4 ms·

You can probably keep hoping. India has some incredible human capital in the form of the upper castes, but China also has a ton of human capital, plus a monocul

You can probably keep hoping. India has some incredible human capital in the form of the upper castes, but China also has a ton of human capital, plus a monoculture (the Han Chinese are the largest single ethnic group on the planet) that makes coordinating societal and economic change way easier. India is a mishmash of dozens of different ethnic groups that have been further factionalized by 1700 years of the caste system.

AareyBaba 7y ago
The ease of mono-cultural (Han Chinese) coordinated societal and economic change - are you referring to the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution ? You are right, unquestioned fealty to a President for Life would never work in a diverse, multicultural country like India.
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  Another way of looking at things is that the advantage of social coordination that comes from a huge monoculture is strong enough to vastly outperform the fractured diversity of India despite the incredible unforced errors you mentioned.
  - AareyBaba 7y ago
    One cannot cherry pick the economic growth in last 35-40 years of Chinese history, completely ignore the decades before that, and then proclaim the advantage of mono-culture. The "unforced errors" were the death of 18-56 million Chinese in the Great Leap Forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward. The Cultural Revolution [1] "Millions of people were persecuted or suffered public humiliation, imprisonment, torture, hard labor, seizure of property, and sometimes execution or harassment into suicide. Many urban intellectual youths were sent to the countryside in the Down to the Countryside Movement. Red Guards destroyed historical relics and artifacts or ransacked cultural and religious sites. " [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution A single party system led by a dictator for life was the cause of the errors in the past and is the situation in the present. There is a problem with mono-culture.
trianglem 7y ago
It's asinine to single out the "upper castes" as good human capital.
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  It is? They utterly dominate in the US. Indian Americans have far and away the highest median household income of any ethnic group in the US (and it’s close to 2x that of white Americans). My understanding is that almost all Indian immigration to the US is from the upper castes.
  - selimthegrim 7y ago
    When my Muslim grandfather was growing up in the 1930s in Gulbarga, he used to make a game of touching the water pot of his caste Hindu neighbors just to see them curse him out and have to re ritually purify it. Some of us I guess have to remind people that there isn’t a monopoly on migration.
  - trianglem 7y ago
    Indians that came from Punjab in the early 1930s were not upper caste members. A large percentage of engineers that arrived in the US and Canada since the late 90s do not belong to upper castes.

AareyBaba 7y ago

The ease of mono-cultural (Han Chinese) coordinated societal and economic change - are you referring to the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution ? You are right, unquestioned fealty to a President for Life would never work in a diverse, multicultural country like India.

toasterlovin 7y ago
Another way of looking at things is that the advantage of social coordination that comes from a huge monoculture is strong enough to vastly outperform the fractured diversity of India despite the incredible unforced errors you mentioned.
- AareyBaba 7y ago
  One cannot cherry pick the economic growth in last 35-40 years of Chinese history, completely ignore the decades before that, and then proclaim the advantage of mono-culture. The "unforced errors" were the death of 18-56 million Chinese in the Great Leap Forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward. The Cultural Revolution [1] "Millions of people were persecuted or suffered public humiliation, imprisonment, torture, hard labor, seizure of property, and sometimes execution or harassment into suicide. Many urban intellectual youths were sent to the countryside in the Down to the Countryside Movement. Red Guards destroyed historical relics and artifacts or ransacked cultural and religious sites. " [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution A single party system led by a dictator for life was the cause of the errors in the past and is the situation in the present. There is a problem with mono-culture.

trianglem 7y ago

It's asinine to single out the "upper castes" as good human capital.

toasterlovin 7y ago
It is? They utterly dominate in the US. Indian Americans have far and away the highest median household income of any ethnic group in the US (and it’s close to 2x that of white Americans). My understanding is that almost all Indian immigration to the US is from the upper castes.
- selimthegrim 7y ago
  When my Muslim grandfather was growing up in the 1930s in Gulbarga, he used to make a game of touching the water pot of his caste Hindu neighbors just to see them curse him out and have to re ritually purify it. Some of us I guess have to remind people that there isn’t a monopoly on migration.
- trianglem 7y ago
  Indians that came from Punjab in the early 1930s were not upper caste members. A large percentage of engineers that arrived in the US and Canada since the late 90s do not belong to upper castes.