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Speaking from a historical perspective. The East India company/ies pretty much won much of the world for Britain & Europe. Europe was neither wealthy nor techn

Speaking from a historical perspective. The East India company/ies pretty much won much of the world for Britain & Europe. Europe was neither wealthy nor technologically more advanced than India. But the Church with its christianising mission and doctrine of christian discovery allowed the pooling of resources. Concentration of wealth is important and the wealth did trickle down to other countries of Europe. A modern take within India is of Reliance which has made cheap telecom services accessible for much of the population. Or the TATAs who have created a local automobile ecosystem competitive based on vertical integration. Trickle down does happen in the long run as long as corruption is limited. Concentration or pooling of wealth is important especially for developing countries. Personally I do not care for inequality, and care more for dignity and wellbeing. The metric that matters most especially with developing countries is if their productivity has increased and if they have moved from low skilled to medium to high skilled job.

tchalla 5y ago
You're basically saying - In a country of 100 people, concentration of wealth is great. Concentration like for every 100$, 5 people taking 95$ and the rest 95 taking the 5$ is fine. Your rationale seems to be the fact that the 95 people have more than 5$/95 than before. Now, you keep accelerating this and you'd notice a 99-to-1 ratio eventually. It's interesting that you call this dignity and well being. You're basically saying that the time spent by the 95 people is orders of magnitude less valuable than the time spent by the 5 people.
- naruvimama 5y ago
  The value of time spent by the people is called productivity. We should be more concerned with the productivity. This is especially true with developing countries where people are mostly employed in backbreaking manual labor. Sometimes it is due to lack of skills and many a times due to lack of industry or ecosystem. Inequality is a great talking point for socialist but isn't an important metric. Inequality is inevitable in a highly competitive and fast growing economy. Just productivity improvement is a great measure of how well the economy is doing. For developed countries productivity improvements is difficult because it only comes about from innovation. For developing countries it can be had from just adoption of existing technologies.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
socialdemocrat 5y ago
Europe was more technologically advanced than India. I know it is popular with revisionism, because people like to explain away Western dominance as if being alone about excelling at being a bigger asshole than everybody else. Reality is that Europe conquered the world because it was economically and technologically superior to all other nations. Neither India nor China had modern science that developed in Europe in the age of enlightenment. There was nobody like Galileo Galilei, da Vinci, Kepler, Newton, Leibniz, Descart, Pascal, Christiaan Huygens, James Watt, Newcomb etc outside of Europe. This is just a small selection of European thinkers from that era. These was a huge number of them involved in all areas of science and engineering. All this stuff meant Europe could mass produce high quality guns, cannons, warships etc. It meant Europe could mechanize all sorts of production. Produce steam engines etc. I am not writing this to suggest that Indians or Chinese are somehow inherently lesser people. Development fluctuates over time. In periods India and China was more developed than Europe. However many developments happened in Europe which caused European development to get supercharged and move ahead. This wasn't colonization. Rather colonization was made possible due to technological, economic and social development which gave Europeans and advantage over their competitors.
- naruvimama 5y ago
  You need to check your facts. East-India company had nothing to sell and was spending its gold. It was precisely because of the concentration of wealth (from Europe) and the hemorrhaging of gold that it desired conquest and taxing the locals. Political weakness in India as against strong crown and church in Europe made conquest easy, but it did take a long time and it was mostly indirect (100s of princely states). Industrial revolution in Britain started 4 years after they set up their trading port in Calcutta and most definitely copying Industrial knowledge. If all they wanted was spices, they could have got that from North and West Africa, or in their new colonies in the Americas. Populations go through ups and downs as do their wealth and power, everyone copies not just China. Nobody grows in isolation. The idea that Europe suddenly started innovating from the dark ages and became industrial needs to be revisited. Call it revisionist all you want.
cycomanic 5y ago
Speaking from a historical perspective, over the last 50 years or so, almost all productivity gains have gone to capital gains not salaries, i.e. it is only the rich benefiting from productivity gains. This is in stark contrast to the time before the 1980s [1,2]. [1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ [2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforce-america-united-states-wages-stagnate https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforc...
iamgopal 5y ago
True that. Million millionaires could not have created Jio or Tata.

tchalla 5y ago

You're basically saying - In a country of 100 people, concentration of wealth is great. Concentration like for every 100$, 5 people taking 95$ and the rest 95 taking the 5$ is fine. Your rationale seems to be the fact that the 95 people have more than 5$/95 than before. Now, you keep accelerating this and you'd notice a 99-to-1 ratio eventually. It's interesting that you call this dignity and well being. You're basically saying that the time spent by the 95 people is orders of magnitude less valuable than the time spent by the 5 people.

naruvimama 5y ago
The value of time spent by the people is called productivity. We should be more concerned with the productivity. This is especially true with developing countries where people are mostly employed in backbreaking manual labor. Sometimes it is due to lack of skills and many a times due to lack of industry or ecosystem. Inequality is a great talking point for socialist but isn't an important metric. Inequality is inevitable in a highly competitive and fast growing economy. Just productivity improvement is a great measure of how well the economy is doing. For developed countries productivity improvements is difficult because it only comes about from innovation. For developing countries it can be had from just adoption of existing technologies.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

socialdemocrat 5y ago

Europe was more technologically advanced than India. I know it is popular with revisionism, because people like to explain away Western dominance as if being alone about excelling at being a bigger asshole than everybody else. Reality is that Europe conquered the world because it was economically and technologically superior to all other nations. Neither India nor China had modern science that developed in Europe in the age of enlightenment. There was nobody like Galileo Galilei, da Vinci, Kepler, Newton, Leibniz, Descart, Pascal, Christiaan Huygens, James Watt, Newcomb etc outside of Europe. This is just a small selection of European thinkers from that era. These was a huge number of them involved in all areas of science and engineering. All this stuff meant Europe could mass produce high quality guns, cannons, warships etc. It meant Europe could mechanize all sorts of production. Produce steam engines etc. I am not writing this to suggest that Indians or Chinese are somehow inherently lesser people. Development fluctuates over time. In periods India and China was more developed than Europe. However many developments happened in Europe which caused European development to get supercharged and move ahead. This wasn't colonization. Rather colonization was made possible due to technological, economic and social development which gave Europeans and advantage over their competitors.

naruvimama 5y ago
You need to check your facts. East-India company had nothing to sell and was spending its gold. It was precisely because of the concentration of wealth (from Europe) and the hemorrhaging of gold that it desired conquest and taxing the locals. Political weakness in India as against strong crown and church in Europe made conquest easy, but it did take a long time and it was mostly indirect (100s of princely states). Industrial revolution in Britain started 4 years after they set up their trading port in Calcutta and most definitely copying Industrial knowledge. If all they wanted was spices, they could have got that from North and West Africa, or in their new colonies in the Americas. Populations go through ups and downs as do their wealth and power, everyone copies not just China. Nobody grows in isolation. The idea that Europe suddenly started innovating from the dark ages and became industrial needs to be revisited. Call it revisionist all you want.

cycomanic 5y ago

Speaking from a historical perspective, over the last 50 years or so, almost all productivity gains have gone to capital gains not salaries, i.e. it is only the rich benefiting from productivity gains. This is in stark contrast to the time before the 1980s [1,2]. [1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ [2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforce-america-united-states-wages-stagnate https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforc...

iamgopal 5y ago

True that. Million millionaires could not have created Jio or Tata.