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And fundamentals for Indian economy are horrible. Look at what happened in China vs India in the past three decades. Arguably, China started from a worse econom

by lvl102 4y ago

And fundamentals for Indian economy are horrible. Look at what happened in China vs India in the past three decades. Arguably, China started from a worse economic place/position and outpaced India rapidly. Is it cultural? Perhaps.

factorialboy 4y ago
> Look at what happened in China vs India in the past three decades. I'm investing in the future, not for the past 3 decades. The Chinese economy is a debt ridden liability in 2023 with political uncertainty around President Xi and the real-estate bust. India OTOH .. Please do unbiased research here. Most analysts estimate India to be the fastest growing large economy in 2023. A quick Google search will get you all the references here. Manufacturing is leaving China towards India and Vietnam. Best of all, India is a self-consuming economy, they aren't reliant on exports, their growing population and potential for lifting people into the middle class alone will offer multiple decades of steady growth. > Is it cultural? Perhaps. Thanks for confirming your bias against Indian people and their culture. I have no incentive to debate with you anymore.
- piva00 4y ago
  If you are investing in the future, how are you accounting for the growing population while the Indian subcontinent will suffer some pretty harsh effects from climate change, mainly regarding water security? India vs China is a big topic there, with China trying to seize control of Himalayan sources of major rivers across the area. I'd guess in this accounting you also should take in consideration what Modi's government set in motion, a nationalistic movement that is enlarging ethnic-religious wedges, couple that with a still growing population coming under stress of resources shortage and it's a ticking time-bomb for civil wars and worse. On top of all the income inequality that is already pretty stark. How are you planning for the future with all of that? Because only economical metrics won't take you anywhere close to those factors which are definitely in the horizon for the next 10-20 years.
  - rapsey 4y ago
    Pretty much all points raised regarding India can be applied to China and vice versa. China is however becoming too expensive to continue their economic model and rift with the west is becoming larger. If Apple is moving towards India, many more will follow.
    - piva00 4y ago
      Yes, they do but China isn't growing their population at all on the same level as India, that was my main point of concern there, in a world with dwindling access to some basic resources such as water, what will a boom of population cause in a society with already almost 2bi people in it?
      - rapsey 4y ago
        India has cheap Russian gas and plenty of sunshine. If you have energy the rest can be gotten.
        piva00 4y ago
        I agree that energy is the main currency for development but saying that with abundant energy the rest can be gotten sounds almost like a Deus Ex Machina way out of some issues that, on the scale of population India, are pretty damn big. You can have desalinisation plants for Israel with ~10 mil pop. but desalinisation to provide fresh water for 200-500m people is a complete different ballpark, or even completely different game. I don't agree with this reduction that with enough energy a country can achieve whatever, might work with "given infinite cheap energy" thought models but when you apply that to reality there are lots of pesky constraints...
        rapsey 4y ago
        1.4B are surviving on the resources at the moment so it's not that bad. You can always find a reason to be negative about the future. However that is a poor mindset for investing. "Pessimists sound smart, optimists make money" is a popular saying.
- jeoqn 4y ago
  India was going to be a first world superpower by 2020. See how that worked out. There is nothing wrong with saying it’s cultural problems. Look at Africa for instance.
  - 0xDEF 4y ago
    AJ Kalam's 2020 visions for India were inspired by his 1997 visit to Malaysia. He wanted India in 2020 to be on par with 1997's Malaysia. Not exactly a "first world superpower". Today India's GDP per capita is roughly half of Malaysia's 1997 GDP per capita. India definitely underperformed but not by the several magnitudes of orders that people assume were AJ Kalam's visions.
  - piva00 4y ago
    > Look at Africa for instance. I look at Africa and see a continent that was chopped up by colonial powers into borders designed to create social and ethnic conflicts. It was a project to create as many wedges as possible so the colonists could keep power by the ol' divide-and-conquer (which the Brits were pretty apt at). Then you have some of the usual colonial genocides, resource extraction with no further improvements to the source, etc. It's not cultural if it was designed to create issues, it's such a stupid reduction of a problem that's been entirely manufactured by colonial powers for centuries. Or is that what you are calling "cultural problems" by now?
- earthnail 4y ago
  Please don’t dismiss a cultural argument as a bias against a culture. It should be perfectly fine to hypothesise about the impact of cultures. I’m a German living in Sweden, and I can tell you that even though the cultures are very similar, there are differences that have a massive impact. Sweden is highly digital, Germany feels like stone age in comparison. And that has almost exclusively cultural reasons: after decades of Nazi and Easy/West split, Germany became brutally cautious around anything involving privacy. Hopefully this example illustrates that cultural reasons are an important factor in discussing societies, and should not automatically be dismissed as someone having a bias for or against a certain culture.
  - factorialboy 4y ago
    It's not a dismissal. Hitchens' Razor. If someone makes the cultural argument, the onus is on them to provide proof for such an argument. Please go ahead and give valid reasons why "Indian culture" is not suitable for steady long term economic growth.
    - rippercushions 4y ago
      It's hard to generalize about something as amorphous and diverse as "Indian culture" (the scare quotes are warranted), but I'd posit that religion makes a large difference between India and China. China was atheist for decades and religion remains by and large pretty marginal today, while in India it's huge right across the social spectrum. The concepts of caste and karma are very Indian too: how the poor are preordained into their lot and the lower castes are stomped down with mob violence if they get too uppity. (Yes, this may sound uncomfortably familiar to Americans.) Urban India is ditching a lot of this baggage at varying speeds and growing fast (cause or effect?), but in wide swathes of the countryside life and belief remains near-medieval.
- drumhead 4y ago
  China might have a huge bad debt problem, but theyre a more efficient and better manufacturer that India. They can crank up production on anything faster than anyone else. They're not done by a huge margin. India is up and coming and I can see a large amount of business coming it's way, and I'd much rather invest in India than China, but I don't think it will ever come close to knocking China off it's perch.
  - factorialboy 4y ago
    That's a fair point. China remains a manufacturing powerhouse, while the likes of India, Vietnam etc. also make rapid strides. Just look at the trend towards "friendshoring" / "allyshoring" and the likes of Apple, Samsung etc. moving manufacturing from China to India / Vietnam. Also, it helps in stable growth that India's population is growing and consumption is internal. "Strawman arguments" such as war with China, ecological crisis etc. are redundant. It goes without saying that if there's a major ecological crisis or a war, India could suffer. Any country could suffer with those conditions. These are but one of many factors in a prediction model, and dare I say these aren't decisive factors.
- csomar 4y ago
  China is collapsing any moment now since 2014… The reality, the Chinese economy is still growing strongly despite its enormous size; and they are also making innovative companies (Xiaomi/Tiktok comes to mind). Their cars started recently taking over the market. Indian’s car industry is still not there yet. China might get in a recession, but they’ll remain the second for quite a long time in the next 30 years.
  - rapsey 4y ago
    > The reality, the Chinese economy is still growing strongly despite its enormous size; China lies. They lie about their horrific demographics and they lie about their economic growth.
    - csomar 4y ago
      Google maps doesn't lie though. China is building too much infrastructure that it's unprecedented. There is a lot of money coming out of China too, so maybe they lie but a big part of it is true.
rapsey 4y ago
India is replicating China's manufacturing economic development model. It will likely improve.
- dirtyid 4y ago
  Improve yes, but see same benefits, probably not. The geopolitical enviroment where world will concentrate manufacturing in one country is over. And even at height PRC manufacturing employed like 300M, India will only get fraction since PRC as incumbant gets to direct large % of where supply chains flow to, add in automation and India will get even less. Reality is even if India executes perfectly, which she's far from able to seeing how infra base is still decade+ behind from when PRC started hammering SEZs and manufacturing, she'll only get fraction of benefit, that's going to be fractioned again because her population still growing. For reference PRC uplifted 300/1300M (2000s pop) during usually stable international enviroment where stars aligned, IMO India lucky to get 100/1400-1700M pop trying to replicate PRC.
csomar 4y ago
Culturally speaking, both countries are strong. Indians place high value on education (especially STEM) and hard work. I don’t think that’s enough to unleash the power of the country. The current elite have an outsized influence on the future of country. In the case of China, they might be authoritarian leaders but they have the interests of their country at the front (even though if internal corruption is rampant)
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  They do. And those hard workers move to California or Toronto. Some go back, or maintain ties, but by and large they're staying where they go.
SanjayMehta 4y ago
China is no democracy so it's easier for them to have long term strategic plans in place. Here if even a state government changes political parties, the first thing which happens is that the previous government's policies are undone.

by lvl102 4y ago

factorialboy 4y ago

> Look at what happened in China vs India in the past three decades. I'm investing in the future, not for the past 3 decades. The Chinese economy is a debt ridden liability in 2023 with political uncertainty around President Xi and the real-estate bust. India OTOH .. Please do unbiased research here. Most analysts estimate India to be the fastest growing large economy in 2023. A quick Google search will get you all the references here. Manufacturing is leaving China towards India and Vietnam. Best of all, India is a self-consuming economy, they aren't reliant on exports, their growing population and potential for lifting people into the middle class alone will offer multiple decades of steady growth. > Is it cultural? Perhaps. Thanks for confirming your bias against Indian people and their culture. I have no incentive to debate with you anymore.

piva00 4y ago
If you are investing in the future, how are you accounting for the growing population while the Indian subcontinent will suffer some pretty harsh effects from climate change, mainly regarding water security? India vs China is a big topic there, with China trying to seize control of Himalayan sources of major rivers across the area. I'd guess in this accounting you also should take in consideration what Modi's government set in motion, a nationalistic movement that is enlarging ethnic-religious wedges, couple that with a still growing population coming under stress of resources shortage and it's a ticking time-bomb for civil wars and worse. On top of all the income inequality that is already pretty stark. How are you planning for the future with all of that? Because only economical metrics won't take you anywhere close to those factors which are definitely in the horizon for the next 10-20 years.
- rapsey 4y ago
  Pretty much all points raised regarding India can be applied to China and vice versa. China is however becoming too expensive to continue their economic model and rift with the west is becoming larger. If Apple is moving towards India, many more will follow.
  - piva00 4y ago
    Yes, they do but China isn't growing their population at all on the same level as India, that was my main point of concern there, in a world with dwindling access to some basic resources such as water, what will a boom of population cause in a society with already almost 2bi people in it?
    - rapsey 4y ago
      India has cheap Russian gas and plenty of sunshine. If you have energy the rest can be gotten.
      - piva00 4y ago
        I agree that energy is the main currency for development but saying that with abundant energy the rest can be gotten sounds almost like a Deus Ex Machina way out of some issues that, on the scale of population India, are pretty damn big. You can have desalinisation plants for Israel with ~10 mil pop. but desalinisation to provide fresh water for 200-500m people is a complete different ballpark, or even completely different game. I don't agree with this reduction that with enough energy a country can achieve whatever, might work with "given infinite cheap energy" thought models but when you apply that to reality there are lots of pesky constraints...
        rapsey 4y ago
        1.4B are surviving on the resources at the moment so it's not that bad. You can always find a reason to be negative about the future. However that is a poor mindset for investing. "Pessimists sound smart, optimists make money" is a popular saying.
jeoqn 4y ago
India was going to be a first world superpower by 2020. See how that worked out. There is nothing wrong with saying it’s cultural problems. Look at Africa for instance.
- 0xDEF 4y ago
  AJ Kalam's 2020 visions for India were inspired by his 1997 visit to Malaysia. He wanted India in 2020 to be on par with 1997's Malaysia. Not exactly a "first world superpower". Today India's GDP per capita is roughly half of Malaysia's 1997 GDP per capita. India definitely underperformed but not by the several magnitudes of orders that people assume were AJ Kalam's visions.
- piva00 4y ago
  > Look at Africa for instance. I look at Africa and see a continent that was chopped up by colonial powers into borders designed to create social and ethnic conflicts. It was a project to create as many wedges as possible so the colonists could keep power by the ol' divide-and-conquer (which the Brits were pretty apt at). Then you have some of the usual colonial genocides, resource extraction with no further improvements to the source, etc. It's not cultural if it was designed to create issues, it's such a stupid reduction of a problem that's been entirely manufactured by colonial powers for centuries. Or is that what you are calling "cultural problems" by now?
earthnail 4y ago
Please don’t dismiss a cultural argument as a bias against a culture. It should be perfectly fine to hypothesise about the impact of cultures. I’m a German living in Sweden, and I can tell you that even though the cultures are very similar, there are differences that have a massive impact. Sweden is highly digital, Germany feels like stone age in comparison. And that has almost exclusively cultural reasons: after decades of Nazi and Easy/West split, Germany became brutally cautious around anything involving privacy. Hopefully this example illustrates that cultural reasons are an important factor in discussing societies, and should not automatically be dismissed as someone having a bias for or against a certain culture.
- factorialboy 4y ago
  It's not a dismissal. Hitchens' Razor. If someone makes the cultural argument, the onus is on them to provide proof for such an argument. Please go ahead and give valid reasons why "Indian culture" is not suitable for steady long term economic growth.
  - rippercushions 4y ago
    It's hard to generalize about something as amorphous and diverse as "Indian culture" (the scare quotes are warranted), but I'd posit that religion makes a large difference between India and China. China was atheist for decades and religion remains by and large pretty marginal today, while in India it's huge right across the social spectrum. The concepts of caste and karma are very Indian too: how the poor are preordained into their lot and the lower castes are stomped down with mob violence if they get too uppity. (Yes, this may sound uncomfortably familiar to Americans.) Urban India is ditching a lot of this baggage at varying speeds and growing fast (cause or effect?), but in wide swathes of the countryside life and belief remains near-medieval.
drumhead 4y ago
China might have a huge bad debt problem, but theyre a more efficient and better manufacturer that India. They can crank up production on anything faster than anyone else. They're not done by a huge margin. India is up and coming and I can see a large amount of business coming it's way, and I'd much rather invest in India than China, but I don't think it will ever come close to knocking China off it's perch.
- factorialboy 4y ago
  That's a fair point. China remains a manufacturing powerhouse, while the likes of India, Vietnam etc. also make rapid strides. Just look at the trend towards "friendshoring" / "allyshoring" and the likes of Apple, Samsung etc. moving manufacturing from China to India / Vietnam. Also, it helps in stable growth that India's population is growing and consumption is internal. "Strawman arguments" such as war with China, ecological crisis etc. are redundant. It goes without saying that if there's a major ecological crisis or a war, India could suffer. Any country could suffer with those conditions. These are but one of many factors in a prediction model, and dare I say these aren't decisive factors.
csomar 4y ago
China is collapsing any moment now since 2014… The reality, the Chinese economy is still growing strongly despite its enormous size; and they are also making innovative companies (Xiaomi/Tiktok comes to mind). Their cars started recently taking over the market. Indian’s car industry is still not there yet. China might get in a recession, but they’ll remain the second for quite a long time in the next 30 years.
- rapsey 4y ago
  > The reality, the Chinese economy is still growing strongly despite its enormous size; China lies. They lie about their horrific demographics and they lie about their economic growth.
  - csomar 4y ago
    Google maps doesn't lie though. China is building too much infrastructure that it's unprecedented. There is a lot of money coming out of China too, so maybe they lie but a big part of it is true.

rapsey 4y ago

India is replicating China's manufacturing economic development model. It will likely improve.

dirtyid 4y ago
Improve yes, but see same benefits, probably not. The geopolitical enviroment where world will concentrate manufacturing in one country is over. And even at height PRC manufacturing employed like 300M, India will only get fraction since PRC as incumbant gets to direct large % of where supply chains flow to, add in automation and India will get even less. Reality is even if India executes perfectly, which she's far from able to seeing how infra base is still decade+ behind from when PRC started hammering SEZs and manufacturing, she'll only get fraction of benefit, that's going to be fractioned again because her population still growing. For reference PRC uplifted 300/1300M (2000s pop) during usually stable international enviroment where stars aligned, IMO India lucky to get 100/1400-1700M pop trying to replicate PRC.

csomar 4y ago

Culturally speaking, both countries are strong. Indians place high value on education (especially STEM) and hard work. I don’t think that’s enough to unleash the power of the country. The current elite have an outsized influence on the future of country. In the case of China, they might be authoritarian leaders but they have the interests of their country at the front (even though if internal corruption is rampant)

red-iron-pine 4y ago
They do. And those hard workers move to California or Toronto. Some go back, or maintain ties, but by and large they're staying where they go.

SanjayMehta 4y ago

China is no democracy so it's easier for them to have long term strategic plans in place. Here if even a state government changes political parties, the first thing which happens is that the previous government's policies are undone.