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The article is a bit light on reasons for why India's economic problems would be similar to the Great Depression. It shouldn't be enough to point out that both

The article is a bit light on reasons for why India's economic problems would be similar to the Great Depression. It shouldn't be enough to point out that both economies did very badly, one should also point out the reasons behind that. There is one sentence that sort of does that: >But in India, internal regulations and underdevelopment, combined with British colonial depredations, prevented Indian resources from being redeployed productively. It is difficult to understate how much history, and human suffering, is hidden behind the words "British colonial depredations". > It was once an unthinkable question, but we’ve arrived at the scary point where it needs to be asked: What if American median income over the next 15 years keeps stagnating — or maybe even falls? Hasn't it already? http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MEHOINUSA672N http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MEHOINUSA672N And what's so outlandish about assuming it will keep doing what it's doing now? > Our Social Security system, whose receipts are based on wage taxation, could then prove to be a bigger fiscal problem than Medicare. Oh, and having a political axe to grind doesn't help the article either.

hibikir 12y ago
How much Tyler Cowen have you read? He has an ideology, but maybe not quite the one you think. If wages do not increase, and demographics remain the same, social security does become a big problem. But that doesn't make him an alarmist that wants to gut social security. His typical writings prefer to avoid the problem the other ways: By either finding ways to increase wages, or through immigration. He has also written book on the problem of how, while the last decade was great for world growth, it was very bad for the US and Europe: He calls is the great stagnation. So he is aware that more of the same could be coming. He just thinks most NYT readers do not really expect this to happen, as they think it'd be unprecedented. The entire point of the article is not that 19th century India's problems were all that similar to the great depression, but that the US' current problems are a lot like India's, in the sense that we are facing a major supply shock as some major competitors industrialize and get better, while the country in question does not. In India, it was a country with major manpower advantage getting hit by new technology it couldn't adopt quickly. In the US' case, it's about a lot of countries that were competing mainly on cheap labor, and that now are catching up on technology, making the US' advantages disappear.

hibikir 12y ago

How much Tyler Cowen have you read? He has an ideology, but maybe not quite the one you think. If wages do not increase, and demographics remain the same, social security does become a big problem. But that doesn't make him an alarmist that wants to gut social security. His typical writings prefer to avoid the problem the other ways: By either finding ways to increase wages, or through immigration. He has also written book on the problem of how, while the last decade was great for world growth, it was very bad for the US and Europe: He calls is the great stagnation. So he is aware that more of the same could be coming. He just thinks most NYT readers do not really expect this to happen, as they think it'd be unprecedented. The entire point of the article is not that 19th century India's problems were all that similar to the great depression, but that the US' current problems are a lot like India's, in the sense that we are facing a major supply shock as some major competitors industrialize and get better, while the country in question does not. In India, it was a country with major manpower advantage getting hit by new technology it couldn't adopt quickly. In the US' case, it's about a lot of countries that were competing mainly on cheap labor, and that now are catching up on technology, making the US' advantages disappear.