- cross-posted to:
- economics@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- economics@lemmy.ml
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There’s a lot of factors at play but I think the most compelling one is simply that if most of the state’s resources are going towards the enrichment of the 1% and not even trickling down towards the billion+ people in the 99%, economic growth will be stunted in the long term. Especially as Modi is simultaneously so dominant and also the avatar of this exact problem, so it’s not as if an alternative is ready to appear.
And China will almost certainly refuse to give up their manufacturing base and so efforts from Western corporations to shift from China to India/Vietnam/etc, such that they even exist (many, many corporations are fine with China) are mostly ill-fated too. In Vietnam it could work, but for India, the state and billionaires aren’t expanding their infrastructure fast enough. because it costs them money that they could spend on pleasure megayachts. Chinese state investment in infrastructure is virtually (if not actually) unparalleled, which is why corporations love working with China so much - they don’t have to sink potential profit into railways and roads.
As for India’s GDP figures, as Roberts explains, they are actually largely made-up (even given the standards of GDP figures in the West, which are also largely made-up but in a different way).
Exactly, India basically jumped straight to financial capitalism without even bothering to develop a serious industrial base. I don’t think it’s even a case of China refusing to give up its base, but just the fact that building out the kind of base China has requires a centrally planned system with a long term commitment to doing so. There’s no path towards doing that under capitalism. Vietnam will likely manage to industrialize eventually, but that doesn’t help the west in the long run because Vietnam is sensibly aligning with China now.
India is a good example of how economists believing that the labor theory of value isn’t true doesn’t actually make it false.
They can make government and economic decisions that ignore or at least sideline the growth and development of labour under the assumption that entrepeneurs and investors are the real motive force of society, but when tens of millions of people enter poverty every year in your country, education is underfunded, roads and railways for the workers to use are underfunded, and employment is underdeveloped, your growth will simply be stunted. You can scream from the rooftops that billionaires create value, not workers, in the hopes that some god will hear you, but it doesn’t change reality.
Every media organization can report, mostly hopefully and without real basis, that surely India will be the second largest economy in the world in 50 years (behind the good old US of A, of course! We will never be overshadowed!) and that surely China, with their unorthodox views of how to create a stable and good economy for the working class, will collapse any minute now, and us here can lean back and relax with the certainty granted by studies and Marxist theory that as long as the Chinese leadership doesn’t betray their communist values - and I don’t see why they would - China is and will remain the best performing economy on the planet for the foreseeable future. We don’t have to give a shit about the opinions of Jerome Powell and so on.
Exactly, you can only avoid grappling with the material reality for so long.
Apart from infrastructure, Indian labour force is worse in quality than China or Vietnam because of the non existent investment in education and health. I think at best there will be some token factories like Apple’s to give an illusion of progress but India won’t ever be a serious manufacturing power in a way that it can drive the country in the developed bloc.
I wish they talked more about why and how the stock markets are overvalued. My fascist relatives are nutting and busting because the stock market performance has gained a stride in anticipation of the BJP victory.
For sure, but they do a good job explaining why lack of industrial base means that Indian economy can’t grow meaningfully in the long term.
It seems that the West only treats India as a fully exploitable market and a place for them to brain drain people from.
For instance, Indians staff all of the US tech companies, but India has no Big Tech of its own. It’s like the country’s politicians only aspire for it to be a baby making factory for the USA.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
