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Politics : High Tolerance Plasticity -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bruce L who wrote (22632)	12/20/2004 12:38:00 PM
From: kodiak_bull	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 23153

Bruce, We'll have to watch and see how India unfolds over the next decade to know for sure. One impressive thing about India is that they have a middle class of about 350 million people as I recall, larger than the entire USA. Of course they have an underclass of 600 million or so. It's almost as if the country contained its own colonizers and colonial subjects within its borders. I don't know about the Muslim problem. So far no Muslim economy in the world seems to be performing up to even 19th century standards, and that is now about 2 centuries behind the times. Maybe like the American Indians they will perpetually opt out of the dominant economy which surrounds them. The tyranny of ideas permeates us all, even religious ideas--or especially religious ideas. We can look at India a number of ways. Imagine a very very sick man who can barely move, covered with bed sores, in residence at the local homeless shelter. We run into him 10 years later and he's dressed and moving around, able to keep a low paying job and wears serviceable if tattered clothing. Out of context his situation looks pretty bleak. In context, his trajectory looks pretty good. Which is it for India? Again, I think it will boil down to the level of corruption that a society allows (both real corruption and the small corruption of inefficient bureaucracy, senseless rules, little tyrannies) to drag its economy down. Again, this is a view from afar, but the reports one sees indicate that the economy and the people are on the rise. Japan in the 50s and Korea in the 60s were both disdained (let's face it, along racial, or racist, lines) as corrupt places that could never do more than stamp out cheap imitative products that would never be cutting edge competitive). Korea suffered from this image through the 90s. Now I keep seeing Samsung and LG heading up technological innovation news stories. My friends in the know say that Korea has succeeded against all odds not because it had no corruption, but because its corruption was always kept in check to a reasonable level. You can find manufacturing, banking and tech executives who dealt with Korea in the 70s, 80s and 90s and almost to a person you will find they were very skeptical about Korea, especially with Japan occupying the cutting edge of business and China hollowing out the manufacturing arena. Of course, Korea's next chapter is yet to be written as well. worldbank.org [edit: wow, the GDP more than quadrupled in the first 10 years and doubled since 1993.] Kb