This brought back some memories! The dream of "educated" politicians was mostly due to the middle class feeling that "illiterate" politicians are the most corrupt. There was always a sentiment in the popular film and culture that corruption thrived because uneducated politicians implemented laws inefficiently.
When we did get "educated" politicians, they were even more efficiently corrupt because they did could understand and use complex financial trickery to siphon away even more money. Compare Lalu's fodder scam to Satyam's 2G scam.
The educated politician dream will only die once people internalize that corruption is caused due to inefficient rent seeking laws and institutions. Sanjeev Sanyal in a recent talk that one of the reasons lateral entry into government is not the panacea is because those who enter laterally become even more bureaucratic than existing bureaucrats.
I think for all his antics, Arvind Kejriwal has finally been the nail in the coffin for the desirability of educated politicans.
Yeah, he said that in a recent talk at IIT Bombay. Basically, career bureaucrats are used to the power they wield over the Indian citizenry, but a lateral entry bureaucrat is suddenly given all this power and government machinery and they end up becoming even more bureaucratic. They are suddenly exposed to all the bells and whistles of being in government.
Listened to a pod this week with Chris Hayes (of MSNBC) about how when he was younger he thought intelligence was the most important quality but as he grew older realized judgement is far more important. Intelligence without judgement is even more dangerous than stupidity.
Totally. I think we were misguided on what exactly helped good judgement - we thought it was education, urban upbringing and all the aspirational things our education told us. Now we know better.
What do you think it is that helps develop good judgement? I want to say struggle but fear I'll sound like the Nietzschean chuds (to borrow a phrase from Richard Hanania).
I guess for leading a country, those who have good judgement tend to have a strong grip on the struggles of the people and have a track record trying to help them relatively successfully.
Are you familiar with Manu Joseph? He has been saying something similar for a while. Netflix’s “Serious Men” is based on his novel of the same name.
I’m in India and the utter lack of seriousness in the population is glaring. I think seriousness is a prerequisite for cultivating good judgement.
Even the “educated” with fancy foreign degrees are for the most part clueless. The Ivy League boys return to join daddy’s business (and run it into the ground) while the Ivy League girls return to marry them.
Stock market speculation is rampant. The only sectors you can make US middle class level money, if you’re not born into wealth, are real estate, jewelry, and weddings. Otherwise you’re fighting for crumbs.
Manu Joseph is a troll. A very good troll, but i don't take him very seriously.
What do you mean people are not serious? Why should someone not join their family business? Isn't people not doing enough of that what devastated middle America?
What I'm talking about here is the urban middle class, which started as a small minority, learning by trial and error how they wanted to be represented as they grew in size.
On lack of seriousness (I'm in tech so that's what I notice the most):
- technical illiteracy (a recent survey said 75% of college graduates don't know how to send an email attachment)
- lack of standardized street addresses, which is a huge problem for ecommerce and anything that requires an address; India Post has no official map of PIN code boundaries
- official government emails hosted on Yahoo and Hotmail (surprisingly few on Gmail)
- CAPTCHAs on every government website, which besides being annoying and stupid but prevents non-English speakers from using the site
- security theatre everywhere, from metal detectors at malls and five-star hotels to multiple daily text messages about scams (since December, you're forced to listen to a 30-second scam warning on every single outgoing call before the call connects)
- When I applied for a drivers license online, the max photo upload size was 25KB
- Just last month, the runner up in a government contest for a Made in India web browser turned out to have simply copied the Brave browser and done a global find-and-replace on "Brave". The contest organizers had no clue, it took a guy on Twitter to flag the theft. And the cherry on top of unseriousness: the thief left a record of his find-and-replace spree in his github repo commits.
- Industrial-scale loan fraud, where businessmen siphon away borrowed funds and disappear leaving the taxpayer holding the bag. This is just considered par for the course.
More generally, people rarely know what they're doing. Call a plumber, he shows up with a pair of pliers and a screwdriver. Call an electrician, ditto. Call a carpenter, ditto. Call a glass repairman, ditto. And these were are all through a billion-dollar company that's about to IPO.
A friend of mine who runs a manufacturing business with $15 million in revenues told me he has to hire 20% more employees than he needs because on any given day 20% are absent without reason.
There's nothing wrong with joining the family business if you actually want to run the business; most of the US-return kids I know (and they're all 0.1% kids) have no interest in running the business, just drinking from the family money fountain, the price of which is going to the office and doing pretend-work.
The middle class business owners are for the most part technically illiterate, only a fraction as productive as their Western or Chinese counterparts and thus uncompetitive, extremely risk averse, and have limited access to capital, so most are just scraping by.
Some other random data points:
Earning $10K/year puts you in the top 10% of earners but there is no income tax until you hit $15K.
Amazon India hasn't made a profit since launching in 2013. Neither has Starbucks. The only companies making a profit are those catering to the richest Indians.
Didnt amazon US also not make a profit for its first many years, due to a combination of reinvesting and avoiding taxes? Even now amazon retail in the US makes the thinnest of profits. Online retail is subsidized by AWS. Even the book selling part of the business isn't that profitable iirc. Retail is about thin margins generally.
As for starbucks.... yeah, you take a country where people buy tea and coffee on the street for Rs. 10 and sit on a slim bench to shoot the shit with strangers, and the store owner offers credit... and then sell them an awful version of coffee for 15x in a space where they feel out of place, yeah, it's not going to work out.
If anything, this is emblematic of the problem. Yeah, you can make profits off of only the most wealthy, because these are the most westernized people who are willing to pay premium for western brands. Look at the crap Netflix India put out for years - stuff made my wealthy bandra elites for wealthy bandra elites. People are willing to throw money at entertainment, but this stuff just screams "not for you" to 90% of the population. It's sort of like complaining about expensive sushi restaurants in the US only attracting the most wealthy.
These sound like westerner-in-india problems. A lot of these problems are solved if you rely on word of mouth networks, like finding a good tradesman.
We've had enough terrorist attacks that a lot of people feel better with the security theater. Older people i know like the warnings on phones about scams. Idk if there are a significant number of people who can't identify the Roman alphabet.
People taking time off is to be expected, right? I used to think that sort of stuff too, but giving people enough slack feels very important now. TFR is already falling, family structure is unraveling, those things are important if you want to have a good quality society. Overhiring should be done everywhere.
There are real issues like the Brave browser thing but I dont think it's a problem of lack of seriousness. Indians work very long hours, brave crazy commutes and manage more family responsibilities than most of the rest of the world with much fewer resources. There are tons of people working diligently to solve problems around them and calling them "not serious" is cold and ignorant.
I think the biggest problem is people feeling like they can exploit other people, and red tapism. Beyond that is people trying to impose systems designed in a completely different context here and expecting it to work seamlessly, and blaming people when it doesn't. The problem is the not indigenizing things - and that happens because people trying this think that the people are the problem. Which stems from self-loathing.
That's sort of what this post is about - my class of people were so stricken with self-loathing that our ideal leader was one who'd be acceptable to the West, because we were so colonized and felt unrepresented. That is changing quite dramatically. More will change.
This is a mix of “we’re like that only” and deflection, and doesn’t refute what I said. People feeling like they can exploit others and red tapism are a direct result of the unseriousness.
What does "seriousness" mean over here? Seems like that term is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Anyway. This sounds like how I'm disappointed that in America you can't send kids to school without worrying about a teacher SAing them or them being shot. Or that if I send my kid to a school in a poor area, I can count on them learning nothing and getting messed up. There are schools near me that get so much money from tech companies and are just straight up horrible. My school didn't have lights, but man could the teachers control a class and ensure order and a good learning environment. I find that rare even in the $50k a year schools. It's no wonder suicide rates correlate with the school year and dispirited students shoot up schools, because they are the scene of crimes against them.
These things are correlated - if you focus on social cohesion, supporting the family structure, prioritize raising children and provide a loving environment all over for children, that goes directly against the demands of an industrialized society. If you prioritize industry, then the consequences will be lack of nurture, distrust within and between communities, high rates of violence, school-to-prison pipeline, high rates of drug use and high incarceration rate.
As India industrializes more, my biggest worry is the high prioritization of children will reduce and it'll become more like America, while not creating the same amount of wealth due to not actually solving the problems you mentioned, and instead get the high crime rate and school violence and economic stratification and inter-community distrust of the West.
This brought back some memories! The dream of "educated" politicians was mostly due to the middle class feeling that "illiterate" politicians are the most corrupt. There was always a sentiment in the popular film and culture that corruption thrived because uneducated politicians implemented laws inefficiently.
When we did get "educated" politicians, they were even more efficiently corrupt because they did could understand and use complex financial trickery to siphon away even more money. Compare Lalu's fodder scam to Satyam's 2G scam.
The educated politician dream will only die once people internalize that corruption is caused due to inefficient rent seeking laws and institutions. Sanjeev Sanyal in a recent talk that one of the reasons lateral entry into government is not the panacea is because those who enter laterally become even more bureaucratic than existing bureaucrats.
I think for all his antics, Arvind Kejriwal has finally been the nail in the coffin for the desirability of educated politicans.
Wow, did Sanyal say that? How do they end up becoming more bureaucratic? This is interesting!
Yeah, he said that in a recent talk at IIT Bombay. Basically, career bureaucrats are used to the power they wield over the Indian citizenry, but a lateral entry bureaucrat is suddenly given all this power and government machinery and they end up becoming even more bureaucratic. They are suddenly exposed to all the bells and whistles of being in government.
Listened to a pod this week with Chris Hayes (of MSNBC) about how when he was younger he thought intelligence was the most important quality but as he grew older realized judgement is far more important. Intelligence without judgement is even more dangerous than stupidity.
Totally. I think we were misguided on what exactly helped good judgement - we thought it was education, urban upbringing and all the aspirational things our education told us. Now we know better.
What do you think it is that helps develop good judgement? I want to say struggle but fear I'll sound like the Nietzschean chuds (to borrow a phrase from Richard Hanania).
I guess for leading a country, those who have good judgement tend to have a strong grip on the struggles of the people and have a track record trying to help them relatively successfully.
Are you familiar with Manu Joseph? He has been saying something similar for a while. Netflix’s “Serious Men” is based on his novel of the same name.
I’m in India and the utter lack of seriousness in the population is glaring. I think seriousness is a prerequisite for cultivating good judgement.
Even the “educated” with fancy foreign degrees are for the most part clueless. The Ivy League boys return to join daddy’s business (and run it into the ground) while the Ivy League girls return to marry them.
Stock market speculation is rampant. The only sectors you can make US middle class level money, if you’re not born into wealth, are real estate, jewelry, and weddings. Otherwise you’re fighting for crumbs.
Manu Joseph is a troll. A very good troll, but i don't take him very seriously.
What do you mean people are not serious? Why should someone not join their family business? Isn't people not doing enough of that what devastated middle America?
What I'm talking about here is the urban middle class, which started as a small minority, learning by trial and error how they wanted to be represented as they grew in size.
On lack of seriousness (I'm in tech so that's what I notice the most):
- technical illiteracy (a recent survey said 75% of college graduates don't know how to send an email attachment)
- lack of standardized street addresses, which is a huge problem for ecommerce and anything that requires an address; India Post has no official map of PIN code boundaries
- official government emails hosted on Yahoo and Hotmail (surprisingly few on Gmail)
- CAPTCHAs on every government website, which besides being annoying and stupid but prevents non-English speakers from using the site
- security theatre everywhere, from metal detectors at malls and five-star hotels to multiple daily text messages about scams (since December, you're forced to listen to a 30-second scam warning on every single outgoing call before the call connects)
- When I applied for a drivers license online, the max photo upload size was 25KB
- Just last month, the runner up in a government contest for a Made in India web browser turned out to have simply copied the Brave browser and done a global find-and-replace on "Brave". The contest organizers had no clue, it took a guy on Twitter to flag the theft. And the cherry on top of unseriousness: the thief left a record of his find-and-replace spree in his github repo commits.
- Industrial-scale loan fraud, where businessmen siphon away borrowed funds and disappear leaving the taxpayer holding the bag. This is just considered par for the course.
More generally, people rarely know what they're doing. Call a plumber, he shows up with a pair of pliers and a screwdriver. Call an electrician, ditto. Call a carpenter, ditto. Call a glass repairman, ditto. And these were are all through a billion-dollar company that's about to IPO.
A friend of mine who runs a manufacturing business with $15 million in revenues told me he has to hire 20% more employees than he needs because on any given day 20% are absent without reason.
There's nothing wrong with joining the family business if you actually want to run the business; most of the US-return kids I know (and they're all 0.1% kids) have no interest in running the business, just drinking from the family money fountain, the price of which is going to the office and doing pretend-work.
The middle class business owners are for the most part technically illiterate, only a fraction as productive as their Western or Chinese counterparts and thus uncompetitive, extremely risk averse, and have limited access to capital, so most are just scraping by.
Some other random data points:
Earning $10K/year puts you in the top 10% of earners but there is no income tax until you hit $15K.
Amazon India hasn't made a profit since launching in 2013. Neither has Starbucks. The only companies making a profit are those catering to the richest Indians.
Didnt amazon US also not make a profit for its first many years, due to a combination of reinvesting and avoiding taxes? Even now amazon retail in the US makes the thinnest of profits. Online retail is subsidized by AWS. Even the book selling part of the business isn't that profitable iirc. Retail is about thin margins generally.
As for starbucks.... yeah, you take a country where people buy tea and coffee on the street for Rs. 10 and sit on a slim bench to shoot the shit with strangers, and the store owner offers credit... and then sell them an awful version of coffee for 15x in a space where they feel out of place, yeah, it's not going to work out.
If anything, this is emblematic of the problem. Yeah, you can make profits off of only the most wealthy, because these are the most westernized people who are willing to pay premium for western brands. Look at the crap Netflix India put out for years - stuff made my wealthy bandra elites for wealthy bandra elites. People are willing to throw money at entertainment, but this stuff just screams "not for you" to 90% of the population. It's sort of like complaining about expensive sushi restaurants in the US only attracting the most wealthy.
These sound like westerner-in-india problems. A lot of these problems are solved if you rely on word of mouth networks, like finding a good tradesman.
We've had enough terrorist attacks that a lot of people feel better with the security theater. Older people i know like the warnings on phones about scams. Idk if there are a significant number of people who can't identify the Roman alphabet.
People taking time off is to be expected, right? I used to think that sort of stuff too, but giving people enough slack feels very important now. TFR is already falling, family structure is unraveling, those things are important if you want to have a good quality society. Overhiring should be done everywhere.
There are real issues like the Brave browser thing but I dont think it's a problem of lack of seriousness. Indians work very long hours, brave crazy commutes and manage more family responsibilities than most of the rest of the world with much fewer resources. There are tons of people working diligently to solve problems around them and calling them "not serious" is cold and ignorant.
I think the biggest problem is people feeling like they can exploit other people, and red tapism. Beyond that is people trying to impose systems designed in a completely different context here and expecting it to work seamlessly, and blaming people when it doesn't. The problem is the not indigenizing things - and that happens because people trying this think that the people are the problem. Which stems from self-loathing.
That's sort of what this post is about - my class of people were so stricken with self-loathing that our ideal leader was one who'd be acceptable to the West, because we were so colonized and felt unrepresented. That is changing quite dramatically. More will change.
This is a mix of “we’re like that only” and deflection, and doesn’t refute what I said. People feeling like they can exploit others and red tapism are a direct result of the unseriousness.
What does "seriousness" mean over here? Seems like that term is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Anyway. This sounds like how I'm disappointed that in America you can't send kids to school without worrying about a teacher SAing them or them being shot. Or that if I send my kid to a school in a poor area, I can count on them learning nothing and getting messed up. There are schools near me that get so much money from tech companies and are just straight up horrible. My school didn't have lights, but man could the teachers control a class and ensure order and a good learning environment. I find that rare even in the $50k a year schools. It's no wonder suicide rates correlate with the school year and dispirited students shoot up schools, because they are the scene of crimes against them.
These things are correlated - if you focus on social cohesion, supporting the family structure, prioritize raising children and provide a loving environment all over for children, that goes directly against the demands of an industrialized society. If you prioritize industry, then the consequences will be lack of nurture, distrust within and between communities, high rates of violence, school-to-prison pipeline, high rates of drug use and high incarceration rate.
As India industrializes more, my biggest worry is the high prioritization of children will reduce and it'll become more like America, while not creating the same amount of wealth due to not actually solving the problems you mentioned, and instead get the high crime rate and school violence and economic stratification and inter-community distrust of the West.