107 Comments

Sounds like hell on earth. I would not want my country to become like that.

"But after ten days in India, I confidently declare that the children of randomly-selected Indians would do well here."

Why?

"they’d adopt almost everything good about modern U.S. culture"

Why?

"while retaining the strong family values that Americans have been foolishly forgetting."

Why?

Most low IQ immigrants tend to become more like Americans when they immigrate. Divorce and crime rates increase for instance in the second generation.

"I live in one of top centers of Indian migration in the United States"

Me Too.

That Indian immigration pushed the area from Republican to Democrat. It caused COVID to be a living hell for me, and Indians strongly supported COVID insanity.

My school district just implemented collective bargaining thanks to its flipping blue, Indians are already make us more socialist just like back home.

My experience with Northern Virginia Indians is largely on corrupt government contracting projects and their vice grip on Northern Virginia's hospital system (where they are utterly useless as your doctor). I've never met a more nepotistic group of people in my life. They are tailor made for Northern Virginia gov contracting scams.

It's their very assimilation that makes them worse. What are they assimilating too? Indian professional women are probably the most "woke" people who exist on the planet.

We're getting the best India has to offer, and I'm still not sold. God help us if we got the worst.

Anyway, I think the strongest opponents of Open Borders with India would be other Indians. They want to get away from India, not have it follow them.

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My brother in Christ, have you ever thought that your hatred is a bit too much? Do you wake up everyday with a Nazi flag?

Chill out. No one is trying to kill you. Bad government decisions cause problems, sure. But that is not the fault of individuals or racial groups. I know I told you a rant when I was frustrated with your racism. I apologize brother. I am sorry. Now, I just feel pity. I hope you find some peace in your life here on earth. And become a good person and stop being this hateful.

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My brother in Christ, being honest and truthful about Indians in America does not make him a Nazi, it makes him a realest. India for Indians. They run the worst motels here, I can go on and on.

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I'm reminded of the Disney movie "Million Dollar Arm" which was based on the true story of a baseball scout going to India in search of major league baseball pitching talent. The idea was that in a country with a billion people and a cultural affinity for throwing a cricket ball, certainly there would be a few men capable of being professional baseball pitchers!

The idea did not and has not proved proved out. Elite talent is not about sheer numbers. It is about skill and cultural genius. For baseball talent, Cuba and the Dominican Republic has it. India does not. Even in a country where throwing and hitting a ball is popular, that ball game is not baseball and this makes a huge difference.

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Damn if he wanted to find a cricketer good at throwing a cricket ball, he should have gone to Sri Lanka 😂

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"India’s central problem is absurd regulation and state ownership. Absurd how? To start: The Indian government strictly protects legal employees, so 90%+ of Indians work “informally.” Our bus driver to Agra was required to take a rest stop every two hours — in a country packed with tuk-tuk drivers zooming around like maniacs. The government caps the maximum size of farms — and bars foreigners (including Non-Resident Indians!) from owning farms at all. A great way to strangle the food supply and impoverish farmers at the same time. The Indian government also crushes construction"

This IS Indian culture. Since they have no respect for individual liberty and no civic-mindedness, they produce governments like this.

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Really? So why the Americans keep voting for their government? They have no respect for individual liberty and civic mindedness as well?

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I don’t really understand how a government that spends only 15% of GDP can be so influential.

If you want to stifle growth you have to employ enough bureaucrats first.

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Why do Indians keep voting for Modi if this is true?

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Modi leans into tribal conflict and is hardly a pro-liberty figure. Maybe I don't understand your question.

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Trump is such a pro-liberty and not into tribal conflict at all right? Or at least, Trump is overall less problematic than Modi, right? Trump is literally the most anti-liberty and tribalistic piece of shit I saw in the modern era, and that cunt actually even won the election one time in the literal fucking USA (home of the immigrants)! People like you are guzzling buckets of his cum and you feel so good that you are in denial about J6 and literal fucking coup.

Your pathetic attempt at defending Trump at Michael Huemer's post was so sad that I thought you are just a retard.

Yeah, you don't understand their question because your brain has a large piece of dick stuck in and you can't think straight. Go to a doctor and get that dick out.

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you know nothing about Modi and indian politics, kid.

i guess you see every journalist and every media lie, right?

So you can't sit in USA and know about these unless you spend years into it.

india is the most diverse nation on the earth with diverse parties

modi leans into tribal conflict. first every politician need to win

second

there are two top political umbrella

one that says india has been a continuous civilisation for 5000 years, and in that period thousands of worships and sects born into that civilization, understand the thing that unites us and make this holy indian subcontinent civilizationally aware, productive and prosperous.

another one, just panders to whatever major western far leftists ideology is around that time, during the British raj, it was anti-colonialism, then post independence it was communism now it is woke whatever

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To a certain extend Indians have to be tricked into supporting markets. Americans need to be tricked also. Ezra Klein has long described the Republican party as a machine that converts social frustration into tax cuts. I think he's right.The BJP is shaping up to be the same. I think Indian culture is a lot like American culture politically. The long dominance of the INC was a temporary feature of Indian politics that resulted from the party's connection with the independence movement and the poverty of media access for Indians. In the future, India will look more like America and have similar economic prospects.

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Ezra Klein is a deliberate liar. See his interview with Sam Harris about Charles Murray.

You're making a huge guess that India will turn out to be like America. Nothing like that has happened yet.

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Modi wins because his voter base is poor-uneducated-backward-easily brainwashed-low IQ-dumb peole who don't have to pay taxes (you have to pay income tax only if your income crosses a certain limit). He overtaxes the middle class so that he can give subsidies and rations and benefits and free healthcare to that poor-dumb class. Nowadays they have even started giving women a pocket-money every month. All political parties (It has become a competition among them so as to who can give more to win votes). Sadly that poor-dumb class makes around 60-70% of Indian population. That class is the one you see in "Dirty street food" and "unhygienic food" videos. Both the vendors and the customers belong to that particular class. India is a highly segregated and classist society. Lower caste people of upper class are considered upper class and are not discriminated in my view.

The educated Indians actually hate Modi because of his polarising politics and the dictatorial propaganda he distributes (he has full control over the national media). His leaders give speeches against Muslims to polarise the society and Hindus vote for them (not all but mostly from that poor-dumb class).

Modi actually is a really dumb person. His educational certificates are all fake and he is the first Prime Minister since independence (1947) who is uneducated. But since he suffers from extreme levels of narcissism, him and his propaganda team have always displayed him as a great intellectual orator cum scholar. He is also very close friends with the major businessmen of the country. They secretly fund his party and in return he gives them cheap land and excuses their loans and makes favourable policies and gives them all the important (profitable) tenders for various projects. He has been exposed and the educated people have started seeing his true self very well now.

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??? All of the free income schemes are by the leftist parties in India. The BJP is explicitly not doing that.

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Looking at the comments, one would be forgiven to think that the racists need a mildest of excuses to come out of their closets.

I am also appalled by the idiocy of logic shown here. You don't go to India to find a baseball superstar, a game that no one plays there and 99% of people there haven't even heard of. But you will find many a world class athathletes who play cricket and field hockey. You will also find many of the chess chachampions. Idiocy is of such writers is astounding!

Visit India, or at least learn a bit more about it before judging it harshly and putting it down. It is still coming out of over 1100 years of Islamic and British invasions, and then some 65 odd years of ultra-left ideology driven socialism. Show me a country that could have survived such a prolonged onslaught, genocides and looting. In the last couple of decades alone, it has left many of the so called "first world" economies behind. It will thrive despite such racism, and despite meddling by US, Canada, UK and the perperennial enemies on its borders.

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Mentally ill individual here. Let's all laugh at him, lolz

(for his third paragraph, at least)

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That's the best you can respond? Just shows your ignorance.

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It is not appropriate to address your content. We should just enjoy ourselves and laugh at you.

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We? The looters? The government topplers?

Dude if you're a British, you have stolen GBP 50 trillion from one country alone and if you're an American, you have nuked innocent people, ravaged countless countries on the pretext of war, invaded oil-rich nations, killed the Saudi king who refused to sell you oil, killed tons of scientists around the world to jeopardise the scientific (nuclear) developments and have spread anarchy all over. Both possibilities (of you being a British or an American are equally disgusting) and please learn to give yourself fellatio in a standing pose while a South Asian or an Indian fucks you from behind. That's going to become a reality in the coming years while you filthy toilet paper degenerates laugh and enjoy while watching your mothers' OnlyFans "content".

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See above post for the quality of the typical Indian. This is why it is inapproriate to even dignify the notion of India becoming civilised. Lolz at that.

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Atleast he didn't kill millions in famines and divided a country on the basis of religion so that they keep fighting among themselves forever. As the old proverb goes, if you see two fishes fighting in water, a British was there. Peak British quality I presume: liars and deceivers and dirty cunts

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Agreed. I will never Visit India

Do you see what they do to their beaches?

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That's exactly what a descendant of the looter British lineage would say

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"Show me a country that could have survived such a prolonged onslaught, genocides and looting."

Germany, Japan, Korea...

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None of them had rulers who decimated their culture, conducted mass genocide, and stole trillions of dollars of wealth for over 1000 years!

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South Korea did.

Complete backwards nonsense country run by slavemasters for 2000 years or so, than decimated and brutalized by the Japanese and once that Horror was finally over they got bombed to hell in a horrible war and had a useless dictator installed. They went from that to first world standard in a few decades.

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That characterization of pre-modern Korean history is quite honestly just complete bullshit, the place wasn't notably worse off than anywhere else and in many ways was quite a bit better (a very high literacy rate after the alphabet was created in 1443, for example). You shouldn't just make assumptions and say things without actually knowing the history of them.

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Why is that India has a glorious age and then let themselves be invaded and dominated. The British had a token force for years and the Indians did nothing...

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Because India was very divided by religion, caste, language, and culture. It still is, but the government has managed to instill some general sense of patriotism in a lot of the populace.

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Accurate answer

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I knew the answer but thanks for the reply George, it was a sarcastic reply to 'what me worry'

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A few Indians asked me if I was also critical of American independence from Britain. Which I definitely am. Mather Byles asked the right rhetorical question: "Which is better — to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away or by three thousand tyrants one mile away?" With rare exceptions, “independence” means a bloodbath, followed by the oppression of local elites.

Compared to the constant and massive famines suffered by India under British rule, the amount of people who died during the partition was pretty small. It's like saying Irish Independence was a bad thing because of The Troubles. The US has never had a major famine (there was a minor one in 1815 due to climate disruption from a volcano), something that would probably not be true if we'd remained under British rule. "Anti-colonial fanatics" became that way because they constantly watched their country getting starved and impoverished by rulers who gave the same Malthusian explanations for the suffering that you rightly dismiss.

3000 tyrants one mile away gives one a viable target and they know that, which usually requires them to be somewhat reasonable in their demands.

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Goddamn I love this reply. Hats off to you, sir.

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Yeah, quite honestly it's a bit fucking disgusting to have to even answer a starvation apologist, but I guess someone has to hose the shit off the sidewalk.

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I've read a few Indian economists and historians that said famines were a constant in India, in pre British and Mughal periods, and that they decreased, partly due to railways and aid policies. Here's Zareer Masani https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/the-british-raj-an-assessment/ Is he incorrect?

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Famines were constant in Indian history, but by the time the 19th Century came along, the British had the power to end them entirely and didn't. In fact, they made significantly less mitigation efforts than the Mughals.

The British Empire, in general, ran a financial playbook that guaranteed famine, and not just in India, but in Africa, and quite famously, in Ireland. In British colonies heavy taxation or outright expropriation would deprive small farmers of their land. These would then be consolidated into large estates owned either by British supported local elites or British aristocrats directly. The bulk of the agricultural populace would then always be at the brink of starvation and a few bad harvests would tip them over into starvation. When this happened, the colonies would continue to export food to Britain even as local people starved.

If you want to understand the British Imperial classical liberal playbook in general, simply study the Irish Potato Famine in great detail. It's just documented so much better than anywhere else (partially because US open borders at the time allowed for so many people to nearly starve to death but then still live to tell the tale). Once you go through the causes, effects, British responses, and toll on the populace; you realize that the whole thing was derived from the first principles of the British empire and goes back even further than that to the Norman conquest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLhFRHqmje0

The various taxes that the British tried to impose on the American colonies in the 1760s and early 1770s were the beginning of this process. "Taxation without representation" eventually would mean starvation without recourse. Thankfully this process was arrested by revolution. India hasn't had a single famine since independence.

Also, calling the British Raj an economic success is insane. India was deliberately de-industrialized by British policy. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169

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The British raj was by far the most successful point in Indian history, India had been poor and stagnant for hundreds of not thousands of years. The reason the population boomed under the British was due to more of them surviving

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Indian GDP per capita was about the same at the end of the British Raj in 1947, as it had been in 1600. When the available technology was expanding all the time. Calling that successful is just deliberately lying.

https://www.core-econ.org/the-economy/microeconomics/01-prosperity-inequality-11-british-colonization-india.html#:~:text=For%20India%2C%20GDP%20per%20capita,Fullscreen

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The British bled India dry in a thousand different ways. India was one of the wealthiest regions in the world when they first came (that's why they came). By the time they left India was poor. Anti-colonialist sentiment may not have been appropriate for whites in the American colonies, but it was appropriate for India.

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"Anti-colonialist sentiment may not have been appropriate for whites in the American colonies, but it was appropriate for India." It was appropriate in the American colonies. A lot of people had come to America to specifically escape the economic pressures that the British upper class inflicted on its own people (a state of affairs that would eventually be known as "Dickensian.") When the British upper class tried to assert control and start replicating those conditions in the American colonies, they revolted, in a completely rational move.

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Nonsense, the Victorian lower class, whilst poor by today's standards where the richest in the world

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Completely wrong and ludicrous comment. India was far richer under the British than before. Of course it was relatively poorer due to industrialization happening for the first time ever in the west.

All non western share of GDP would obi decline

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At best India's per Capita GDP increased by 16% between 1850 and 1947. Considering the economic growth experienced other countries in that period, that's basically stagnation. Hell, Spain was considered a basket case, and their GDP almost tripled in the same period. Hell, even the anemic growth of the Permit Raj (1-2% per year) was better than that.

There's a good argument to be made that India was on the verge of Industrializing before the British put a stop to it.

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Everyone in this comment section is already ready to discard India and Indians as hopeless. I for one share Bryan's optimism

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Such optimism has not borne fruits for almost a century at this point

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It's currently bearing fruit

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Rotten fruit.

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7% annual growth does not rot

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Can we trust these numbers? I think not.

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I think so!

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>English is widely spoken

Some fun facts about language in India are that English is the second most commonly spoken language in India and that most Indians don't speak Hindi, the most common language in India.

>life in India has drastically improved since 1991

To put some numbers to it, in 1991, India had a life expectancy of just under 60 and by 2023, it rose to almost 72.

GDP per capita also increased more than fourfold from $529 to $2,240 (in 2010 dollars).

The percentage of the population living in extreme poverty dropped from 49% to 13%, by 2021.

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What is the IQ profile of India and its subgroups (races, ethnicities, castes, etc.)? As I recall, the country's mean IQ is somewhere around 80, 5 points lower than that of American blacks, on average. Any thoughts on THAT aspect of the country or did you somehow manage to miss that in your travels and sharp-eyed immersion in Indian culture...?

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You must be really high IQ

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IQ doesn't exist. All people everywhere are the same. Even you and me, morons both.

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Finally someone who speaks the truth.

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Your question seems to suggest you do believe in IQ…

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Your response seems to suggest you don't...

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Bryan does not take his faith in biology/hereditarianism far enough. Yes, Sovietism has ruined India, but there's a reason totalitarian ideologies find it easy to take root in oriental societies, whereas they've consistently failed to take off in northwestern Europe. The reason is that people in these societies are biologically hardwired to be susceptible to these ideologies. You bring them over in large enough numbers, and they're bound to shift the political culture of their new countries. Also Indians are pretty lazy. They have to grind incredibly hard because they live on the edge of sustenance, but if you pay close enough attention, you'll notice that they do everything in a sloppy, haphazard manner, that most lack the perseverance necessary to put up with the rigours of something that requires long term commitment. They're the equivalent of the lazy student who pulls an all nighter before test day, except the all nighter happens to be their entire life. He may look really hard working if you were to drop in on him without knowing the context or anything about him, but he's actually a slouch, and will forever be one.

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Bryan, you need to start moderating your comments. Or hire someone to do it. Nobody you want to hear from is going to reply to you at this rate.

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from india, overall, it was an okay analysis except for caste, partition and some other points Maybe I find those parroting general lines because I am well versed in that. okay

In future, you will see a person of Indian descent holding all major positions in Western countries and the world be so globalized that that also won't matter

I think the biggest indian subcontinent ( Hindu and Muslim ) to world migration is here to come,

that will alter the world's culture so much, Subcontinent philosophy and culture will become popular and in turn subcontinent and its people will get to live under the rule of law and experience their full potential and productivity

the only problem I see in this world is Islam but in a free just society that philosophy may take moderate reform like every other past religious ideology

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Great take on India, the potential is immense. I cannot wait for India to become richer ❤️

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I enjoyed this travel report.

It's strange to blame India's lingering overregulation on the USSR. It's cringe when Russians do it (the USSR having been gone more than 3 decades) to say nothing of a country that wasn't even within its sphere of influence.

Anyhow, burdensome regulations are omnipresent throughout the Third World, but are mitigated by the optionality of following many of them due to low state capacity. India's true problem is the average IQ of 80, which would be somewhere in the 90s under First World conditions. How to close that gap between reality and potential should be India's foremost priority. It's difficult to accomplish much with such a workforce.

India's south is indeed by and large richer, cleaner, and more developed than the north in an inversion of the usual global pattern. I suspect this has very deep roots, from the surprisingly high density of Roman coinage in SW India to Indian mathematics actually being pretty much just Kerala mathematics.

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The numbers I saw were:

India IQ 76

Japan IQ 106 (top in world)

That's about the gap between an adult and a 10 year-old.

Standard deviation at most 15 for both (though I don't know how reliable Lynn's India average is, and haven't seen s.d. figures for either, I don't recall ever seeing a population s.d. above the nominal 15 -- though if there's anywhere with a higher s.d. it would be India).

That India figure could easily rise with better environment, but not much more than 10-12 points, from what has been seen in other countries. Still lower than Mexico. As it is now, only about in 44 Indians can answer as difficult questions as the average Japanese, so India not only has a smaller absolute number of 106+ IQ people, the ones they do have are held back by mentally subnormal bosses, teachers and officials.

India has to stop exporting its competent people and instead put them in charge of India.

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It's too simplistic to associate IQ so strongly with whether a country is first world as if IQ alone explains everything. Just 40 years ago China was poor as India but today in my opinion it's the most developed country on Earth. Did IQ go up significantly more than the Flynn Effect of 7-8 points in those 40 years? Systems and governance matter.

India post independence was burdened by 5 decades of Nehru socialism. Since opening it's economy in 1991 it's grown fast but it was from such a low baseline that even today it looks like crap. I first went to Mumbai in 1999, I don't think ppl like the OP have any idea how much worse things were back then. If you think it's horrific now it was like going to hell in the 90's.

And I think all that matters with IQ is having a top 10% of high IQ individuals to govern society and do the top jobs. The top 10% of Indians can compete with anyone on Earth. To build a society this is all you need, along with good governance and the right system. In my opinion most white and black Americans are dumb as hell but the US succeeded cause it had a quality top 10% with the right governance and system.

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Average IQ (or even better the average IQ of the top 5%) is the single best predictor of GDP per capita, especially when one adjusts for the two main systematic outlier groups - countries with large resource windfalls, to the upside, and countries with a Communist legacy to the downside. One might argue the legacy of the License Raj puts India partly into the latter category, but even so, it's clearly to a much lesser extent than ex-socialist Eastern Europe or China.

I'm certainly not denying the importance of institutions, they are at any rate more malleable than cognitive ability, and in some cases they're clearly the main or even only important factor (North vs. South Korea being the classic example). I just don't think India is in that category though.

India does have quite an impressive smart fraction though, which is why I am relatively bullish on its long-term prospects. Its democracy and relatively independent judiciary ensures that sharp downside risks are smaller than in China, Russia, or most of the Islamic world.

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honest, not attempting to prove some gotcha by asking, question: did the Muslims you spoke to or met seem as free with their speech as other groups?

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Retarded opinions stemming out of libertarian ideology. “If it looks fancy then it must be rich else it’s poor..” unfortunately that’s not how it works here in the third world where most people never reveal their income. The only thing that bothers me about india is lacking infrastructure and solid waste management. Most poor that you see are most likely not poor. There was this pretty intersecting news of a few poor looking unkempt street vendors who white people would think are poor were actually found to be millionaires in US dollars. Don’t believe whatever you see. The indirect taxes, electricity consumption, car sales, bike sales, house sales per capita in India exceed than countries having twice the gdp per capita of india. Please for the millionth time, put your libertarian ideologies and biases at home and stop believing everything you see. No wonder people don’t take libertarians seriously in the states. Thank you !!!!

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Excellent essay. Coincidentally spent the same week in India, in some of the same places, and I found the extreme libertarian reality of everything being up for negotiation to be a major issue: https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/life-in-india-is-a-series-of-bilateral

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