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.
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.
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.
What about what he said is accurate? Indians by some estimates have 4 and 6 times the mean income and wealth of average Americans. How would this be possible if what he said were true?
"They run the worst motels here, I can go on and on." How so?
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.
Indians in India and recent immigrants from India are overwhelmingly pro Trump.
My own observation is that many Indian Americans publicly attack Trump while secretly backing Trump. Especially rich and upper middle class Indo Americans in woke, left or liberal areas.
2nd/3rd/4th generation has the dynamic you describe. But keep in mind where they live and how rich they are. If you hold income and academic performance constant, they are behaving like caucasians.
I would be very surprised if half of Indo Americans didn't actually vote for Trump this time around in practice, whatever they told pollsters.
"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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Obviously you can. Look at corporate profits in India. India is a very transparent liberal free democracies with strong institutions and a strong financial and business sector.
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.
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".
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.
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
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.
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.
You can't compare South Korean governance pre Japan to something like the Delhi Sultanate. This is absurd.
After 1991 India began free market reforms inspired by (you guessed it . . . South Korea); and because of this India is the world's fastest growing economy.
However there is a massive woke attack on India. Peter Boghossian wrote the forward to a book about it:
This describes the global woke attack on the USA, India and other liberal free democracies.
Trump's victory was a massive victory for India too and will hopefully make it easier for India to implement free market pro business reforms without massive US and global sanctions and resistance on woke grounds.
Sadly global NGOs and institutions with foreign backing and funding can cause massive protests inside India to oppose economic liberalization.
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...
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.
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.
When the British East India company first became the main power in British India in 1805, India had a larger economy and more wealth than the UK. Britain, especially after 1844, and even more especially after 1858 imposed fabian socialism on India to crush the Indian private sector and deindustrialize India. [A common European policy at the time.] Real per capita GDP growth between 1805 and 1947 was probably negative. Indian manufacturing & agriculture were decimated by British fabian socialism.
To this day many Indian farmers don't have the freedom to sell their goods to customers & are forced to sell their goods to "distributors" who pocket the spread between farmers and end users. The British gave ownership of these "distributors" to veterans of British wars. Many of these settled in Canada and to a lesser degree Britiain in the early 1900s, after WWI & WW2 (where the British also have them benefits and land.) Canada continues to generate a lot of revenue from these socialist farming distribution companies.
Any Indian attempt to give Indian farmers some freedom to sell their goods to market is stopped by Canadian sponsorship & funding of terrorism, riots, organized crime in India, and the global woke left. In 2019/2020 Canadian backed protestors literally took over the capital city of India for a year, blocking highways, freeways, public buildings.
Because this was during Black Lives Matter (which some of protestors in India were also pushing), Indian police where scared to use force to stop this, in case there were viral videos. Several hundred police were sent to the hospital by Canadian backed (and in some cases actual Canadian) protestors. Greta Thunberg & other European/American celebrities gave full support to the violent protests. India as always bowed down to Canadians (and the Gretas of the world) and gave Canadians whatever they wanted in return for getting their capital city back.
Britain supported a young scholar called Karl Marx in his efforts to dismantle Indian culture, society & religion. Marx wrote about a 100 articles on India. Britain also worked with the founder of semiology and structuralism (which evolved into post modernism) Ferdinand_de_Saussure to dismantle Indian society. The British backed many leftist academic scholars (from Oxbridge and what we now call the Russel Group) in an attempt to disrupt Indian society, the Indian economy, and to demonize India's entrepreneurs, business class, traditional schools, elites. These indology theories would later morph into what we now call the culturally marxist frankfurt school of Herbert Marcuse. And more recently "critical theory."
It is sad that UK and more recently US woke liberal arts universities (especially Harvard) are more influential in India (in a very bad negative way) than they are the UK or USA. And it was horrifying to more recently see UK and US universities start to destroy the UK and USA the way they were destroying foreign countries via what we now call "wokeness."
India only really got partial independence from Oxbridge, Russel Group, UK, in 1991, when India began tepid free market reforms (which were strongly opposed by the global left.) Since Indians understand the horror of wokeness first hand, there is a massive anti woke backlash among over 80% of Indians--albeit the woke institutionally still control India in many ways. Indian Supreme Court judges--who tend to study at Harvard--love to make speeches about what is a man, what is a woman, third wave intersectional femnist critical gender theory, critical theory in general, critical race theory, critical tribe theory, critical caste theory. These speeches are made in public when the Indian supreme court is in session adjudicating cases; and in speeches made outside the court. Indian liberal arts academia remain an extension of US and to a lesser degree UK liberal arts academia.
This explains the mass celebrations across India, Asia, Africa and the world when Trump won in 2024. There is deep global hope that Trump will fight the woke left movement.
This book discusses the woke attack on the USA, India and other liberal free democracies. Peter Boghossian wrote the forward to it.
I hope that when the UK gets a good leader again such as Nigel Farage (instead of the woke socialist two tier Kier) the UK implements soft reparations to undo some of the damage the UK is still causing:
This would benefit the UK more than it would benefit India and other countries.
Please watch from the 29 minute 40 second time stamp. The UK would massively benefit from India becoming the UK's largest trading, investment, business, joint R&D partner after the USA and EU--in lieu of China. India is the world's fastest growing economy. And then expand this business partnership to the other asian countries standing up to Pres Xi. The UK should similarly adopt global Britain and commonwealth Britain to make the big bucks doing business with Africa.
Between 1765 and 1947 there was no point at which a famine that killed hundreds of thousands at least was not in the easy living memory of your average adult Indian and usually more than one.
In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis points out that here were 31 serious famines in the 120 years of British rule compared with 17 famines in the 2,000 years before British rule. Having known this reality, it is imperative for us to take a quick look at the visible causes of the famine.
You're no better than the tankies who deny the Holodomor.
Can you then explain why the population of India exploded under our rule? Does this no doubt impartial and even-handed book suggest that perhaps the famines came about from the birth rate exceeding the food supply? Does this book perhaps consider that British recording methods might be more accurate then famines millennia ago?
Did the population of the Ukraine increase under the Soviets?
I'm not going to go through the trouble of debunking Malthus. It's been done over and over again but remains the go to explanation of parasitic sadists. During the 18th The population of most of the world increased quite massively without the trouble Also, India wasn't all that primitive under Mughal rule, records were kept.
The population of India was 169 million in 1800 and 340 Million in 1947. So the population basically doubled. This to a world population of 1 Billion in 1800 and 2.3 Billion in 1947, so the world growth rate was actually higher than India’s. It helps to actually know things before you start talking.
Do you think this vast and rapid increase might have had something to do with the Industrial Revolution and the conquest of the planet by Europeans? Where do you think it came from?
What does it matter where it came from? If you want to say that population increases caused famines because there were more mouths to feed than the hands to work could keep up with (as Paul Erlich predicted in the 70s, wrongly) then why didn't it happen everywhere?
Also, the population doubling in those 150 years isn't particularly impressive.
The British used the same excuse of people breeding too much when they were exporting food away from the famine regions for money that they did in Ireland. Nice to know you can keep repeating the same Bullshit.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Some fun facts about language in India are that English is the second most commonly spoken language in India and that only a slim majority 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.
A lot of the comments are expressing reasonable skepticism at the idea that immigrants won’t carry their country’s home culture when they arrive. The situation in Canada has been referenced as an example of what a true open borders policy could end up looking like in the U.S.
Would you mind explaining why that view is so horrifically wrong that it must be dismissed or even deleted out of existence?
Look, I’m sure your own circle only has wonderful and fully integrated Indians - that’s the case for my circle too. But your circle is the elite of the elite, not a reasonable sample of Indian Americans, let alone Indian Indians.
Why in your view do Indian Americans have 4 to six times the average wealth of Americans in general? Why do asians and jews in your view sharply outperform the American average?
I would say that anyone whose expected value in terms of income & wealth is more than 1.5 times the American mean & who shares America's values should be given green cards in my view.
Everyone else should get the equivalent of temporary student and guest worker visas.
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...?
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
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.
I used to really like the idea of open borders. I promoted it 10 years ago, as you can see on my blog. But, looking at what has happened in Europe since, I must now admit I was wrong. It is not about economics, it is about culture. Culture plays a far bigger role than Libertarians like to admit. Libertarians have a quite mechanistic view of humans. If you set the right environment with the right insensitives than humans will behave in the same way, so they think. I used to believe that. But that is not what we are seeing. You put a lot of these people into a modern economy and they fail just as much as in their home country. And that is where we have to acknowledge that maybe the reason why a country like India is so badly run is not an unfortunate external factor, but maybe has something to do with Indian culture. Listen to Jayant Bhandari. He has a podcast where he discusses Indian culture, and he is extremely pessimistic. Maybe a bit too pessimistic, but even if he is only half right, there is no hope for India, and you certainly would not want too many Indians to move into your neighbourhood.
A lot of parts in my home country Germany have now become really really dangerous. Especially women are increasingly not safe to go out any more. This is due to culture. I am sorry, but there are just some cultures that are not compatible. If you put them together you are asking for violence. And violence is not beneficial for any society.
Jayant Bhandari is a typical self hating Indian whose deep self hatred translates into hatred of India.
He has consistently been dead wrong about India.
The Indian left and Indian woke hate India exponentially more than the US woke and US left hate the USA. No left and woke hate their own more than Indian ones do. The global left and woke also hate Indians.
Ignore the Indian left, Indian woke, global left, global woke, and engage with the Indian non left. For example, if you want to understand deep indian and deep asian culture, please watch:
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 !!!!
Isn't India in the middle of the largest infrastructure build in world history with the partial exception of China? I find Indian infrastructure to be brand spanking new and high quality in much of India.
Agree with you completely on 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."
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.
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.
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.
The communists similar tried to destroy many countries all over the world, including the USA, Europe, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Philippines.
In 1946 Bengal had 3% of global GDP. Calcutta (capital of Bengal) was the richest, most high tech city in all of asia. With the largest stock market, financial center, marketing center, manufacturing center, industrial center in Asia.
Soviet communist infiltration destroyed Calcutta, making it the world's first proto woke city. Calcutta became a woke communist dystopian dirt poor dump.
I am very optimistic that India can reach 1/3rd US per capita GDP within a generation--which would make India the largest economy in the world.
Trump is very popular in India and while much of the Indian elite, upper middle class and rich are woke; the vast majority of Indians are anti woke.
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.
Indian free speech is comparable to the UK's. Both India and the UK don't have free speech by US standards. Indian free speech is governed by British laws from colonialism.
Conservative sunnis have a lot of free speech in India. Good liberal muslims, femnist muslims, lbgtq+ muslims less so.
Free speech is almost entirely determined by Indian woke courts--which for practical purposes select their own members and are the most powerful branch of the Indian government.
Indian courts are heavily influenced by Harvard university (US judiciary is more influenced by Princeton.) Indian judges love to publicly talk about what is a man, what is a woman, critical theory, critical gender theory, critical race theory, critical tribe theory, critical legal theory, critical caste theory.
If you want to see a prominent Indian liberal muslim woman fight India's number one leftist woke schmuck, please watch:
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.
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.
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.
What about what he said is accurate? Indians by some estimates have 4 and 6 times the mean income and wealth of average Americans. How would this be possible if what he said were true?
"They run the worst motels here, I can go on and on." How so?
Crime, tribalism, fraud
This is woke propaganda. You know better than to fall for it.
Self-actualization, excellence, merit does not make someone a white supremacist.
The woke like brown people, I want them deported.
Well played the Hitler Card. Did Kamala loan it to you?
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.
Damn if he wanted to find a cricketer good at throwing a cricket ball, he should have gone to Sri Lanka 😂
Indians are very strongly pro Trump. In India Trump might have 90% support.
A strong majority of Indians have voted democrat in every single election of my lifetime including this last one.
Indians in India and recent immigrants from India are overwhelmingly pro Trump.
My own observation is that many Indian Americans publicly attack Trump while secretly backing Trump. Especially rich and upper middle class Indo Americans in woke, left or liberal areas.
2nd/3rd/4th generation has the dynamic you describe. But keep in mind where they live and how rich they are. If you hold income and academic performance constant, they are behaving like caucasians.
I would be very surprised if half of Indo Americans didn't actually vote for Trump this time around in practice, whatever they told pollsters.
"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.
This is not Indian culture. Please read Artha Shaastra by Chaanakya. India has long been capitalist. Asia in general too.
Really? So why the Americans keep voting for their government? They have no respect for individual liberty and civic mindedness as well?
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.
Why do Indians keep voting for Modi if this is true?
Modi leans into tribal conflict and is hardly a pro-liberty figure. Maybe I don't understand your question.
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.
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
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.
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.
Why in your view is Modi the most popular Indian PM of all time and has been this for more than 10 years?
Modi tries to unite all the many groups of India together and runs on unity and oneness. Or unity in diversity.
Modi is the more free market and pro business than almost anyone from the Indian left or even center left.
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.
??? All of the free income schemes are by the leftist parties in India. The BJP is explicitly not doing that.
Everyone in this comment section is already ready to discard India and Indians as hopeless. I for one share Bryan's optimism
Such optimism has not borne fruits for almost a century at this point
It's currently bearing fruit
Rotten fruit.
7% annual growth does not rot
Can we trust these numbers? I think not.
I think so!
Obviously you can. Look at corporate profits in India. India is a very transparent liberal free democracies with strong institutions and a strong financial and business sector.
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.
Mentally ill individual here. Let's all laugh at him, lolz
(for his third paragraph, at least)
That's the best you can respond? Just shows your ignorance.
It is not appropriate to address your content. We should just enjoy ourselves and laugh at you.
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".
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.
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
I don't think you know Indian history.
India has been highly free market capitalist for most of the last 6 thousand years. And partly industrialized for most of this period of time.
Please read Artha Shastra. Or watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3Xg7DwbHMw
Agreed. I will never Visit India
Do you see what they do to their beaches?
Indian beaches are full of foreigners. What is your issue with Indian beaches?
That's exactly what a descendant of the looter British lineage would say
"Show me a country that could have survived such a prolonged onslaught, genocides and looting."
Germany, Japan, Korea...
None of them had rulers who decimated their culture, conducted mass genocide, and stole trillions of dollars of wealth for over 1000 years!
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.
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.
You can't compare South Korean governance pre Japan to something like the Delhi Sultanate. This is absurd.
After 1991 India began free market reforms inspired by (you guessed it . . . South Korea); and because of this India is the world's fastest growing economy.
However there is a massive woke attack on India. Peter Boghossian wrote the forward to a book about it:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364637085_Snakes_In_The_Ganga
This describes the global woke attack on the USA, India and other liberal free democracies.
Trump's victory was a massive victory for India too and will hopefully make it easier for India to implement free market pro business reforms without massive US and global sanctions and resistance on woke grounds.
Sadly global NGOs and institutions with foreign backing and funding can cause massive protests inside India to oppose economic liberalization.
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...
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.
Accurate answer
I knew the answer but thanks for the reply George, it was a sarcastic reply to 'what me worry'
Indians were grateful to the British for many years for liberating India from conservatives sunni islamists. This was understandable and correct.
Which of them were ruled by conservative sunni islamists for a close to a millenia?
The British were brought into India as liberators by Indians who wanted help to remove their conservative sunni islamist oppressors.
The British also had their problems and imposed socialism and proto wokeness to devastate the Indian economy and deindustrialize India.
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.
Partition was horrific. 1 to 2 million dead and perhaps 30 million forcibly ethnically cleansed.
However India in 2024 is far better governed than she ever was by the British.
Oh, how so?
When the British East India company first became the main power in British India in 1805, India had a larger economy and more wealth than the UK. Britain, especially after 1844, and even more especially after 1858 imposed fabian socialism on India to crush the Indian private sector and deindustrialize India. [A common European policy at the time.] Real per capita GDP growth between 1805 and 1947 was probably negative. Indian manufacturing & agriculture were decimated by British fabian socialism.
To this day many Indian farmers don't have the freedom to sell their goods to customers & are forced to sell their goods to "distributors" who pocket the spread between farmers and end users. The British gave ownership of these "distributors" to veterans of British wars. Many of these settled in Canada and to a lesser degree Britiain in the early 1900s, after WWI & WW2 (where the British also have them benefits and land.) Canada continues to generate a lot of revenue from these socialist farming distribution companies.
Any Indian attempt to give Indian farmers some freedom to sell their goods to market is stopped by Canadian sponsorship & funding of terrorism, riots, organized crime in India, and the global woke left. In 2019/2020 Canadian backed protestors literally took over the capital city of India for a year, blocking highways, freeways, public buildings.
Because this was during Black Lives Matter (which some of protestors in India were also pushing), Indian police where scared to use force to stop this, in case there were viral videos. Several hundred police were sent to the hospital by Canadian backed (and in some cases actual Canadian) protestors. Greta Thunberg & other European/American celebrities gave full support to the violent protests. India as always bowed down to Canadians (and the Gretas of the world) and gave Canadians whatever they wanted in return for getting their capital city back.
Britain supported a young scholar called Karl Marx in his efforts to dismantle Indian culture, society & religion. Marx wrote about a 100 articles on India. Britain also worked with the founder of semiology and structuralism (which evolved into post modernism) Ferdinand_de_Saussure to dismantle Indian society. The British backed many leftist academic scholars (from Oxbridge and what we now call the Russel Group) in an attempt to disrupt Indian society, the Indian economy, and to demonize India's entrepreneurs, business class, traditional schools, elites. These indology theories would later morph into what we now call the culturally marxist frankfurt school of Herbert Marcuse. And more recently "critical theory."
It is sad that UK and more recently US woke liberal arts universities (especially Harvard) are more influential in India (in a very bad negative way) than they are the UK or USA. And it was horrifying to more recently see UK and US universities start to destroy the UK and USA the way they were destroying foreign countries via what we now call "wokeness."
India only really got partial independence from Oxbridge, Russel Group, UK, in 1991, when India began tepid free market reforms (which were strongly opposed by the global left.) Since Indians understand the horror of wokeness first hand, there is a massive anti woke backlash among over 80% of Indians--albeit the woke institutionally still control India in many ways. Indian Supreme Court judges--who tend to study at Harvard--love to make speeches about what is a man, what is a woman, third wave intersectional femnist critical gender theory, critical theory in general, critical race theory, critical tribe theory, critical caste theory. These speeches are made in public when the Indian supreme court is in session adjudicating cases; and in speeches made outside the court. Indian liberal arts academia remain an extension of US and to a lesser degree UK liberal arts academia.
This explains the mass celebrations across India, Asia, Africa and the world when Trump won in 2024. There is deep global hope that Trump will fight the woke left movement.
Please consider reading:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364637085_Snakes_In_The_Ganga
This book discusses the woke attack on the USA, India and other liberal free democracies. Peter Boghossian wrote the forward to it.
I hope that when the UK gets a good leader again such as Nigel Farage (instead of the woke socialist two tier Kier) the UK implements soft reparations to undo some of the damage the UK is still causing:
https://www.brownpundits.com/2018/03/06/how-the-english-should-provide-soft-power-reparations-to-india/
This would benefit the UK more than it would benefit India and other countries.
Please watch from the 29 minute 40 second time stamp. The UK would massively benefit from India becoming the UK's largest trading, investment, business, joint R&D partner after the USA and EU--in lieu of China. India is the world's fastest growing economy. And then expand this business partnership to the other asian countries standing up to Pres Xi. The UK should similarly adopt global Britain and commonwealth Britain to make the big bucks doing business with Africa.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeJHuzLQb3g&t=1780s
Praying for Britain to be great again.
"Constant and massive"? You haven't a clue what you're talking about
Between 1765 and 1947 there was no point at which a famine that killed hundreds of thousands at least was not in the easy living memory of your average adult Indian and usually more than one.
In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis points out that here were 31 serious famines in the 120 years of British rule compared with 17 famines in the 2,000 years before British rule. Having known this reality, it is imperative for us to take a quick look at the visible causes of the famine.
You're no better than the tankies who deny the Holodomor.
Can you then explain why the population of India exploded under our rule? Does this no doubt impartial and even-handed book suggest that perhaps the famines came about from the birth rate exceeding the food supply? Does this book perhaps consider that British recording methods might be more accurate then famines millennia ago?
Did the population of the Ukraine increase under the Soviets?
You are, of course, talking bollocks.
I'm not going to go through the trouble of debunking Malthus. It's been done over and over again but remains the go to explanation of parasitic sadists. During the 18th The population of most of the world increased quite massively without the trouble Also, India wasn't all that primitive under Mughal rule, records were kept.
The population of India was 169 million in 1800 and 340 Million in 1947. So the population basically doubled. This to a world population of 1 Billion in 1800 and 2.3 Billion in 1947, so the world growth rate was actually higher than India’s. It helps to actually know things before you start talking.
Do you think this vast and rapid increase might have had something to do with the Industrial Revolution and the conquest of the planet by Europeans? Where do you think it came from?
What does it matter where it came from? If you want to say that population increases caused famines because there were more mouths to feed than the hands to work could keep up with (as Paul Erlich predicted in the 70s, wrongly) then why didn't it happen everywhere?
Also, the population doubling in those 150 years isn't particularly impressive.
The British used the same excuse of people breeding too much when they were exporting food away from the famine regions for money that they did in Ireland. Nice to know you can keep repeating the same Bullshit.
Tiocfaidh ár lá
Goddamn I love this reply. Hats off to you, sir.
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.
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?
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
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
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
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.
"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.
Nonsense, the Victorian lower class, whilst poor by today's standards where the richest in the world
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
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.
>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 only a slim majority 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.
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.
A lot of the comments are expressing reasonable skepticism at the idea that immigrants won’t carry their country’s home culture when they arrive. The situation in Canada has been referenced as an example of what a true open borders policy could end up looking like in the U.S.
Would you mind explaining why that view is so horrifically wrong that it must be dismissed or even deleted out of existence?
Look, I’m sure your own circle only has wonderful and fully integrated Indians - that’s the case for my circle too. But your circle is the elite of the elite, not a reasonable sample of Indian Americans, let alone Indian Indians.
Why in your view do Indian Americans have 4 to six times the average wealth of Americans in general? Why do asians and jews in your view sharply outperform the American average?
What is your issue with asians & jews?
Those who make 4-6 times more than average should be allowed to stay permanently, yes. Those who don't should only be granted temporary work visas.
I would say that anyone whose expected value in terms of income & wealth is more than 1.5 times the American mean & who shares America's values should be given green cards in my view.
Everyone else should get the equivalent of temporary student and guest worker visas.
Are you volunteering to help Bryan as a mod?
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...?
You must be really high IQ
IQ doesn't exist. All people everywhere are the same. Even you and me, morons both.
Finally someone who speaks the truth.
Your question seems to suggest you do believe in IQ…
Your response seems to suggest you don't...
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
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
Great take on India, the potential is immense. I cannot wait for India to become richer ❤️
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.
I used to really like the idea of open borders. I promoted it 10 years ago, as you can see on my blog. But, looking at what has happened in Europe since, I must now admit I was wrong. It is not about economics, it is about culture. Culture plays a far bigger role than Libertarians like to admit. Libertarians have a quite mechanistic view of humans. If you set the right environment with the right insensitives than humans will behave in the same way, so they think. I used to believe that. But that is not what we are seeing. You put a lot of these people into a modern economy and they fail just as much as in their home country. And that is where we have to acknowledge that maybe the reason why a country like India is so badly run is not an unfortunate external factor, but maybe has something to do with Indian culture. Listen to Jayant Bhandari. He has a podcast where he discusses Indian culture, and he is extremely pessimistic. Maybe a bit too pessimistic, but even if he is only half right, there is no hope for India, and you certainly would not want too many Indians to move into your neighbourhood.
A lot of parts in my home country Germany have now become really really dangerous. Especially women are increasingly not safe to go out any more. This is due to culture. I am sorry, but there are just some cultures that are not compatible. If you put them together you are asking for violence. And violence is not beneficial for any society.
Jayant Bhandari is a typical self hating Indian whose deep self hatred translates into hatred of India.
He has consistently been dead wrong about India.
The Indian left and Indian woke hate India exponentially more than the US woke and US left hate the USA. No left and woke hate their own more than Indian ones do. The global left and woke also hate Indians.
Ignore the Indian left, Indian woke, global left, global woke, and engage with the Indian non left. For example, if you want to understand deep indian and deep asian culture, please watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8uWhVxcD90&pp=ygUfaGluZHVpc20gaXMgYSBsaWJlcmFsIGNvbnN0cnVjdA%3D%3D
I hope that's a fake profile picture and you don't actually look like that.
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 !!!!
Isn't India in the middle of the largest infrastructure build in world history with the partial exception of China? I find Indian infrastructure to be brand spanking new and high quality in much of India.
Agree with you completely on 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."
Bingo.
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.
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.
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.
Aravindan Neelakandan's article https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/jawaharlal-nehru-and-how-his-love-for-marxism-affected-india describes Ram Swarup's book https://academic.oup.com/ia/article-abstract/26/4/572/2693585?redirectedFrom=fulltext from 1950 about the communist / Soviet plot to destroy India.
The communists similar tried to destroy many countries all over the world, including the USA, Europe, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Philippines.
In 1946 Bengal had 3% of global GDP. Calcutta (capital of Bengal) was the richest, most high tech city in all of asia. With the largest stock market, financial center, marketing center, manufacturing center, industrial center in Asia.
Soviet communist infiltration destroyed Calcutta, making it the world's first proto woke city. Calcutta became a woke communist dystopian dirt poor dump.
I am very optimistic that India can reach 1/3rd US per capita GDP within a generation--which would make India the largest economy in the world.
Trump is very popular in India and while much of the Indian elite, upper middle class and rich are woke; the vast majority of Indians are anti woke.
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.
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?
Indian free speech is comparable to the UK's. Both India and the UK don't have free speech by US standards. Indian free speech is governed by British laws from colonialism.
Conservative sunnis have a lot of free speech in India. Good liberal muslims, femnist muslims, lbgtq+ muslims less so.
Free speech is almost entirely determined by Indian woke courts--which for practical purposes select their own members and are the most powerful branch of the Indian government.
Indian courts are heavily influenced by Harvard university (US judiciary is more influenced by Princeton.) Indian judges love to publicly talk about what is a man, what is a woman, critical theory, critical gender theory, critical race theory, critical tribe theory, critical legal theory, critical caste theory.
If you want to see a prominent Indian liberal muslim woman fight India's number one leftist woke schmuck, please watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FiYI4oL1Us
(This is the type of Indian woke schmuck who tries to weaponize the Indian court system against liberal Indian muslims)
The Indian left loves to demonize Indian muslims who are not muslim voices and house muslims for being traitors and having false consciousness.
But Indian muslims are fighting back against the Indian left and global left.
Sadly India's establishment institutions are left and even woke.