This so easily glosses over the linguistic apartheid in India (other African countries incl.), that it's shocking. See my previous interactions with the WASP imitations; I gather there are enough of them in India to form markets as large as Japan (oth. unicorns like Flipkart wouldn't survive).
A language without economic value dies eventually. It's likely that the complement of the set is poor enough to not be of consequence (India's median income is the lowest of the BRICS - ~ $600 per-capita).
India: you have bigger problems than the efficient milking of the population - you need to feed the cow first. Irony of ironies, the country is apparently a "socialist republic". It'd be interesting to know about the kind of "intellectuals" sucking off of the Indian state's (imaginably fat) tits - Chomsky mentions somewhere how post-modernism (the new religion in the humanities), rids a population of desperately needed leaders.
Others: No India is not going to beat China economically, nor will Africa. The former will probably produce enough clones and ship them your way for cheap (profit!); the latter will continue in ignominy as its land gets stolen from underneath.
The thing is - every state in India has its own language, more-or-less. Either you can translate into every single language at extreme cost, or you can use either Hindi or English. Of the two, English is likely slightly wider-spoken these days.
India doesn't have a language which you can be guaranteed nearly everyone will speak. English is the closest thing for the classes that are being targeted for ecommerce.
Aside from that... looking at your comment history, you seem to really hate India. Any particular reason?
While you are correct, those states are not small.
The number of native speakers for top five major languages as of 2001 are:
Hindi (and dialects) 422 mil
Bengali 83 mil
Telugu 74 mil
Marathi 72 mil
Tamil 61 mil
These are not insignificant populations. If you add in Bengali speakers in Bangladesh, the total hits 189 mil.
It's easier to think of India the way you think of EU: an aggregation of peoples and cultures under a political umbrella. As an example, sure many people in germany speak english, but would you really try to seriously gain entry into the german market without localizing into german?
This is of course true. But generally speaking, most of the folks who speak these languages but don't speak Hindi also don't have much money and may not even have internet.
In Maharashtra, virtually every middle class person speaks English and Hindi in addition to Marathi. Auto drivers or street vendors will speak only Hindi and Marathi. Of the people I've encountered who don't speak Hindi, most were cooks/maids/similar.
A peripherally related question: is it worth translating your software into Dutch? 90% of the Netherlands speaks English and by having English you've also covered the UK. So it's probably not worth it.
Now lets compare the Netherlands to Maharashtra. The GDP of the Netherlands is $850B (16M people). The GDP of Maharashtra is about $400B (for 110M people). Half that GDP is just Mumbai (about 20M people) and Mumbai is disproportionately a place where English and Hindi work well.
If you are very forward thinking (10+ years), it might be worthwhile gambling that gaining a foothold in regional languages today might pay off when those regions grow. But that's a very long play.
I get by with English and broken Hinglish in Pune and Mumbai. Those are the cities with internet and money. That wouldn't work so well in smaller cities, but those are also not the places I'd target if I were building a business.
As for the south, in my limited experience the same is true. English works fine in Bangalore if you restrict your conversations to upper middle class people with good internet and money to spend.
> But generally speaking, most of the folks who speak these languages but don't speak Hindi also don't have much money and may not even have internet.
About a 100M people in India know English out of a population of 1.3 Billion. It is only the MNC service sector wherein know-english-have-money holds true. The larger chunk of India's income is generated by people who do not know English or Hindi(~800 Million people fall into this bucket).
And yet if you could enter Germany with the same marketing you give to the UK... wouldn't you?
There's a lot of markets which get left out when a company expands to "the EU" - which often means Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and maybe one or two other countries.
As someone who studies culture (as you can tell), my hate is reserved for the neo-colonial entities and the bourgeoisie they cultivate to stay in power. If you call such entities by the names the kakistocracies christen, then yes, I hate most states in the global south.
India, like China, however was a historic center (天竺 - heaven axis they called it) unlike most in the global south. To see it brought to the same level as sub-saharan Africa is painful; to realize there are deep structural issues that will keep it that way is even more so. Hate, yes, for the fat maggots feeding on the dying corpses - but that too is a distraction, for it's not the maggots' fault.
Rhetorical devices of the form "ah, but that's the our only way towards progress", will not be answered to. I'm tired of worn narrative, you lot bombard me with.
Focusing on 'Culture' is blinding you to what's going on. Tribal cultures are inherently economically inferior due to scaling issues. Western culture is not the only way forward, but the limitation is not the specific ideas, but rather the level of organizational structure.
Stable and mature underground economy's for example operate based on reputation not just tribe. As allegiance to even arbitrary tribes (crips vs bloods) limits commerce. Nation states are arbitrary and transitory, however when larger groups of people limit us vs. them to those outside the nation the internal economy's has fewer self imposed barriers.
PS: China demonstrates other failure points, but as a very non western culture they still show the same trends.
Hasn't India always been like that though, with the caste system? Nobody writes epics about the person who dug Arjuna's toilets, and so we see the past through rose-coloured lenses.
Nobody has written epics about anyone digging someone else's toilets as far as I know. This is not unique to the Mahabharatha or other Indian epics.
As for the caste system, yes, it has had a lot of evils. But then almost all populations around the world have some notion of "class" that is loosely defined, with its own set of evils. I fail to see how this is unique to India, see for instance the topic of ghettos in medieval history.
In modern times, the "class" is usually based on financial wealth.
Furthermore, in the sense of classification based on profession (the idealistic interpretation of caste), this certainly exists across the world (merchant guilds, high concentrations of a single occupation like Harley St, London, etc).
Finally, as for viewing the past through rose-coloured lenses, every historian has his/her own set of biases in terms of coverage and emphasis. There are some who are honest about the reality of this, such as Howard Zinn who mentions it in his preface to "A People's History of the United States", but many delude themselves into thinking that they somehow are magically "unbiased".
With respect to works of fiction, the same applies. In the case of Tolkien, the treatment of the orcs is an example, we never see an orc perspective or pov. In the case of the Song of Ice and Fire, there is arguably little treatment of the common population. Military engagements are reduced to the standard historical style focusing on the leaders and "important" entities involved. As for the Mahabharatha, similar issues arise. Nevertheless, it has a surprising amount of depth and complexity in many respects (e.g morally grey characters and a bittersweet ending).
America, for all its deficiencies, does not expect its citizens to be loyal to a foreign culture or language, in order to come up in life. Some idiot being elected to the throne is not going to change the U.S, nor will it change the fact that US's GDP per-capita is about 25-30x that of India.
Tell me, other than mimic ing whatever is fashionable in London, Berkeley and Paris, what exactly has the "Left" done in Africa, S. Asia and S. America ? Fashion, in general, is apparently the operational semantics of the ostensibly unpowdered and unperfumed.
> India: you have bigger problems than the efficient milking of the population - you need to feed the cow first.
Absolutely disagree. Some data-points in this regard:
- Rural FMCG share is already greater than Urban.
- While rural markets grew by 16%, urban did 12%.
- For many like Dabur India, 50 per cent of their domestic sales comes from rural markets.
> No India is not going to beat China economically, nor will Africa.
I wonder why you'd think that monetisation via Internet is the only thing that adds value to a society. In developing nations, Internet trickles democracy down like nothing else. The kind of equality and voice that the Internet gives, is especially required for people who don't have a high SEC category.
Another important pillar of long term economic growth to a nation is- productivity growth. Internet inclusion drives that.
India a socialist republic? I'm not sure where you're getting that from. Sure, there's tons of subsidies for the poor, but that's necessary in a country as large and poor as India.
Re: language. There's plenty of strong linguistic identity in the south, East and West of India. The north has a weaker cultural identity, but the rest take great pride in their language and culture.
There might not be many online local languages business sites but when you have to do purchase offline it done through local languages. Some of them don't have written written script yet spoken daily by millions.
> linguistic apartheid in India (other African countries incl.)
You appear to be a reasonably educated person, so I guess your use of the word 'other' above is a kind of oversight (because last that I knew, India was in Asia, and not in Africa).
> you need to feed the cow first...
I am sure the government - and all the citizens - of India will forever remain indebted to you for generously contributing and sharing this piece of infinite wisdom - whoever could have even thought of this otherwise?
Hmm. In India, education, laws, governance, pretty much every sphere of power, last I looked, is run in English, for the English (vestiges).
China, like most nations, may aspire towards Western nations, but K-pop/Internet/TV inspired fads are no match for such awesome structures enforces under the threat of violence.
As outsiders, it's likely to be difficult to appreciate this - I recommend Naipaul (although he tends to believe colonization was some godsend).
Yet people are conditioned in schools to love the state and hate the "all evil" capitalism.
In Brazil it's political suicide to suggest cutting government expenses such as bloated programs and agencies (even though they are known to be infested by corruption). People are hit hard by our extremely high taxes but don't make the connection to the government inefficacy and corruption. They keep asking for more government services and programs. People hate our postal service (which has a monopoly on some sorts of deliveries), yet freak out at the idea of opening it to the free market.
The current president attempted to end the "ministry of culture" (which basically is a money gateway from our pockets to already-rich artists with political connections) and replace it with a smaller department. Teachers and university students brainwashed by the state-worshiping religion kept protesting until the president gave up and bought the ministry back. That has been happening to all his attempts at fixing things.
Perfect reading and reproduction of the market-fundamentalist-pamphlet! Who are you to call anyone brainwashed? Talking in truisms, uncharitable to any disagreeing point of view, turning anyone who opposes your points of view into caricatures. Give me a break.
It's funny how idiots here in Brazil thinks that the neoliberalism BS is a serious econômica thesis. Parent post probably studied in a federal university, but hates "big bad state".
Well I think the biggest problem is that we're not really used to reading and trying to understand stuff more deeply, and debating etc so we need simple truths to cling to and for quite a long time there was something homogeneous here, everybody had the same information, everybody watched Jornal Nacional and Novelas, etc. But when you start to read and honestly try to develop understanding of stuff you need to deal with conflicting ideas without cracking lol, and you start to see it's a lot of work and it takes time... But this shouldn't be something for "college people" only, it should be for everyone(and I'm not one of the humanities or who is from the universities). But now we're getting anti-intellectual like the US...
I'm sorry, but I can't see how being pro free markets is being anti intellectual. Using myself as an example, I used to believe government intervention was usually a good thing if done right. But then this whole mess happened in Brazil and I started to actually study economics to understand what was going on, and that changed my view completely.
Economics is not the only issue at play in this whole thing, there's a lot more. This talk of "state worship", "school indoctrination", plus the all sorts of mcarthism, left-dehumanizing(also important to note: center-left) and etc is 100% pure authoritharianism. If you're capable of being charitable to different arguments, seeing the nuances, recognizing the valid points someone from another point-of-view can provide and etc it's one thing but there's a lot of people that are way over the edge.
Well, I do think Brazil has a serious problem with state worship and school indoctrination. I can't remember being exposed to any sort of liberal economics thinking when I was at school or in college. Many of my colleagues never really questioned the ideas they learned, and some of them deepened them during their college years. I don't think that pointing this out as a problem is dehumanizing nor authoritarian. For one, I'm completely against the "Escola sem Partido" project, because it is actually authoritarian and limits freedom of speech.
I do agree, though, that many people with right wing ideals dehumanize progressives, but those are more linked with the conservative and religious right than with libertarian or classical liberal ideals.
I consider myself a classical liberal and when exposing my views to left wing people have been called a fascist and many other adjectives that actually are dehumanizing and are the extreme opposite of what I believe in. I just don't care when people say that, because it just shows they don't have a clue of what my ideals are about and don't even care to listen.
Well, the burden of proof is on the accuser, if people can make the case objectively then of course something should be done and educators themselves should care about the integrity of the knowledge, but it's not as simple as that, to call someone indoctrinated or brainwashed or indocrinator/brainwasher/dishonest is quite a tall call IMO, it's easy to claim, backing it up is another story... The reality I see is that most people just take sides without really reading stuff in depth or don't care at all about politics and that's it, to me that's true for all and I didn't leave school with any defined political positioning, Personally, I don't think state worship is a thing and what I said to the other reply above applies here, too.
I'm not convinced and it was not my experience. Plus it doesn't make any sense, nobody actually worships the state so this is already politically charged wording with little substance and it's what is used to bash people with, not for sincere discussion. If people want to be taken seriously they should use precise and neutral language as much as possible.
You know what is meant when we say "worship the state". You can't be naive to the point of thinking we mean people kneeling in the altar of the state.
But there is an undeniable anti-market anti-individual freedom anti-conservatism bias in Brazilian schools. Examples of that are readily available if you google for it.
> that is until they have inflated themselves out of existence.
Inflation doesn't matter to socialists, because as long as the Mint's printers work they have all the cash they need to conduct a reverse osmosis on the nation's wealth directly into their cronies' pockets.
Then the cronies just save the money in some offshore bank, and the inflation works twice in their favor.
With socialism, the people is the only part getting the shaft. This has been like this for decades now.
Of course, with capitalism in most countries, exactly the same thing happens in reality... it's almost like when you have entities with huge amounts of power that are almost entirely disconnected from the population, the population gets the short end of the stick, no matter what propaganda is pushed on them.
It's hardly that simple. China/Korea/Thai/Vietnam/India... were economically at the same level at the turn of WWII - India was probably in better shape. Now India is comparable only to S-Saharan Africa (and other S.Asian countries), in terms of educational attainment/malnourishment ...
Systems matter; it's not surprising that deeply colonized countries remain basket cases. It's likely that China will be the last nation to "re-industrialize" in the near term.
Vietnam/Thailand are already in the supply chain (where do you think all your cameras/hard disks come from ?). India barely has a manufacturing sector.
Of course. But supply/demand economics means as wages/issues rise in China (i.e. trade war) the rest of Asia, which is rising quickly, picks up the slack.
China has scale, and the right value chains for certain things. But ultimately they are commodities. It's that hard to build simple factories and provide reliable electricity and cheap workers.
Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Vietnam etc. - there's a lot of people there waiting to pick up the slack.
The US does not import a lot of meaningful things from China.
China imports a lot of critical goods from the West, particularly Germany. Also - the trade balance is very lopsided.
A 'trade war' with China would be very painful for China, but the West would hardly skip a beat.
A) Consumer prices would rise a little bit.
B) Some plants (smart factories) would open in the US
C) Mexico would boon, and so would other areas in Asia.
In the long run, if other places pick up the slack, it would permanently damage China's competitive advantages - whereas Western nations would do just fine, save a few German tool makers.
US economy grew only by 1.3% (as opposed to the expected 2.3%); the news sent XAU and JPY soaring. The silver cloud was that the consumer spending still looked decent; such tariffs without massive structural changes to the US manufacturing will come with a recession.
People don't understand why people manufacture in China - it's less about wages now, and more about logistics. Considering the global decline in demand, it's unlikely US (or any others in S. Asia / Africa) will be able to repeat the China/Asian Tiger story on such a mass scale.
That's a good point; British "agnostic" "liberals" (incl. notably Mill), often defended the British task of "civilizing the barbarians" the world over.
That is a very astute observation. Those of us who've seen secular humanist tenets of "rights", being cynically used for all sorts of geopolitical ends, will realize how easy it is to excite folk with such talking points.
People don't realize the dangers of such universalist notions.
Indeed. Worse yet, those alien to this sphere, are not even aware of this lack of understanding - which is probably why it is so destructive, culturally, for colonized peoples.
I would've hoped those in "social sciences" would work to rectify such issues, but in their new garb of post-modernism, they've yet more become the new priesthood.
Indeed. The only reason I can see the other side to this is that I have been married to a woman from a Indonesia for over a decade now. It has been a long process to understand the cultural differences. And I have enjoyed studying anthropology quite a lot.
The one thing that does save things a little bit is that Westerners are usually so out of touch that there really isn't much room for us to do much that doesn't just effectively turn into disengagement. But even that poses real problems. I do my best to help engage in dialog on both sides of very culturally bound issues in order to try to foster some room for dialog through disagreement but getting Westerners in general (and Americans in particular) to accept that an issue like abortion or same-sex marriage is dependent on culture and other cultural institutions (such as how family relates to the economic order) is virtually impossible.
That also gets to what is wrong with multiculturalism in the US, namely that it is being pushed by people who hate culture generally.
> That also gets to what is wrong with multiculturalism in the US, namely that it is being pushed by people who hate culture generally.
I couldn't agree more; this'd have been okay had US not been so powerful geopolitically, but alas. You'll probably enjoy the tapestry around L. Carroll's "The Walrus and the Carpenter" given in "God and Gold".
Looks fascinating. The abstract dovetails on Hilaire Belloc's "The Servile State" in interesting ways. Belloc argued that the key to the success of the industrial revolution in the UK was the confiscation of Catholic church lands under Henry VIII because this created destitute masses that could be exploited in the factories. So to Belloc, Protestantism as a political system was the key to understanding the economic problems of Capitalism.
Thinking about Belloc's thesis a bit more, you have a parallel to the Confiscation of the monasteries in the US, and that was the liberation of the slaves. One can think about slave-based agriculture in the Antebellum South as increasingly industrialized (and even increasingly exploitative as a result). And the civil war not only empowered corporations with large military contracts but also in its resolution provided them with destitute masses pushed into the wage labor system. As I usually say, all racial oppression in the US has been economic in both ends and means.
But in both cases, the religious landscape evolved to match the economic landscape. And the ideological landscape quickly followed. In some rural parts of the US it is still possible to have a discussion about common good, even with people one politically disagrees with. But in the cities, it is all about individualism and rights and any questioning of the in-group orthodoxy gets one labeled as "the enemy."
It took me actually living in Indonesia for a number of years to grasp the depth of difference there. And one of the things that is worth repeating often is that when third worlders speak of first world problems, they don't regard these as trivialities. Indonesians and Malaysians don't want to become like Americans and grow old alone. To those in the third world[1], they have already rejected what Americans and British hold to be (paraphrasing Thatcher) without alternative. I now count myself in the same category.
[1] using the term in the original sense, namely countries which reject both Anglo-American capitalism and Soviet/Chinese Communism. I sometimes refer to Sweden as third world for this reason also, though it is far more Capitalist than others.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12116787
A language without economic value dies eventually. It's likely that the complement of the set is poor enough to not be of consequence (India's median income is the lowest of the BRICS - ~ $600 per-capita).
India: you have bigger problems than the efficient milking of the population - you need to feed the cow first. Irony of ironies, the country is apparently a "socialist republic". It'd be interesting to know about the kind of "intellectuals" sucking off of the Indian state's (imaginably fat) tits - Chomsky mentions somewhere how post-modernism (the new religion in the humanities), rids a population of desperately needed leaders.
Others: No India is not going to beat China economically, nor will Africa. The former will probably produce enough clones and ship them your way for cheap (profit!); the latter will continue in ignominy as its land gets stolen from underneath.
(Update: Here come the downvotes!)