This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
On The Studied Irrelevance of Indian Schools
A note: this essay began its life as a reply to the wider discussion about Freddie deBoer and his god-awful takes on disciplinary standards inside schools downthread. I followed the link, encountered the paywall at speed. My prose went completely off track, sprawled out of control, and I've given it standalone status.
I would be more upset about all this if I believed my future kids stood to benefit from schooling. I cannot rule that out entirely, but I do not intend to start a college fund on their behalf unless the next five to ten years deviate sharply from my expectations. That isn't the same thing as not saving money on their behalf, which I absolutely do. Remember, money is fungible, and can be exchanged for goods and services.
I do not live in the States either, though some of these concerns map onto the British system, as dim as my understanding of that system happens to be.
My experience with the Indian education system, which I have more familiarity with than I would have wished, has left me with what I'd call a hot-take if most people back home wouldn't tacitly or vocally agree with me.
Bluntly: the schools you attend before college did not really matter. A prestigious name-brand private school could be expected to give you a marginally better education, but most parents who choose them are buying prestige and peer composition. The middle class and above does not send its kids to a government-run school if they can help it. The students at government schools are not particularly awful or ill-behaved, and we don't have the disciplinary problems Western schools deal with. Government schools are grossly under-resourced, and they serve a population whose parents cannot afford the parallel education system. Your kids would come out of it with an inferior social network, worse English, and a sense of shame. It's almost unheard of to pick one if you can afford better, even if that accordance requires severe tightening of physical or financial belts.
Why? The real answer is that nobody expects the teachers to actually teach you much in class. Including the teachers themselves. I am being serious about that. Even the best teachers at the prestigious school I attended knew, with the placid certainty of a thermodynamic law, that their star pupils and everyone else would be attending private coaching sessions outside school hours.
That's what you have to understand to make sense of anything that follows. School is the credentialing and networking layer. Coaching is the education layer. The two have been functionally decoupled for decades, and the entirety of Indian society organizes itself around the assumption.
You want numbers? I've got numbers. India's private coaching industry was about Rs 58,000 crore (about $7 billion) in revenue as of 2022, with projections to hit Rs 1.3 lakh crore (about $16 billion) by 2028. That's a parallel education system roughly the scale of a respectable national economy. In a country with around 250 million students in K-12, comprising almost 25% of the world's school-going children, that represents a lot of household income diverted from other purposes. Somewhere in the ballpark of 7.5 million students are enrolled in formal coaching at any given moment, with Kota alone drawing more than 200,000 annually.
The terminus, the thing all this preparation is for, is a small handful of murderously selective exams. 1.4 million students sit JEE Main each year for entrance to engineering colleges, of whom roughly 250,000 qualify for JEE Advanced, of whom around 17,000 actually get into one of the 23 Indian Institutes of Technology. The Computer Science seats at IIT Bombay close out around rank 60-70 in the country. Roughly one in a hundred thousand students gets a CSE seat at IIT Bombay. NEET, the medical-school entrance, runs on comparable arithmetic: over 2.3 million students sit the test annually for around 110,000 MBBS seats, of which fewer than 60,000 are at the more affordable government colleges. Harvard's acceptance rates are only slightly lower than the odds of getting any medical seats in India.
This is what your kid is competing for, and this is why your kid is in coaching from age fourteen, or twelve, or ten, or, occasionally, five.
I have my own theory about why parental coaching enrollment ages keep dropping. It's not a particularly original one, since it reduces to the logic of any arms race. If the median competitor starts at twelve, the marginal advantage of starting at ten is large. Once enough people start at ten, the advantage shifts to eight. There is no obvious floor, until we've reached toddlers still crawling there. ThePrint recently profiled a five-year-old in Jaipur who attends two hours of tuition after a five-hour school day, carrying eleven books in his bag. His mother has already decided he will be a doctor. He might struggle to count to thirty. I strongly suspect that we won't be recruiting doctors by the time he turns twenty.
Back to the school itself. Why don't the teachers care?
Several reasons, layered on top of each other, mutually reinforcing.
The first is selection. A physics or biology teacher actually good at teaching physics or biology can run their own coaching center. This pays better by a significant multiple and selects for higher-functioning students who actually want to learn. The teachers who stay in regular schools are typically the ones who cannot, or will not, make that jump. A few of my schoolteachers moonlighted as coaches on weekends, and the fact that they could not sustain it full-time tells you where they stood in the talent pyramid. The very best teachers I encountered were either independent coaches or worked at the apex coaching institutes.
The second reason is incentive. Schoolteachers are paid the same whether their students learn or do not. A coaching center operates on something closer to a results-based payoff structure. Parents pay a coaching center for performance on entrance exams, and they will pull their kid out and switch institutes if results are bad. It's much harder for the school to lose your tuition this way, because admission to a desirable school is itself a scarce good. Parents pay for the brand and for the peers. They do not pay for instruction. They pay out the nose for that elsewhere.
The third reason is information. Everyone in the system knows everyone else knows. The teachers know the students are getting taught elsewhere. The students know the teachers know. The parents know everyone knows. School ends up being an attendance requirement, a social environment, and a credentialing function. Nobody with their a functional frontal lobe mistakes it for the place where the learning happens.
Imagine this scenario: you're an Indian parent, and dear Ramesh (I had to pick a maximally stereotypical name, because my skin color allows me to get away with it) can't solve the Riemann hypothesis. He can't even prove the transcendental nature of pi! You accost his school teacher, and harangue him on the deficiency of his didactic approach. He is genuinely shocked. “But madam, I gave him the homework exercises. I told him it'll come on the test. I scribbled hastily on the blackboard and rapped knuckles, including his. I made sure nobody was snoring in class, or using their phone. What more can you expect of me?” You deflate, and feel suitably chagrined. You are overcome with shame, you grab Ramesh by the wrist and drag him off to whatever sprawling network of coaching centers is in vogue today. I haven't quite kept up.
The end result is a level of self-aware double-bookkeeping that I do not think most Western observers fully grasp. When you ask an Indian student "did you learn this in school?" they will laugh, albeit internally. The real answer is that they learned it in their evening coaching, with a private tutor, or by self-studying their books.
The coaching layer functioned as its own form of tracking. The smarter, harder-working students would study on their own or get more intensive and dedicated tutoring. The smart but constitutionally lazy ones, like me, attended too, probably with worse results. My ADHD was at the time unacknowledged and unmedicated, which I now realize accounts for considerably more of my misery than I appreciated at the time. Lucky for me, my parents ensured I had 1:1 private tutoring for most subjects for most of my life. It's hard(er) to daydream or procrastinate when someone is watching you like a hawk for two consecutive hours. Thanks, mom and dad? I suppose it worked.
There was also more explicit tracking, which I expect that American educators would find appalling. The duller kids got diverted into the humanities by 8th or 10th grade. Kids from mercantile backgrounds who wanted to stay in the family business opted into commerce. The would-be engineers, doctors, and professionals took the science track, with some discretion over whether to include biology, programming, and so on. Maths, physics, and chemistry were core and immutable. English literature and a native language rounded things out. I'd like to claim I did History and Geography until 12th grade, but it has been long enough that I genuinely cannot remember. On reflection, the answer is probably yes.
I have younger cousins, and I vicariously observed a rather interesting trend through them. An increasing fraction of Indian parents have recalibrated on the importance of sending their kids to the “best” schools, or at least have decided that the return on investment isn't worth it. So it went with them. They moved, around 10th grade, to a “worse” school. Why? Because that institute had subtly advertised that it did not give a hoot about in-person attendance metrics or regular grades. The understanding was that the students enrolled only as a legal formality, they were expected, even encouraged to not show up to class and instead spend that time studying on their own or attending private coaching. A remarkable innovation, really. I wish it had been around in my time. I'm surprised it took so long to show up, that's what every incentive leant towards.
After high school: well, bud, better give the college entrance exams your best shot. Your future hinges on them. For the sufficiently wealthy, paying out to put your kid in a private institution was an option, though it came with a degree of stigma. Everyone knew that the kid who got into a government-run engineering college like an IIT had more intellectual horsepower than the best private alternatives. I will set aside the affirmative action issue, partly because I do not want this essay to be about that, and partly because anything I say about it will infuriate someone. Same went for medical schools, law schools, business schools, the entire prestige hierarchy. Government meritocratic top-tier sat at the apex, followed by a long tail of private institutions of variable quality, some genuinely excellent and some basically diploma factories.
The dimmer kids? Too bad. Barring their parents, nobody expected much of them. Did they learn anything in class? Who cares. Did they learn anything from the extra coaching? If the answer was no, that was on them.
I should admit I do not have great visibility into what happens to the genuinely subpar in academic terms. Even the dullest tools in my school shed came from reasonable wealth. They probably had a sinecure waiting for them in a family business, a comfortable middle-management slot somewhere, or some equivalent arrangement. The default outcome for those not quite so lucky is probably a dead-end job and a long slog. You cannot expect better from a poorer nation. They manage. They have to, because there are hundreds of millions of them.
Disciplinary measures were far stricter than in the West. Expulsion for unruly behavior was a rare but real possibility. If you were a bad student, you had better be a well-behaved one while lessons were happening. I’m just about old enough to remember going from corporal punishment being the norm to mostly frowned upon. Mostly. The legality of it was never the primary concern for anyone involved, including the parents who knew it was happening and either silently approved or tolerated it as the cost of having their kid in a serious institution.
Reading the Freddie deBoer discourse from a distance, I am consumed with cynicism, mostly because I perceive it as charitably misplaced idealism. The Western debate around discipline often proceeds as though the alternatives are "strict enforcement with consequences" versus "permissive chaos," and we are arguing about which moral failure to commit. After serving time inside the Indian system, I observed that strict discipline turns out to be the easy part. It isn't hard to produce a quiet, orderly classroom through any number of methods, some humane and some less so. The hard question is what happens inside that quiet, orderly classroom. The answer in India is: surprisingly little, by design, or by tacit acceptance.
Do I think this is a good thing, something to advocate for? Oh god no. I find it depressing. I'd like to claim that better schooling inside the schools would help, but surely you've understood that this is another Red Queen race right? You run as fast as you can just to stay in place, and making everyone faster doesn't change the composition of those making a podium finish.
Kota, the city in Rajasthan that has long been India's largest coaching hub, makes the Indian news with depressing regularity because of student suicide. A handful a month, from memory. There would be more, if they weren't incredibly strict about preventing them. If you imagine they achieve this by improving living standards or reducing the load? There's no hope for a quokka like you. They just make it harder to kill yourself, including through the kind of anti-suicide measures usually seen only in in-patient psychiatric wards, combined with draconian surveillance. The students are teenagers, sent away from home to live in hostels and crammers, with the expectation that they will spend two years of their lives doing nothing but preparing for one exam. Most of them will fail. A small number will pass and go on to lives of unevenly distributed satisfaction. The wager their parents made on them, financial and emotional, will turn out to have been a bad one in the median case. They were never going to be in the top one percent. Almost nobody is. The maths doesn't math.
If I had to place this in wider context: imagine something halfway between the laissez-faire approach of the West and the all-consuming grind of East Asia. Thankfully it was not quite that bad. I am not fond of the system at all. It almost chewed me up and didn't quite spit me out again, and the only affirmative defense I can make of it is that the chewing has not stopped since I left, despite my having moved far, far away. It is just not as bad as it could be, which I say while noting that explaining why sacrifices were made to Moloch is a different exercise from condoning the practice or wishing it to perpetuate into the future. We burn our children to prepare them for the flames ahead. The fires do not really cool off once you are out the other side. The forms of suffering reorganize themselves around your changing life circumstances, and that is roughly the most many of us can hope for.
What I can say is that I had some slack. I had opportunities to be a child rather than meat slurry waiting to be packed into a mold. The front-loading of suffering arguably bought me optionality for the future, though I am no longer fully confident this is true. Well, it's the thought that counts.
As someone who was on the local equivalent of a pre-med track, I might have spent between two and four hours after a full school day with private tutors, but the real pressure ramped only up after 10th grade. I can't blame my parents for that either. They weren't tigers. They were on the slightly upper end of strict by upper-middle-class Indian standards, largely because they had gone through the whole ordeal themselves and knew the value of higher education in a country where higher education is the one ticket out of a great many situations. I would do the same with my kids if I had to. I do not expect to have to. If I have kids, I hope they grow up somewhere the pressure is not nearly as bad.
Then again, it is hardly that much better in the West. An aspiring American doctor better start working on extracurriculars well before finishing high school. In the US, even more years of their limited life get spent in pre-med coursework, after which they apply to medical schools that admit a small fraction of applicants and that publicly weight non-academic considerations heavily. All you have done is trade the legible, harder-to-fake signal of excellent grades for excellent grades plus sob stories about digging wells in Africa, plus the presidency of the Underwater Basket Weaving Society, with an added interest in supporting weavers from under-represented minorities, which should help look past the uncomfortable fact that you yourself are not an under-represented minority.
The Indian system is more legible and crueler about it; the American system is less legible and crueler about hiding it. I'd have to be a touch daft to claim that the former is superior to the latter, I know which one I'd choose for my kids, warts and all.
It could be worse! South Korea has roughly 75% of students enrolled in around 100,000 cram schools nationwide, and Japan has over 65% of ninth-graders attending juku. India's coaching enrollment is enormous in absolute terms but smaller as a share of total students, largely because most Indian families simply can't afford the fees. Our middle class might out mass the entirety of the United States (albeit not in a literal weighing setup; gotta wait for the Ozempic to kick in to make that a fair fight), but there are a lot of poor people here. They never had a chance.
There are games where the winning move is not to play. Those Indians should consider themselves lucky that they can't afford to play them, at such a scale. Somehow, I doubt they'd feel comforted if I were to tell them that. In fact, I strongly suspect that they'd get angry at me.
At the end of the day, schools (or education in general) are a selection device for a tiny number of slots in professions that pay disproportionately well in societies where most professions do not pay nearly as well. As long as those differentials hold, you can expect parents to pour everything they have into making sure their kids end up on the right side of the divide.
Good thing all of it is about to be moot anyway. I am writing this in 2026, after all, and you know what I expect of the near future. I will not belabor the point. Anyone reading this knows what I am referring to. If you don't, well, you have other things to worry about than your kid's MCAT score, and this essay is not the place to acquaint you with them.
God. It sucks to grow up and realize that your parents, despite their flaws, loved you and wanted what was best for you. That the pressure they put you through, or the pain they expected you to endure, was for your own good. Positive expected value, at minimum.
It would be easy to rail at my parents. I have, on bad days, indulged the temptation. I would have done the same in their shoes, however, and I would have hoped my kids forgave me for it later. The forgiveness comes easy now, long after I have passed the stage of needing my parents to shove me out of the nest, and discovered the entirely different qualia of suffering that is charting your own path while holding yourself accountable. I am told that some people find this easy. Good for them. I will settle for prescription stimulants and a regularly-examined internalization of parental expectations, which turn out to be remarkably portable and follow me wherever I go, whether I want them to or not.
I do not much like that fraud, Freud, but this is classic super-ego stuff. Where’s my suspiciously penis-shaped cigar? I could use a smoke after letting all of that out. Or, given the times, at least a good puff on a vape.
All reading about all this dysfunction does is make me wonder why anyone participates at all. Where is the Indian Bill Gates or Steve Jobs who sees money on the table, drops out, and changes the world?
But that just takes us right back to the big obvious question. If India has so many great engineers, doctors, scientist, etc, why can't they achieve great things in India? Why do they need to come here with all the externalities they bring with them?
What you are describing is not an education system, it's a system for fleeing the country and/or other Indians. Because for whatever reason, nothing can be achieved in India. So everyone with any sense at all has one goal, get out by any means necessary. The rest will sort itself out later.
25 years ago we were saying this about China and laughing at their shitty plastic exported toys. It's entirely possible that 30 years from now, your children will be sitting in your chair bitching about our industries being hollowed out by Indian companies.
It is possible though India's issues are kinda different from Japan/China in that it's not like there's been a massive war or communist effort that's rendered them a big laggard to the rest of the world. There's been no reason of that caliber why India cannot compete previously. They've been permeable to outside investment, they're not recovering from being razed to the ground and there are parts of India that are perfectly functional/developed already.
Losing the war and being occupied by the allies was probably the best thing that could have happened to Japan's economy, as opposed to dragging them down.
The American occupation broke the Japanese military-industrial complex and forced them into exports and free markets, funneled them large sums of capital via Korean war procurement, American market access and technology transfers, and extended Japan the American security umbrella. The Japanese economic miracle wouldn't have been possible without losing the war and getting dragged into a modern economy by force.
While they never went full communist like China, there's a good argument that India could be decades ahead of where they are now without Nehru and Gandhi fucking around with poorly implemented socialism. The over-emphasis on heavy industry, licensing and central planning, failing to implement any real land reforms, and essentially being closed off to trade prior to 1991 were practically the completely opposite conditions as to what made the four Asian tigers so successful.
While I agree that India has different issues to East Asia, having a 50 year disadvantage on Japan and a 10 year disadvantage on China in liberalization did them no favors either.
I mean Japan had already had an economic miracle to get to the point of being strong enough to even engage in their expansionary activity. The close relationship with the USA helped put the afterburners on it, but there was clearly a capability to modernize there already.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
People forget there was a time Japan had the same reputation for producing junk. Nowadays look what they’re known for. They learned from their experiences overtime. It’s possible China may do the same.
The East Asian racism was always from lower class whites, who were angry at them merely because of labour competition. The smart people have been predicting the ascent of East Asia and the possible surpassing of the West almost since first post-Renaissance contact.
India, on the other hand... the early Western explorers were like "They literally just stand there in the parade and let themselves get trampled by elephants. What the hell lmao"
There was and still is resentment toward East Asians among upper class whites, for providing a robust source of competition in knowledge work and the education credentialist system, and/or making more fashionable minority groups like blacks look bad.
More options
Context Copy link
The ascendancy of East Asia was a problem with the timeline, not the above ground factual observations people were making of them, Japan developed after WW2. Yeah, they didn’t overtake the US as everyone was prophesying with the “yenification” of the world economy back in the 70’s-90’s. China has also “ascended today,” whether that translates into a “triumph” over the west remains to be seen. Kishore Mahbubani is probably the most eminent scholar to date that makes this case but he’s been heavily assailed too.
The west doesn’t see India as a particular threat except maybe insofar as they have competing economic interests, although why the US aids Pakistan against India isn’t something I know about in great detail, except only to say we see it in our strategic interests.
US aids Pakistan because Pakistan surrendered oversight of CIA activities in the Hindu Kush listening posts entirely in exchange for having its own free hand to do its own dastardly shit, and from there the Pakistanis leveraged their place as 'useful assholes' for many players globally, a role India never managed because India saw itself too important to aid foreigners at all and so was bypassed by major powers. The Pakistanis asked for US help and offered something in return, India always said it could chart its own course while begging for aid whenever shit hit the fan (request for US carriers in 1962 war, request for USSR submarine support against the US carrier group in 1971, requests for SU30 technology transfers, requests for IMF bailouts, requests for waiver for purchasing Russian/Iranian oil, etc etc etc)
Kishores own reputation within the international commentariat is a byproduct of market demand for a non-Chinese articulate ostensibly neutral heavyweight that isn't bogged down by domestic political considerations polluting the discussion: Kishores commentary and analysis is hardly more breathtaking than informed western China observers that seem similarly dispassionate about capability convergence inevitability like basically the entire US Chamber of Commerce circa 1998-2013, or Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Nye if you want to be intellectual about things.
However, Kishores own media ascendancy is also a byproduct of a deliberate internal tension within the Singapore foreign policy establishment where a pro-US advocate is always raised up at the same pace as an anti-US advocate, and the two actually switch positions depending on the needs of the moment. Kishores antithesis is Kausikan Bilahari, who himself enjoys some time on the media circuits when a counter to the China ascendancy is also sought. You can see the same pattern in others, there is also Chan Heng Chee and Tommy Koh, but that gets too deep into the weeds of Singapores arcane adversarial-cooption civil service modality.
Also, and lets be fucking frank here, Kishores pro-China anti-US sentiment comes from what looks like a fairly obvious chip on his shoulder. His first book was 'Can Asians Think', a direct rejoinder to a presumed racial contempt that supposedly existed in the western policy establishment which denigrated asian (specifically southeast Asian (singapore) at time of writing, but later extended to China and the subcontinent) intellectual ability and execution capacity. Thing is, even at that time of writing the US policy establishment and broadly the west as a whole recognized asian capability and its necessity to be actively managed. Kishores voluminious presence on the media circuit is downstream of what looks like obvious status reassertion, and that there is an especially receptive audience because US domestic political considerations make people cast about for an ostensible 'neutral' just happens to direct that gravy train straight to Kishores lap.
Huh. Thanks for the analysis on that one.
Kishore’s analysis seemed too idealistic and off the beaten path to me. I’ve read his books but he seems to constantly pull out the wrong tools and metrics of analysis to bear on the discussion. You could see it also on Samir Saran’s face whenever Kishore got the mike and seemed to be droning on. His “Civilizationalism” doesn’t seem to be an analytically powerful concept to apply in strategic circles. Insofar as he contributes to the influencing the discussion, he’s worth taking seriously.
I’m curious to know what your background is if you don’t mind sharing. You seem pretty knowledgeable about this topic.
Kishore is definitely smart, dont let my conveyed irritation at his playing the pop geopolitics circuit distract from the strength of his simplistic reductive concepts. If anything Kishore is an aberration to the Singaporean institutional resistance to highfalutin grand theory, their operational modality is see the world as it is not as you wish it to be and maintain internal red teaming to avoid blinkers.
My own experience is unimportant. On the internet I could be Kishores disciple or a disgruntled taxi driver or anything in between, what matters is verifiability. Kishores own books give the necessary info and in the professional sphere if you encounter a single Singaporean in any eliteish profession like finance or tech anywhere globally you're two kevin bacons away from knowing someone with deep insider knowledge of the Singaporean civil service operational modalities which really aren't that opaque anyways. That contact could be any one of us. It could be you! It could be me! It could even be - ok its me I know these dudes directly.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Personally I think it's likely that China will continue to produce a lot of junk, even as the top-line quality of their manufactures grows. (Basically, this has already happened.) It's possible to find some of the highest quality goods in the world in Guangzhou and Shanghai. But if I were a random manufacturing company in Europe looking to source parts I would not trust a random Chinese factory. I suppose given time the free market would correct this, but I think China also provides some unique qualities that could allow them to keep making junk for a long time.
No doubt they will, but they’ve definitely improved in some areas. If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur in the west it makes economic sense to contact a Chinese outfit and get them to prototype a product you’ve designed. Plenty of people do it at low cost and reliably but you can also fall into traps. Word is that Vietnam is trying to make itself look very attractive to western companies by upholding their intellectual property and patent laws, and is undercutting even China as a lower cost destination for business to flourish. Not saying I’d easily trust them either, but provided you do your vetting, it makes business sense.
“Guanxi” (i.e. “connections”) is a huge concept in China and defines a lot of the activity about the way the manufacturing sector operates. Western companies are somewhat afraid to dip their toe in the water there (not that I blame them) for fear of getting burned by linking up with a bad partner. Last I read though is that’s beginning to change.
This is always proffered as a trait of Chinese culture but I'm skeptical. Connections in this respect are a feature of business everywhere, at all times. The societies that have minimized connections are all WEIRD (Haidt).
I think that "Guanxi" satisfies some deep Chinese need for everything to be catalogued and systematized. They like reifying things. It's not just who you know, it's Guanxi. It's not just networking, it's Guanxi. Likewise their penchant for Lists (Four Great Novels, The Three Principles of the People, The One Hundred Years of Humiliation, etc.). And it's fine if you can observe that it's better to win than to lose, but it helps if you can find the relevant quotation from the Art of War from Master Sun.
That’s true. I think what they mean though is that it’s often a substitute mechanism for doing business in places where institutional controls are weak or non-existent. One mistake people often make in doing business in Russia for instance is they grossly underestimate the role that informal patronage networks play in power dynamics. That isn’t just a problem in doing business there in 2026. It was one thing historians of WW2 pointed out in Hitler’s massive miscalculation to invade the Soviet Union:
“All we have to do is kick the door in and the whole rotten structure will come tumbling down.”
The exact opposite of that happened and people ran into the arms of “Papa” Stalin, even as he was brutally oppressing them. Look at China throughout the ages as you just did but with a bit of an adjustment. The Tang Dynasty was established by the Li family, which came from a military aristocracy in the northwest of China, and it was ruled from there on out by noble families (guanxi and patronage networks). In the west we neither have a history nor a system like that. If you want you could say “merit” and social recognition in a basic sense play a role and sometimes even a strong role, but it’s not like it is in the rest of the world.
I find this incredibly difficult to take seriously. Medieval and Renaissance Europe was full of patronage networks, as was Rome (and its client states), and the Sui-Tang period is precisely the point in history where China develops the institution of meritocratic examinations for the civil service. If anything, you would expect the reverse.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The difference is that the Indian government isn’t powerful enough to make the decisions the Chinese government has either made or didn’t need to (because communism effectively reset property rules and forcibly collectivized smallholders).
India can’t modernize until it deals with agricultural subsidies and inefficient farming which essentially leave vast sections of rural India under a form of quasi-feudal quasi-socialist economic relations. Even Modi wasn’t powerful enough to slightly change this, revolts forced him to back down when he tried.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Believe it or not, many talented Indians stay back in India because they want to, not because they're forced to. I know medical peers who are simply better doctors than me on every single front, and they're happy living and working in India. That is the norm. Only a minority of doctors, engineers or programmers try to leave, even considering those who have the resources and credentials to leave.
India is not Somalia. It is perfectly possible to have a decent life there.
I won't deign to answer this question. It's beneath me.
Honestly in today's world, as somebody who bailed from a top-tier Western democracy to a 'mid tier' economy, this is a large part of why I find a lot of desperate migration pushes to be silly. If you're capable of getting into the upper-middle class of like 80% of the world's countries you're probably gonna be broadly fine. Urban development has largely plateaued for a decade or two now, especially in the West where the sheer expense of construction and associated red tape means that the nicer parts of the mid-tier countries are on par/better since they can actually develop things (and keep the homeless out). I'm in Malaysia now after leaving Australia, and from what I can see a lot of white collar quality of life outcomes are essentially equal between here and Australia. You might be earning 40% the wages you would in Australia, staying in Malaysia, but large portions of your expenditures (especially housing) are about 30% the price they would be in Australia.
The Malaysian Chinese demographic have historically been prone to emigration since they're filtered hard from University placements inside the country and therefore go overseas to pursue higher education. 20 years ago they were a lot more prone to just staying in the UK/Australia/wherever else they went, but now the perceived gap in quality of life has shrunk immensely. Same for Chinese. And like I have no doubt that the Somalias of the world still exist where every day is suffering and a battle for survival, but also there's a correlation between immigrants from those places and being unlikely to actually contribute to their destination country.
More options
Context Copy link
The answer is that Indians are, for all their many positive traits, not a martial people, and have largely given up on exercising any real control of their domestic underclass. Indian elites live in their pristine multimillion dollar apartments in Mumbai skyscrapers while the street outside (literally right outside) is squalid, covered in garbage and has a random cow or three walking around it - and this really is the state of the most expensive neighborhoods there, it’s not an exaggeration as you probably know. What can you do with that? It’s unclear if it can be fixed. No other major civilization has this issue to the same extent.
India's dysfunction is more about having different lines for what they consider an acceptable levels of grime. If you're a junkie or a homeless person and cross into an area that is off-limits you're getting handled a lot more physically by security than you will be in any Western democracy.
More options
Context Copy link
But enough about San Francisco.
And I'll take the cows over the junkies. I know cows shit a lot, but they'll shit less in public walkways than the junkies do. They're animals but they're not animals.
The San Francisco situation is different. Not only because most of America isn’t like it, and because the truly wealthiest areas of San Francisco have it but less so than eg the tenderloin or whatever, but because we know why San Francisco has its permissive attitude towards the homeless and public squalor. It’s not a mystery. It is, in fact, the core conflict at the heart of the existence of this forum itself. If you ask a progressive San Franciscan elite why they let junkies piss and shit on the street they will tell you. If you ask an Indian elite why they will shrug, maybe mumble something about ‘village people’.
More options
Context Copy link
SF has shitting junkies but India doesn't?
I doubt the Indian ones are drug addicts or that they're allowed to shit anywhere near rich people. Designated vs non-designated, etc.
It's hard to exaggerate the very worst I've seen in San Francisco. Having personally seen human shit on the ground right outside comically expensive condos is too obvious an observation.
Hmm. I'm not entirely sure because I haven't beent here myself, but I have heard things to the tune of India being a land of extreme contrasts and widespread filth even in rich neighborhoods, or very close to them.
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah. Junkies exist but most asian societies are a lot better than current year Western society at atleast moving them out of the nice places. This is facilitated by greater cultural affinity to gated communities and whatnot, but policing is just generally more civic minded
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not a martial people? That term is so poorly defined that I don't know what to with it. It's not like it's that different in Punjab, which is full of Sikhs, who are as martial as it gets.
Nepal? Full of Gurkhas. Similar grime levels.
My schizo theory is that generations of being divided into castes made indians not see themselves as a unified one: "it doesn't matter that those people are shitting on the streets, that in that village they bathe in cow excrement, they are not like me, it doesn't reflect poorly on me that they do. In fact how dare you imply that it does #notallindians".
My understanding is broadly similar. Caste system gives an easy solution to both 'should we help them' and 'why are they like that'. You can easily designate a lower caste an outgroup, their struggles are self-evident proof of their inferiority and it can be treated as natural law of the universe
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You need money. I think you don't realise how much money there is floating around in the US. I'm working on a startup in the UK that has a clear use case, a major client, a solid business model, and industrial trials agreed next month. It's almost impossible to get anyone to fund the ~50k pounds we need for dev work, equipment and support over the trial, let alone the 200k we would need for stability and to take on a few high quality engineers for a year without them/us taking big salary cuts.
The government refuses to fund anything that isn't 100% up and running and used elsewhere. Venture capital is thin and risk-averse; it's focused on specific and very over-saturated sectors, and requires your stuff to be proven and to have a customer already buying from you, by which time you don't need venture capital. Foreign venture capital exists but mostly focuses at home and is more reluctant to invest the more local and less footloose your operations are. Regulation certainly doesn't help, but it's not the main issue.
Who is paying for Indian Bill Gates' equipment, workers and office space? Who is paying for his food? Potentially for his wife and kids?
Aren't second-tier European countries the worst case scenario for this kind of range? You're looking at high cost of living and salary expectations. Indian Bill Gates can get things done on a comparative shoestring (and living in a similarly-cheap country you'd be amazed how often the initial seed capital will just come out of a family member's small-medium business)
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, people say the UK and Europe are generally bad for startups however the US showers even shitty companies with so much cash that I'd treat a random UK company that managed to raise £100k from UK investors as being more promising than a US startup that's been handed $2 million for their idea. Seems like an allocation inefficiency for humanity as a whole with a corresponding deadweight loss that can be avoided if the US VCs were funding the UK companies instead of Juicero v2.5 (now with electrolytes!).
Instead of getting Trump to sign meaningless promises on data center investment in the UK when he visited Starmer would have been much better advised to get him to make promises on forcing American VCs to invest in UK startups that aren't looking to enter the US market in the short to medium term. That would genuinely have been a lot better for the country than yet another mega datacenter when we have some of the highest industrial electricity costs in the world.
The amount of cash shoshing around in the US is obscene, relative to basically anywhere else in the world.
Except you can't force them, and American VCs will expect that any successful startup will move to the USA for reasons (we're the centre of the universe, here is where the money is, you need the Silicon Valley/Wall Street connections, etc.)
More options
Context Copy link
American VCs aren't going to do that, because UK startups that aren't looking to enter the US market in the short to medium term are guaranteed not to make money. Although perhaps it wouldn't be worth fighting with Trump over it if they could do it with pocket change like £200K. Still, Trump knows these are losers as much as UK investors and US investors do, so he's not going to do it.
Yeah, there's nothing stopping American VCs from deciding that the funding a UK start-up wants is chickenfeed and they lose nothing by throwing a few hundred grand their way, except the expectations that your start-up wants to make it big and to do that you need to eventually be US-based.
More options
Context Copy link
The problem in the UK is actually the opposite. We have startups that have working viable products with actual repeat customers and they still have trouble getting funding a lot of the time, especially Series B onwards (Seed funding is better resourced). These companies are usually already making money, they just need further funding to expand their offering which is unfortunately not available here in the UK for various reasons.
I mean this is just broadly where West Europe, Australia and Canada have landed. You're not getting the cost effective quality of life you would in nicer emerging countries and it's a lot harder to set yourself up for home run money outside the USA
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Hasn’t the UK in whole been suffering enormously the last couple of years due to its own self-inflicted policy decisions? It isn’t just a lot of red tape inhibiting new development from taking places but across all sectors there’s a massive national underinvestment in research, infrastructure and basic labor productivity. I’ve heard of the tax system being so punitive over there that it’s choking the fuck out of otherwise ambitious people. I’ve read of cases of doctors getting taxed in excess of 60% for taking on more shifts (there were other qualifying factors as well), but it would kill my motivation too. University graduates are also no longer the golden ticket to success they once were. That’s increasingly having an impact here in the US too.
All of these things are true, but they hit much harder and are more difficult to avoid when there's less money in the system overall.
You said it yourself: the tax system is punitive, and there's massive underinvestment. So either you have to raise taxes to pay for investment, continue to underinvest, borrow to invest, or explain to the pensioners and the disabled that the government is going to significantly reduce the support they receive in order to give the money to posh boys like me so we can become rich(er).
That last has to be followed by looking for your genitalia because the mob has cut them off and nailed them to a tree in Rutland haha.
They could cut the 'import Afghans and house them in hotels secretly with gag orders' budget... Or refrain from giving Mauritius money and land.
There's no shortage of money in the UK, the British government just knowingly allocates it towards bad ends.
Come on, you know it’s not that easy. I have no love for our current government but the Afghans are coming of their own accord.
The options are:
The general public won’t stand for 1 and 2, the left and half the right won’t stand for 3, so we get 4.
——
Edit: the Mauritius stuff really is unforgivably stupid. Stopping it certainly won’t save Britain but spending the 10bn it’s going to cost us on 50m small business investment per year for 20 years would certainly be nice. Doesn’t change the fundamentals though. Britain isn’t poor because the government is wasteful, it’s poor because the alternative is letting people freeze/starve/die of illness while we could save them and choose not to, and we aren’t prepared for that.
No, it's not merely the random Afghans that make their own way that I'm talking about but the ones that the government went out of their way to resettle in the UK, ostensibly because some idiot leaked some data. It was thought the Taliban might do recriminations against Afghans that worked with British forces there. Realistically the Taliban have other concerns.
That's what I'm talking about. I think the UK should have spent those billions on British people, not Afghans.
I'm sorry, then I misunderstood you. I thought you were talking about 'asylum seekers' in general and using Afghans as shorthand.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Turn backs worked extremely well for Australia. And I really doubt that the public would erupt into anger that these poor defenceless 25 year old men were getting sent back to the hellscape that is...France.
Also, the government did literally import Afghans in secret, in addition to letting them come across in small boats.
The turnbacks worked in Australia because they towed the boats out into international waters, and left them with enough fuel to reach only Papua New Guinea. I guess we could technically do the same with France - and would even be up for trying - but the French have a lot more tools to make their displeasure known.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
They're coming "on their own accord" because they know they will be welcomed by the government.
If the general public can tolerate how the rape gangs were being handled, surely they can handle either of these two. At the very least it's worth a try.
What's the logic here? Too expensive?
Also what happened to "send them back directly where they came from. Don't ask any questions, don't bother with process, just send them back"? There's no way a plane ticket costs more than these hotels.
Violation of their human rights to be sent to a potentially unsafe country. For some any country bad enough to deter people from showing up and making asylum claims is too bad to send potential refugees to. Rwanda is either too bad or too expensive for not being bad enough.
The home countries may not want to receive them back, assuming they didn't burn all identifying documents. Which they do.
More options
Context Copy link
Broadly my model is that 95% of the Labour party and 35% of the Tory party don't want restrictions on 'refugees' no matter what, so they're a dead loss. 3 is therefore viable but very difficult to get through Parliament in its current configuration.
The public does want something done, but balks if it's visibly violent or leads to deaths. So 1 and 2 are out.
is difficult practically. There are three questions: how do you get them on the planes, how do you make the planes carry them, and how do you make the destination let the planes land / take them off the planes?
Mostly the relevant countries don't want these people back and / or it would be unpopular to be seen to take them back. So dedicated transports are unlikely to be permitted to land. For weaker countries you could always start landing unapproved somewhere, but that is difficult and expensive and technically an act of war. If you can't do that, you could put them on passenger jets, but that's expensive and you need a minder to supervise them and passengers / airlines are likely to protest or grandstand.
Not saying it's impossible with enough will, but it's not straightforward. By and large it doesn't beat the Rwanda plan.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, and that's the problem I was alluding to. Because these policies failures compound among one another. I can’t imagine immigration is helping this along either, unless you’re relying on them as a permanent underclass to finance your way out of crises. Good luck resolving that problem. There’s even been an exodus of people out here where I am in the US, moving into other states that are less socially and economically hampered by bad policy.
Agree on all counts. My initial post was more responding to @WhiningCoil by explaining a little bit of why sometimes systemic context means that Indian Bill Gates can't drop out of his obviously pointless schooling and start achieving great things. A lot of things have to go right in your country before 'drop out of school, change the world' becomes an option even for the best of us. In a landed aristocracy things are different - you gate your geniuses by accident of birth but those of them who are lucky get the resources to do something useful with their time.
Unless his suggestion is that Indian geniuses should drop out of school and apply immediately for emigration since that is their ultimate goal anyway, but AFAIK visas are gated on credentials not IQ so that doesn't work.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link