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There's a lot of hype surrounding India. The US clearly wants to boost the country to provide a Western-oriented alternative to China. No other country has the scale comparable to China and India's demographics are much better (26 million births compared to China's 10). The Indian diaspora is very successful in the US and largely pro-American and anti-China. So what's not to like here?
To India boosters like Noah Smith, there's pretty much nothing to be skeptical of. He sees the emergence of an Indo-US alliance in all but name as a necessity.
For this alignment to make sense, India must actually become a real alternative to China. Is this plausible?
First, India's economic structure is dominated by services and elite services at that (IT exports). Its manufacturing sector has been very weak. Modi tried to change this with his 2014 "Make in India" campaign. We've now gone almost a full decade since then and there's basically been zero movement on this issue. India boosters will claim that this is simply because decoupling never really got serious until now. But the problem with this line of argument is that the rhetoric is changing. Even Raytheon's CEO is claiming decoupling is impossible; the new watchword is "de-risking" which is a tacit admission that China's integration into the world's supply chains is far greater than the Former Soviet Union ever was, which is why the analogies to the Cold War are often misleading at best.
Second, a key part of China'a ascent was built on skilled, but cheap labour. Economists often overstate the importance of labour costs. What matters is productivity. Labour costs can increase as long as productivity increases faster: this is what drives long-term growth.
Nobody is denying that India has cheap labour, but is it skilled? Moving past the rarefied IT, pharma and finance sectors that dominate India's services, we find a much bleaker landscape.
50% of Indian kids are functionally illiterate. Female literacy has actually worsened over time. Though this is partly a function of the school system taking in far more kids than before. Yet Vietnam and Indonesia did the same yet did not notice such a fall. Finally, there's no improvement over the past decade.
We can argue over whether education matters much for simple manufacturing. Economists like the heterodox Ha-Joon Chang of South Korean descent has argued that it really doesn't. Perhaps this was true when SK, JP, TW and other East Asian "tigers" took off in the 1960s. Today, everything is far more digital, even relatively simple manufacturing. Workers need to read basic instructions and should at least be able to operate basic machinery, which in turn requires them to read and operate screens. Being unable to read a simple sentence immediately disqualified half the Indian workforce.
If India were to really become a fully fledged alternative to China, then it means that it would need to scale the value-added ladder the way China has. It can't just produce toys or textiles. It would have to create a fully industrial ecosystem covering the greatest sophistication. Simply put, does India has the human capital base to pull that off? The data seems to draw us to a stark conclusion: not really.
Poverty cannot be an explanation either. Vietnam had a similar per capita GDP to what India has now in the mid-2010s. Yet it did very well in international tests and it has continued to draw in a great number of manufacturing projects in a way that India has been unable to. Some of this may be related to government: Vietnam is a one-party dictatorship like China and can bulldoze through various projects of importance. But a more important explanation is simply that Vietnam has the same combination that China had a generation ago: skilled labour but at cheap rates.
In short, if American elites are now betting big on India supplanting China - or at least becoming a real viable alternative - for manufacturing then it is very likely that they will become disappointed. By the same logic, any talk of decoupling (or "de-risking") is likely to run into the hard wall that the alternatives are either too small (Vietnam) or not up to par (India).
On a sociological note, we should acknowledge that discussions on India are colored by their diaspora in the West, primarily in Anglo countries. This group are an incredibly elite selection, particularly in the US. They come from highly privileged homes with house maids and a cultural aversion to manual labour, and by extension manufacturing. It can hardly be surprising that India was ground zero for fantasies that developing countries can "leap frog" manufacturing into prosperity, despite there being virtually no examples of this in world history (barring petrostates, financial êntrepots like Singapore etc).
I've hoped to convince you of becoming more realistic about India's prospects, even if I support a move to diversify away from China for obvious geopolitical reasons. India's own potential can be hotly debated. Certainly their smart fraction is highly capable and we know that smart fractions are important for driving prosperity. The question before us is if India's much less capable "middle" will prevent it from rapid convergence once the easy gains from growth are gone. East Asia managed to educate the broad masses to fairly decent levels whereas India clearly has not. Should we really expect them to emulate East Asia given these sharp differences? As things stand, the West's current policy completely ignores this question.
Let’s look at this thru a lens of being a consultant if say I was advising the WH on the viability of the plan.
Are Indians actually smart? I honestly don’t know. We get higher caste Indians here and heavily filtered from a giant population. If they are then one can probably make an assumption India could replace China. I have some doubts here because India has always been the “next big thing” for perhaps even centuries and it never happens. Sort of feels like a better Africa. They were never the leader or a great power of civilization like China has often been.
The de-risking from China is likely accurate. It’s too smart of a country not to make many economic and technological gains. I’ve bought into a lot of Galeevs rhetoric but it does appear Russia has never been a real great power and all of their Soviet tech was mostly imported from the west. They existed as a feudal state for military protection thru their entire history. Perhaps the Russians could have been a great power but the military threat was always too much which kept them limited to resource extraction and military. China is obviously pass that stage.
Probably a good ally. But I would never expect them to take the next step and be more because it’s never worked before.
I've had... bizarre experience with Indian's professionally. Every Indian coder, support staff, offshore worker, project manager, etc I've ever worked with over 20 years, had this peculiar mode of communications failure. It's hard to even describe. On my end it looked like some part of their cognition was just broken. Like they'd make all the right mouth sounds that they understood certain questions, comments and directives, and then proceed to perform tasks or give answers that were totally detached from any context we were operating under. It's how I imagine p-zombies would behave. It actually reminds me of trying to get ChatGPT to understand my point, and it just failing to over and over again. Because ChatGPT doesn't think, or really comprehend anything at all. It's just a statistical model of what words come after what other words.
Like, one time I was having a conversation with the Indian project manager we were subcontracted to. There were three requirements on the project, that when taken all together, only a subset of 2 could be satisfied. And trying to have this conversation with the PM just went round and round in circles. I explained that I implement requirement 1 and 2, then requirement 3 cannot be satisfied. They'd come back to just do 3. I'd return that if I implement requirement 3, requirement 1 cannot be satisfied. They'd come back and insist I implement requirement 1. I'd explain if I implemented requirement 1 and 3, requirement 2 could not be satisfied. We went round and round and round like this, with me giving detailed technical and logical reasons why these requirements in aggregate created a paradox, or a double bind. After two weeks of beating my head against a wall, they handed me off to a non-Indian and we had the issue sorted in 5 minutes as he immediately understood what I was pointing out.
This person was a project manager.
I've had far worse experiences with lower level Indians I've had to work with. Simple instructions like "DO NOT RESTART THE SERVER" just get flatly ignored routinely. Like, I tell the guy, to his face, looking directly into his lazy eye not to do it. He proceeds to do exactly that 5 minutes later.
So, I just donno. I hate to generalize. Generally I'm not a fan of "different forms of intelligence" discussions. But my every professional interaction with an Indian, at all levels of an organization, have been frustrated by them seeming to just not ever grok anything I tried to explain to them. Conversational knowledge just refused to penetrate their skull in any meaningful way. I simply cannot account for it. I've had people tell me it has to do with their culture, and never ever under any circumstances admitting they don't understand, or don't know something. I guess I can't rule it out.
That matches pretty well with my experience. At my current job ~90% of my coworkers are Indian, most of them offshore. The ones good enough to get to the US are noticably better, but not by much. I look like a miracle worker to them with some really simple, CS101 tier crap.
Real (but slightly simplified) conversation a few weeks ago:
Them: "The API client library you wrote only takes a single instance of this object, could you change it to take an array/list/whatever?"
Me: "Well the third party API only takes a single instance at a time so I can't change it directly, but I can add a method to the library that takes a list and loops over it while sending it to the API."
Them: "That would be great, how long would it take you to implement that change? We have a project that's going to use your library starting in a month and need it reasy by then."
Me: "I can have it done in... 5 minutes?"
Them: "Really? That's amazing, how can you do it so quick?"
Maybe ChatGPT will replace more jobs than I thought.
I've long though ChatGPT would replace offshore work. Or at least executives would give it a try. They'd probably still discover that everything it ever does is wrong, just like offshore workers. But they'll give it the old college try for a decade or two.
And the poor bastard who has to oversee the quality of work it produces will be driven just as mad by ChatGPT pretending it understands the request and returning nonsense, as he was by the offshore workers who did the same. If anything it will be worse, since ChatGPT will return results instantly, and the Indians take a week or two. He will have zero reprieve from the stupidity. Just complete idiocy, in his face, all the time, that he must fruitlessly attempt to wring productivity out of.
Maybe with instant results he could iterate over the stupidity faster and figure out what approach works, so,...
Anyway - apart from the weird hype, I saw a lot of reasonable coders saying chatGPT increased their efficiency at making stuff that works by a factor of 3-5x over doing things the old fashioned way (reading a lot of stackexchange).
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>making the right facial expressions and mouth sounds to get coworkers to go away
>half or quarter-assing a task until it solves itself or becomes someone else's problem
Indians be just like me, fr fr.
(I wish, it sounds like I'm far more virgin and less Chad when it comes to work than your [former?] Indian co-workers).
Part of it might be that Indians are disproportionately and stereotypically in functions like IT or IT-adjacent, where both the perceived upside (bonuses, promotions) and downside (getting fired) could be limited, and there is high perceived ease of finding a similar role if fired (hence the meme of IT-workers working multiple remote roles simultaneously). As opposed to roles such as investment banking, where it's relatively easy to get let go or "subtly" pushed out, bonuses are a large chunk of your compensation, and finding a replacement role can be difficult (even at a lesser firm, or a "lesser" job function like corporate strategy/finance/development where you would even need to mingle with normie corporate plebeians).
It's like perpetual quiet quitting. Such effort efficient Indians could even view their counterpart Americans (or Westerners in general) as naive try-hards who feel intrinsically motivated to kindly revert and do the needful without any external incentive to do so.
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At Facebook I once wrote a diagnostic for a piece of hardware that was causing trouble for my team. The folks who qualify hardware wanted to integrate it into their qualification process to guard against hardware with this particular fault from getting deployed again. It was a Python script with well defined args discoverable via
--help.This is was my first and only interaction with a contractor. The guy was Indian, and it was mind-blowing. After three meetings of explaining that he just needs to run the script and collect output via whatever mechanism qualification already uses, I gave up. I couldn't have simplified the task anymore without just doing it for him.
At one point he just copied and pasted my script, with no modifications and nothing to invoke it, and put me on as a reviewer.
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I've had similar experiences managing a remote team in India and it sapped my will to live. They'd tell me a task was complete and then when I reviewed it it was obviously broken in a way I had specifically told them to avoid. If they ran into a problem they'd sit there for days at a time without trying anything to solve it.
They may be cheap but they aren't a good value.
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I think these are just ordinarily low-intelligence (or maybe even average intelligence, when the task requires more) people who have learned how to smile and nod well enough at things they don't understand that it's not obvious immediately that they have not a clue in the world. Indian, because Americans of that intelligence level usually don't get into IT in the first place (although I have run into a few) and Chinese of that intelligence level aren't good enough at the faking it part (at least not in English).
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