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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.
Must it?
What, exactly, is India supposed to achieve in this alliance?
I posit that geopolitical aims of the US are already misaligned with economic ones, at least for the foreseeable future; it wouldn't make much of a difference to sacrifice a bit more growth for geopolitical aims. In fact I believe, based on the unquestionable consensus regarding irredeemability of China* and widespread comments about small businesses withdrawing from China for basically ideological reasons, that Americans could be convinced to starve for collective greatness in prevailing over other civilizations. But there's no need for such extremes here.
What Americans take much harder than economic hits is dying for their collective greatness. While any conventional war between China and the US would probably be light on personnel, Americans would still much rather not participate directly, and certainly not be aggressors. What to do, then, if PRC never decides to initiate the Taiwan operation, and neither does it implode on its own thanks to demographics or debt or some other pedestrian reason? How will the future of the light cone be secured for freedom and justice, if there is no pretext to eliminate the Chinese state?
It could be convenient to befriend and prop up another immense, increasingly nationalist regional nuclear power that has a bone to pick with them, to the point that any eventual large-scale conflict would go as poorly for China as the current war is going for Russia. This suggests they must be subsidized. It's doable, and it's not even clear if the elite human capital moving in from both prospective parties wouldn't entirely offset the cost of doing so. It is also eminently doable to pretend that this propping-up has RoI above 1 for the necessary duration.
American economy is accelerating, capex is growing quarter by quarter (I won't cite anything, it's easy to find sources); and American innovation, in AI and robotics, promises the possibility of running industry on friendly shores with very limited high-skill labor, maybe only with Western expats, maybe with a few natives – which are trivial to recruit from that upper crust of India, 100-250 million strong.
If bullishness on AI is warranted, and furthermore AI is primarily compute-bound (with compute wholly monopolized by the US), then human capital is rapidly becoming obsolete, except in its capacity as warm bodies and tokens for political computation. The Chinese can keep priding themselves on their futile industriousness, like they've been doing throughout every historical humiliation: Indians will let robots do robotic jobs, and wisely play to their strength – in numbers.
To me this is the key point in geopolitical considerations that is largely being ignored by most pundits. If America and the West generally can actually develop and leverage seriously useful AI systems a la ChatGPT, the economic gains will be literally unfathomable.
Now I don't think it will happen immediately, but even in the next 5-10 years as the current transformer models get developed into more narrow domains, I see the US being the major adopter. If they can do it right, correct implementation of AI technology will give a massive boost to geopolitical/economic power, and should quell fears about the fertility crisis, lowering IQ, etc etc.
A while back I saw someone tell an AI optimist they're repeating verbatim the promises of the internet, and while all the tech around it made life quite a bit more convenient I have not seen any massive boosts to geopolitical or economic power.
Unless your fears about the fertility crisis are "how do I cause a fertility crisis without triggering an economic collapse" this just plainly is not going to happen.
And if this is what you're aiming for, you're still in for a surprise. AI is a lot more likely to replace upper class managers and paper pushers than it is middle class grunts, and it's the latter you'll be running out of due to fertility.
The Web is eating the world and it being produced in California contributes massively to continued American growth on the backdrop of European stagnation, for instance.
But it can't run robots.
I don't buy it. If the web never happened, do you think we wouldn't have continued American growth on the backdrop of European stagnation?
Computers had the power to automate countless manhours of tedious unproductive work, and all that happened is that we invented even more tedious unproductive work. Even if we get AI-controlled robots, I doubt things are going to be much different.
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