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I've been thinking about Indians today. In my current management position in tech, I deal with a lot of Indians. On one hand, Indians are some of my most trusted colleagues and friends who I rely on who have a CS degree from a legit US college like University of Colorado Boulder or Ohio State. These people are the best and I love working with them. These are people who went to school in the US and are legit. Not only that, but my favorite two teachers in college in math and CS were both Indians who taught CS.
On the other hand, the Indians we hire as support are absolute trash. You compare them to Philipno or Eastern European people we hire as support, and they are so bad. The funny thing is that the Indians that are in the US are our best people for support. Obviously, there is a massive selection bias, but what the hell is going on with this?
I actually have a real world example. I worked at a telecom company as a software engineer and most of the managers were former Army or Air Force people. The majority of the people in the US who were doing support are/were Indian. But these people were Indians in America and everyone liked them and they all eventually got promoted. But the overnight people in India were again absolute trash.
What is going on in India with their leadership? Why are Indians so bad in India but ones that come hear and get a taste of American corporate structure so good? I know this is probably a best fit for the questions thread, but this legitimately puzzles me.
And obviously Indian-Americans I don't include in this. They are just like all other Americans.
In no other people is there the same extraordinary gap between the achievements of the diaspora and the abject squalor of the homeland.
And that, really, is the Indian Question. Are they an intellectual elite of fifty or a hundred million capable of Denmark-tier (or at least Israel-tier, let’s say) civilization were they not sadly chained to a billion 80 IQ commoners?
The problem with this narrative is that one would expect that at least, like white South Africans, the smarter Brahmins would have created some semblance of high civilization if only for themselves.
And yet as I have noted, even in wealthy parts of Delhi and Mumbai garbage piles in the streets, random cows and other animals stand around, and the exteriors of the homes of the rich often appear crumbling or at least unkept (even if the interiors are pristine). Even many temples, which one would assume would be highest priority for maintenance and cleanliness (as they are in every other religion) and which would presumably be the responsibility of the priestly caste are dirty or otherwise poorly kept, often despite a large contingent of priests and other staff.
The Indians can go to space for nationalist symbolism, but they cannot clean the Ganges, despite it being of central spiritual importance to their faith and the fact that they have had a Hindu nationalist government in power for a decade. I read this article about Varanasi which quotes a Brahmin priest, whose day job is a professor of engineering, who still drinks from the water each day despite knowing how contaminated it is by fecal matter, corpses and so on. A show of faith, certainly, but why must it even happen? Obviously this is a country that has enough engineers to clean the river. (They try, but it appears halfheartedly.)
What gives? Even when China was a poor communist shithole, places like Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan were rapidly developing, it wasn’t like you had to look hard in 1975 for evidence of Chinese achievement. But the Indian nations in the world - including diaspora nations in the Caribbean and the Pacific like Guyana and Fiji - all seem to suffer from similar issues.
Yes. Assuming they managed to lose the maladaptive cultural baggage they developed. Which they do, at least in the West. Or they wouldn't be model minorities and the single richest ethnic group when it comes to average income in quite a few nations.
As I've previously explained to you, rich Indians do not particularly care about that. It's only when they're socialized in a place where that's expected that they put in the effort.
Being richer than 97.23% of our 100k gods, like Ambani, will buy you a sick skyscraper. It won't clean the streets outside. So you become rapidly inured to it and focus on the interior, which is both free from the Hoi Polloi, and also what your peers care about.
Most temples let anyone in who wants to enter. That puts a firm cap on how clean they can be when the average person isn't.
They have 10-20 IQ points on us. That counts for a lot. It takes a certain baseline level of intelligence for prosociality to really start paying dividends, leaving aside the other benefits of human capital.
Besides, the Indians in places like Guyana and Fiji are descendants of indentured laborers abandoned there by the Brits. They're not the same sampling as the average emigre to the US. I am under the impression they still spank the native populace, South Africa would be a pertinent example.
But it will clean the streets outside, friend. Google says Ambani is worth 97 billion dollars. Street cleaning is no arcane secret, many nations have essentially perfected it. The machines are readily sold by all the usual manufacturers. Salaries for manual laborers are very low. Training the local population is only a matter of hiring traffic and street wardens for a few years until the people get used to it. Google suggests the average Mumbai taxi driver makes about $3000 a year, and I suppose we can assume that street cleaners are unlikely to be paid much more. If the city objects, India is a corrupt enough place that the country’s richest man can bribe them. A guy worth $97bn can clean the streets outside his skyscraper, he can hire 10,000 men to do it by hand if he wants to (that would amount to what, a paltry $50m a year?), it’s absurd to discuss this banal issue solved in every developed country and even many poorer countries for much less money as some impossibility!
Downtown Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, even Jakarta (!) are so much cleaner than the wealthier parts of Mumbai or New Delhi. So is Windhoek. So are parts of Accra and Addis, even. What holds India back? It’s not some kind of upstanding socialist government insisting that the rich can’t do this; as the Adani reports showed, the government is clearly in the pocket of the billionaires, who are largely high IQ and high caste. The only explanation is lack of will, not among the peasants but among the rich.
And why should they bother, when they can travel abroad to their mansions in London or their penthouse in Singapore? But again, the rich Malaysians have those too, and they still work to make Kuala Lumpur a better place to live. I’m often criticized for my own elitism, but I don’t blame all of society’s problems on the poor in whose nation I share.
Sure, Ambani can pull that off, if he made it a priority. That leaves about 99.999% of us. Certainly the few hundred million middle class who wish it were otherwise.
I am in agreement there's a lack of will. I disagree that emigration is the most suitable explanation for it. Like I said, this has been a problem well before UMC Indians could, with only a little bit of effort, flee to the West, if not the US.
There's clearly either a revealed preference here or some kind of skill issue. India is around 41% urbanised. Take away the rural classes and a "few hundred million" people represents like 30-50% of the urban population, which would be even higher in non-slum areas. If those people and a smattering of billionaires can't or won't clean up their cities then I'm not sure what would get them to. There doesn't appear to be that spirit of municipal capitalism that was prominent in, say, the late 19th century in England. Mumbai must have greater resource than 1870s Birmingham, and look at Chamberlain! And if not grand paternalistic mayors, then at least naked self interest to carve out a space for those few hundred million you mention.
I am claiming it's revealed preference, to the extent that applies when considering coordination problems.
I'm pretty sure I have an accurate idea of how dirty 1870s London is, let alone from the horse shit, and believe me most of the country is nowhere near that bad.
By the time most people become billionaires or at least multimillionaires, they're used to taking the overall grime for granted, and besides they're going from enclave to enclave in Audis with the windows rolled up, it's not like they have to walk.
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What was the population density in 1800s coal country?
The more people around you, the higher chance one or more is going to engage in some commons-trampling. Maybe not even on purpose, given that sanitation and transport are not trivial problems.
Well England's population density was around 160/km² in 1870, 22m in total. Maharashtra has a population density of 365/km². Mumbai now must be 3 or 4x denser than the West Midlands of the time if the state as a whole is that dense. I don't think density is the key at all (look at the Ganges valley, UP and Bihar combined is ~USA worth of people!).
To be clear, I’m saying higher density makes things harder. Especially as automation, even steam power, cuts demand for labor.
That’s my answer to @2rafa and others who are asking why the Brahmins haven’t built a shining city on a hill: there are already people there! And on the next hill, and the next. A billionaire can surely buy some of them out, but how many? How long before you get one of those desperate holdouts like in China?
Or to put it another way—Central Park sits at the heart of one of the most expensive cities on the planet. Some of the leading US firms look out over its greenery. It’s also open to the public. The latter completely dominates public perception, because one big apple spoils the bunch. If all the wealth and power of New York can’t overcome the noise floor, why should India have a solution?
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