Re: A long post - your opinions sought
- From: Geico Caveman <spammers-begone@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2007 12:33:47 -0700
alvey wrote:
On Fri, 30 Mar 2007 17:05:35 -0700, Geico Caveman wrote:
Agreed.
It is a long post.
And one who's solutions don't address any of the societal problems it
identified.
The societal problems cannot be addressed in a program. Any change would
have to be voluntary after people recognize that there are incentives for
physical fitness.
India in that sense has gone from being a mostly malnourished/undernourished
country to a country where a significant section of people suffer from
heart problems because of overeating and lack of regular exercise. Given
that there is some evidence that Indians are genetically more prone to
suffering from coronary heart disease, the imperative for the growth and
development of a physical culture goes well beyond the mere need to excel
at sports.
By the by, is this Indian 'Upper class' based on the English or American
model? Or something else?
All these classes are defined by how many percentiles is a person / family
above / at / below the minimum living wage (poverty line) in India.
The poverty line in this classification lies somewhere in the upper half of
the 600 million strong lower class.
There are extreme wealth differences in India which have gotten worse over
the last 20 years - India now has both the largest number of billionaires
in Asia (36 - overtook Japan last month - counting Hong Kong and China
separately (42 combined otherwise)) as well as the largest number of people
living at or below the poverty line (in Asia). The number of people below
the poverty line has shrunk markedly, while the growth at the top has
occurred at a much faster clip. As long as the resulting social problems
can be managed (and there is evidence that they are being managed fairly
well), there is little to complain about uneven growth. There are extreme
regional disparities as well - which sets up economic migration patterns
between villages and cities fairly far away, again something that has been
going on for about a hundred years.
I am not a big fan of trickle down economics, but I do think that wealth
generation at the top is one of the essential preconditions for wealth
generation below. It is often not a sufficient condition, which is where
the classic economic debate comes in.
The oft-quoted figure that hundreds of millions of Indians live at less than
a dollar a day often glosses over the fact that a dollar (about Rs. 50)
goes a long way in India (you could, with some difficulty, restrict your
food bill for the day to that). The life won't be comfortable at all - but
it is certainly not the utter starvation level that is often depicted in
the West. There are Indians who do worse than that and actually do
unfortunately starve/suffer from extreme malnourishment, but its too easy
to conflate the picture of a starving Indian villager with the initially
(until you realize the relative cost of living in India) shocking statement
about a "dollar a day".
I expect that the poverty problem in India will be eliminated in about 20-30
years, completing the biggest economic upsurge in human history.
--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com
.
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- From: Geico Caveman
- Re: A long post - your opinions sought
- From: alvey
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