Amartya Sen on why India lags China

Amartya Sen wrote an op ed in 2013 titled 'Why India trails China'.

MODERN India is, in many ways, a success. Its claim to be the world’s largest democracy is not hollow.

What is important about India is that it is a Democracy under the Rule of Law where the State can't coerce its citizens to relocate and take jobs they don't want to do. China has always used coercion. This is now blindingly obvious. It is 're-educating' millions of Uighur Muslims. It is forcing Business Enterprises to do whatever the Party demands. It has a 'Leader for Life' with unlimited powers. There is no pretense that the Judiciary can act as a check upon the Supreme Leader.

The Chinese State's ability to mobilize resources and bring about demographic change by naked coercion has no parallel in India. Thus it is foolish to compare the two countries.

At one time, there were Communist Parties in India but their 'long march through the Institutions' had already ended in irrelevance. Thus not only was India nothing like China, there was no longer any prospect of it becoming so.

The hope that India might overtake China one day in economic growth now seems a distant one. But that comparison is not what should worry Indians most. The far greater gap between India and China is in the provision of essential public services — a failing that depresses living standards and is a persistent drag on growth.

Sen has been saying this for decades. Yet everybody already knew that teachers and Doctors and so forth won't relocate to rural areas where there no amenities and their lives are unsafe. China could coerce educated people to go to the villages. It could beat students till they stopped protesting stuff and got down to work. India couldn't and can't do anything similar. Still, where there is community support for Education and Healthcare- i.e. doctors aren't tied up and forced to watch their wives being gang-raped, as happened recently near Nalanda- India can do as well, or better, than China.

Why could China exert coercive force in internal matters while India could not? The answer is that the Communist Party of China first conquered the country and then administered it. In India, the Congress Party inherited a relatively weak administration from a relatively tolerant and laissez faire Colonial power.

One reason inequality in India declined more than China is because mobility was greater. People could move freely and change occupation. This ability was limited in China. However, the Chinese leadership was able to use up the huge pent up demand for mobility to make a huge profit for itself. It turned out, preventing people from running away from poverty paid less than letting them generate a profit for you and your chums. India can still do this but faces the problem of 'contested rent seeking'. In China, this problem is settled by a bullet to the head for which your heirs are invoiced.

Inequality is high in both countries, but China has done far more than India to raise life expectancy, expand general education and secure health care for its people.

It has done so by beating and killing them if they didn't do what the Party commanded. Sometimes this raised life expectancy and general education and so forth. Sometimes it had the opposite effect. What mattered was the whim of the High Command.

India has elite schools of varying degrees of excellence for the privileged, but among all Indians 7 or older, nearly one in every five males and one in every three females are illiterate.

Elite schools can turn to shit if they hire illiterate people with political connections and admit only the non privileged- i.e. equally illiterate folk. Schools which wish to remain elite have to go out of their way to give scholarships to smart but poor kids who will work their butts off and add lusture to their alma maters.

In China, a particular Political Party decides who is privileged. It can change its mind and put a bullet in your head. The suggestio falsi here is that India can choose to do more for the non-privileged. China could do so because it shot a lot of the formerly privileged.

And most schools are of low quality; less than half the children can divide 20 by 5, even after four years of schooling.

Why? Teachers in Government Schools count the votes at elections. Anyway, who will replace them?

India may be the world’s largest producer of generic medicine, but its health care system is an unregulated mess.

But, if it were regulated, it would be an even worse mess with higher prices because of corruption. Look at Medical Education. On paper, it is highly regulated. Yet scams like Vyapam are routine. It is cheaper for Indians to study medicine in China than to qualify in their own country. Govt. policy- the 'NEET mess'- has worsened the problem.

The poor have to rely on low-quality — and sometimes exploitative — private medical care, because there isn’t enough decent public care.

The reason it isn't decent is because it is public sector. Everybody knows how things can be improved- get rid of regulations and pay for results

While China devotes 2.7 percent of its gross domestic product to government spending on health care, India allots 1.2 percent.

Dr. Jack Prager has explained why that 1.2 percent is largely wasted. He was accused of being a Christian Missionary- by Christian Missionary organizations whose malpractices he exposed!- and threatened repeatedly with deportation.

The reason there is no political constituency for increasing spending on Health and Education is because people believe the money will be wasted.

India’s underperformance can be traced to a failure to learn from the examples of so-called Asian economic development, in which rapid expansion of human capability is both a goal in itself and an integral element in achieving rapid growth.

Nonsense! It can be traced to a foolish 'export pessimism' which led to 'import substitution' based policies. This was the infamous 'License Raj'. Regulations are not a panacea. Nor is expanding the Public Sector. The reasons for this have been well understood since the Sixties. Nevertheless, 'public intellectuals' like to virtue signal on this issue by turning a blind eye to the obvious.

Japan pioneered that approach, starting after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, when it resolved to achieve a fully literate society within a few decades.

Japan embraced export led growth while also harboring Imperialist designs on their neighbors. Thus, there was a need for a literate soldiery and workforce.  However, it should be remembered, the 'terakoya' Temple schools had already raised literacy and this was itself a factor in bringing about the Meiji Restoration which ended feudalism. India had no similar convulsion. There has been incremental change and former 'feudal' landlords no longer possess the same sort of power. But, in places, they have been replaced by crime-lords like the infamous Kuldeep Sengar.

As Kido Takayoshi, a leader of that reform, explained: “Our people are no different from the Americans or Europeans of today; it is all a matter of education or lack of education.” Through investments in education and health care, Japan simultaneously enhanced living standards and labor productivity — the government collaborating with the market.

Takoyoshi was a samurai indoctrinated in the bunbu (training in literacy and martial arts) tradition. His visit to the West convinced him that Japan needed to modernize so as to change its martial tradition and military doctrine. He was not speaking of cosseting the Japanese people but rather of boosting their productivity. Why? He wanted Japan to compete on a global basis. This meant Trade, not Autarky.  Moreover, the decree on universal education was immediately followed by one on conscription. Thus people had to pay the school fees for their sons to be turned into more useful soldiers. It was not till the patriotic fervor which swept the nation during the war with Russia that school attendance became genuinely universal. Moreover, the kids actually wanted to learn. Thus by the time they came of age, illiteracy had vanished. This shows the tight connection between education and military strength- which, contra Sen, is something people actually want. This is the explanation for the growth of the 'Tigers'. Each such country wished, often for very good reason, to be militarily stronger.

 As a recent paper reveals-

Sen does not see that there is a direct connection between Japan's educational policies and its turn to militaristic Imperialism. For him 'Japan's war years' were some sort of unexpected, inexplicable, 'catastrophe'.

Despite the catastrophe of Japan’s war years, the lessons of its development experience remained and were followed, in the postwar period, by South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and other economies in East Asia.

Yes. Export led growth was the key. Indeed, if like South Korea, Taiwan or Singapore, you were menaced by a militarily stronger nation, your survival as a nation depended on generating the wealth needed for a deterrent effect. All the countries Sen names have compulsory military service.

What did Japan's 'export led' strategy consist of? It meant getting young rural women into the dormitories of textile factories and then using the profits to invest in R& D and work your way up the value chain. South Korea was still quite poor when it decided to get into ship-building. Within a decade it had outstripped Britain.

What did India do? The idiots at the Planning Commission hobbled the textile and other wage-good industries. They babbled mathematical nonsense about 'turnpike theorems'- i.e. the notion that if you are poor, you must first get a yacht and a mansion in Mayfair before you can become rich. If you concentrate on getting ahead through thrift and enterprise then you are a fool. You don't understand mathematics.

China, which during the Mao era made advances in land reform and basic education and health care, embarked on market reforms in the early 1980s; its huge success changed the shape of the world economy.

China made 'advances in land reform' by shooting people and taking away everybody's land. Later it sent educated people into the villages for 're-education'. What was the result? Famine. Military decline. It had to change and do sensible things otherwise it wouldn't just be the Vietnamese whupping their ass. Even the Indians would get in on the game.

India has paid inadequate attention to these lessons.

No. Indians understood that export led growth was the way to go if the aim was to make the country strong and prosperous. They knew the Licence Permit Raj was killing the honest businessman and empowering the corrupt and the criminal. People like Sen, safe in Britain or America, did not pay attention to anything because they were too busy repeating the same stupid lessons they had received at Cambridge from equally worthless cretins.

Is there a conundrum here that democratic India has done worse than China in educating its citizens and improving their health?

No. China can stop poor people having babies. India can't.  Why? Because India is democratic. China is not. It's leadership may still choose to turn it into North Korea instead of South Korea. Let's hope not.

Perhaps, but the puzzle need not be a brainteaser. Democratic participation, free expression and rule of law are largely realities in India, and still largely aspirations in China. India has not had a famine since independence, while China had the largest famine in recorded history, from 1958 to 1961, when Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward killed some 30 million people. Nevertheless, using democratic means to remedy endemic problems — chronic undernourishment, a disorganized medical system or dysfunctional school systems — demands sustained deliberation, political engagement, media coverage, popular pressure.

Sadly this is not the case. The 'sustained deliberations' of people like Sen was useless. So was the 'political engagement' of the bien pensant. Media coverage changed nothing because the problems were 'Common Knowledge'. Popular pressure- like that of the anti-corruption movement which gave rise to the Aam Aadmi party- is just musical chairs on a sinking Titanic.

Does this mean there are no 'democratic means' to tackling India's problems? Not at all. You can have meritocratic, cadre based, not dynastic, political parties which compete on 'last mile delivery'. Furthermore, making the police and other investigative agencies autonomous will go a long way to breaking the nexus between crime and politics. There are legal remedies to existing problems. However, constantly passing new laws and making new regulations worsens the underlying problem. The courts are clogged up with law suits brought by Departments of Government against each other. Everything is always 'sub judice' and thus politicians get to pass the buck. There is no Governance just a lot of speechifying and virtue signalling from cretins like Amartya Sen.

In short, more democratic process, not less.

This means the disintermediation of public intellectuals who haven't won elections though they award each other prizes and honorary Doctorates in plenty.

In China, decision making takes place at the top. The country’s leaders are skeptical, if not hostile, with regard to the value of multiparty democracy, but they have been strongly committed to eliminating hunger, illiteracy and medical neglect, and that is enormously to their credit.

Sen, pedagogue that he is, thinks giving gold stars to pupils is the best way to change the world. But the Chinese aren't listening to him. Rahul Gandhi may have listened to him. But look where that got him.

China's leaders killed those they didn't like and rewarded those who did what they were told. Some of their leaders were crazy, some were patriots and had some common sense. China started to do well when people at the top stopped making decisions. It remains to be seen whether Chairman Xi will centralize things and whether this will destroy Chinese prosperity. What is certain is that there will be no 'convergence' between China and Liberal Democracies like India. Party control of the economy has increased in China. In India, corrupt dynasts are now on the run.

There are inevitable fragilities in a nondemocratic system because mistakes are hard to correct.

Nonsense! Mistakes can be corrected immediately by shooting a few people and doing a 180 degree turn. The Leader can say that his previous pronouncement that cats, now cows, must produce milk for the dairy industry actually meant that cats are cows and say moo not miaow.

Dissent is dangerous. There is little recourse for victims of injustice. Edicts like the one-child policy can be very harsh. Still, China’s present leaders have used the basic approach of accelerating development by expanding human capability with great decisiveness and skill.

China's 'present leaders' have done very well for themselves. They are now ensuring that they will retain the lion's share of any future gains made by the private sector.  Sen may believe this 'expands human capability'. If so, he must think the world of capitalists who achieve the same end without using coercive means.

The case for combating debilitating inequality in India is not only a matter of social justice. Unlike India, China did not miss the huge lesson of Asian economic development, about the economic returns that come from bettering human lives, especially at the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid.

China did not give a damn about 'bettering human lives'. That's not the reason if keeps putting bullets in people's brains. It embraced export-led growth based on private enterprise so as to enrich itself and increase its power. Under Chairman Xi, the Party's end-game has been revealed for all to see.

India’s growth and its earnings from exports have tended to depend narrowly on a few sectors, like information technology, pharmaceuticals and specialized auto parts, many of which rely on the role of highly trained personnel from the well-educated classes. For India to match China in its range of manufacturing capacity — its ability to produce gadgets of almost every kind, with increasing use of technology and better quality control — it needs a better-educated and healthier labor force at all levels of society.

Sadly being healthy and well educated does no good if nobody is buying what you are selling. Ask Rahul Gandhi.

A hefty fellow currently doing a PhD in Gramscian Grammatology at JNU may become more socially productive if employed in a call center but neither his health nor his education is germane. What is important is if that call center can compete for higher value added business on a global market.

What it needs most is more knowledge and public discussion about the nature and the huge extent of inequality and its damaging consequences, including for economic growth.

India does not need more useless junk social science masquerading as Knowledge. It is sick and tired of 'public discussion' that goes in circles. Inequality does not matter. Social Insurance- risk pooling- does. The former is not deliverable save coercively and with mischievous consequences. The latter can be the subject of 'last mile delivery' and thus impact voting preferences.