Immerwahr & the Kerala model

Back in 2016 Daniel Immerwahr gave an interview to Dissent magazine which is worth reading as a whole. 

In this post, I will focus on the importance of 'the Kerala model' for his thesis. It is eminently silly. Kerala had a large and ancient Christian community, which would feel a natural affinity with Western learning, as well as an indigenous 'Ezhutachan' teacher caste. Missionary money and competition between sects meant a big expansion of Education as well as Healthcare. High population density meant mimetic effects were broadcast quickly. Lower castes were well organized. This meant that localized competition raised Health and Educational outcomes but, predictably, fucked up the Economy coz of crazy Commies running around like headless chickens. This was cool because Kerala could start exporting labor not just to Sri Lanka and Bombay but the Gulf- with which the indigenous Moplah Muslims had historic connections. So Kerala turned into a remittance economy. Like Cuba which exported Medical services and Pharma, Kerala defeated 'Baumol Cost disease' by exporting people who wanted the money they sent back to go into Medicines and School Certificates as well as nice houses and better food for the family back home. Obviously, Keralites would have been better off if like, South Korean construction workers in the Gulf in the Seventies, they too could have invested in the Malayali version of Samsung. Still, they did pretty well because they were hard working, smart, and of good character. Furthermore, Kerala is quite far away from Bengal. Thus, its Communists remained too stupid and provincial to properly understand that fighting American Imperialism must involve being utterly shite all the time. Now, because 'Teacher' Shailaja did such a good job handling COVID, 'Captain' Vijayan has got re-elected- though he has kept her out of his new Cabinet. The Captain may be able to attract fdi to Kerala and give it high value adding jobs to make up for disappearing opportunities in the Gulf. 

But all this has nothing to with 'communitarianism' or 'the capabilities approach' or other such shite.

Dissent's interviewer asks-

Shenk: But you argue that Kerala’s experience was relevant for urban areas too—I’m thinking in particular of your discussion of what happened to community development when it returned to the United States under LBJ. How do these two fit together?

Immerwahr: If you imagine a typical Asian village circa the 1950s, you’ve got a few powerful men (nearly always men) and then a large number of people who depend on them. There’s a hierarchy, but it occurs on the intimate, interpersonal scale: tenants know their landlords, untouchables know who the Brahmins are, and so forth, because everyone lives cheek by jowl.

In Kerala, the Namboodri Brahmins were separate from their Nair allies who, themselves, had wanted to get rid of matrilocality and caste based curbs on occupation. 'Lower castes' had already gotten organized. The Christians and Muslims represented a check on the power of the Commies. You still had a recipe for frustrating economic growth, but localized competition could improve health and educational outcomes. Remittances began to grow rapidly in value after OPEC put the squeeze on the West. Thus Kerala was an exceptional 'Tiebout Model' which nobody really wanted to emulate. Doing construction in the Gulf isn't the ideal way to make money.  

When community developers devolved decision-making power to these “communities,” inevitably the local elite would step forward to speak for the village, sharply elbowing aside anyone who wanted to talk about redistributing land or challenging patriarchy. That’s why community development accomplished so little in India: it couldn’t challenge the rural social hierarchy.

The proper thing to do was to give soft loans to 'market makers' of various sorts so that the incentive system was robust to exogenous shocks. Localized competition would then drive mimetic effects. Bringing agricultural income into a local tax net would make subsidiarity self sustaining. This sort of stuff was happening anyway. Reducing uncertainty was a cheap way to catalyse it. An expensive way to retard everything was to create more 'stakeholders' and increase regulations and boxes to tick like crazy.  

Kerala was a weird exception. For various reasons, the intricate and tradition-sanctioned hierarchies of the Indian village just didn’t hold in Kerala. There was still inequality, but it was starker, because it was impersonal. Thus, when community development came to Kerala, there was no on-the-ground local elite in place to grab hold of the process.

Why? It had been largely 'Princely'- and so the Indian National Congress had less purchase there. Thus, the Congress 'machine' wasn't the default beneficiary. But this had been true of all of pre-Gandhian India.  

Community-building there meant peasants, women’s groups, and students coming together, and it all fed into the communists’ attempts to remake the state.

Thankfully the Christians and the Nair Service Society were strong enough to fight back. But Commies who have to compete for votes either stop being Commies in all but name or else they don't get any fucking votes at all- like the Left Front in Mamta's Bengal.  

That’s pretty similar to what happened when antipoverty experts tried to transpose community development from Asian villages to the urban neighborhoods of the United States.

Hilarious! This is like Scotland bringing in UN Special Rapporteur's on Food Security to enable mothers to feed their wee bairns by getting access to arable land  and she-goats to milk. 

The oppression that city-dwellers faced was harsh, but, thanks to white flight and segregation, it wasn’t always local. The landlords who collected their rent, the banks they owed money to, and the employers offering dead-end jobs weren’t prominent in the life of the neighborhood; those people and institutions were often geographically and socially distant.

I wonder why? Getting mugged is a fun recreation for all the family.

So when the government offered money to community organizations, the actual powerholders were nowhere to be seen. To the shock of the Johnson administration, the men and women who stepped forward as community leaders were activists with little interest in maintaining the social order. And so, as in Kerala, community development turned radical, before it was quickly shut down.

Because 'radical' means kray kray. Either the thing is shut down or other lunatics kill the current lunatics till they are themselves killed. Kerala's religious diversity prevented radicalism doing its thang, though- no doubt- Communism could survive as a cult amongst cults and a caste among castes.