Tyler Cowan, India & Leontief paradox

 Tyler Cowen has a post on India titled 

Some simple analytics of Indian growth, economic and cultural

I think of India as, throughout much of its history, as having a surfeit of human talent

Cowan is biased because the Indians in America tend to belong to small cognitive elites from lineages which specialized in knowledge work. His mistake is to think they are representative of the entire population. The plain fact is that the majority of people have low productivity and low educational attainment. They may still be better off than most of their ancestors going back many centuries. It is natural that the proportion of the population that comes from the traditionally educationally backward castes will rise as the affluent have fewer or no children.  

but a scarcity of good infrastructure.

It had good infrastructure in places thanks to the Brits. What it didn't have was a hukou internal passport system.  This meant that people from the countryside could swarm and overrun cities and make them increasingly uninhabitable. Politically, their votes counted for more than the people who paid taxes and thus funded public goods. Look at the Railways. They became more and more unproductive as there was political pressure to create jobs and keep prices low- or non-existent for fare dodgers. Industry had to shift to road transport because of cross-subsidization and long delays. Air transport should have flourished. But Air India was nationalized and turned into a big loss maker. Port development and shipping were neglected till recently. Infrastructure will always be neglected because the political compulsion is to give 'freebies' and expand public sector employment. This means wages and pensions plus interest charges consume more and more of the budget. 

  Infrastructure serves as a bottleneck for further advances

No. Advances generate profits. This attracts politicians who, if not killing the golden goose, significantly constrain its growth.  

.  Thus, many of India’s most significant advances are densely packed with talent, but capital goods are relatively scarce. 

India's crazy Labor laws militate for high capital output ratios in the organized sector. But the bigger problem is that land appreciates whereas physical capital depreciates. Why bother making things when you can borrow from Nationalized Banks to finance real estate development? If the bubble bursts, the Banks take the hit while you retire to your mansion in Belgravia.  

For instance:

1. Indian classical music is super-high G-loaded, but the instruments are relatively inexpensive, compared say to a symphony orchestra.

But Indian classical music isn't that popular. I imagine that top performers and composers- like AR Rahman- don't stint when it comes to music software and hardware.  

2. Indian mathematics and computational advance, such as we find in say Ramanujan

a Tamil Brahmin- a very small minority. Tamil Nadu has an extremely anti-Brahmin political culture.  

and the broader South Indian tradition, is high on mental facility and low on capital goods.

Not any more. Applied Math and Computing is lucrative and Indians are perfectly happy to embrace this. Indeed, philosophically, Indians tend to be Brouwer type intuitionists or constructivists.  

3. Religious contemplation is another Indian specialty, ditto.

Or pretending to be doing religious contemplation while actually looting and raping your disciples. Gandhi belonged to a sect whose head kept fucking the wives of his devotees and thus giving the great spiritual gift of syphilis. There's a good reason Gandhi kept banging on about celibacy. Otherwise people would have assumed he was fucking everybody in his Ashram.  

4. Indian food has lots of ingredients, but many of them are relatively inexpensive, for instance vegetables, lentils, or native spices.  The combinatorial achievements however are remarkable.

But most Indians eat meat though some aren't comfortable with fish. Some spices- e.g. saffron- are very expensive.  

And so on.

As Indian economic growth proceeds, infrastructure will improve dramatically and indeed this process already is underway.

How long will this continue to be true? Some States look ready to go off the fiscal cliff. If Modi is defeated in 2024, it is likely that the Centre will go the same way. The problem is that there may be no Manmohan style reform the next time there is a forex crisis.  

  That will enable India to make contributions in a broader range of areas, and for those contributions to spread around the world more readily.

If Modi wins- sure. But what if he doesn't? Will more prosperous states really transfer resources so politicians can buy votes in the backward, but more populous, regions?  

We are in essence entering a world where physical infrastructure and “ingredients” are no longer the binding constraint on Indian cultural development. 

It never has been. India embraced new technology- Cinema, Music Software- if allowed to do so. One reason Indian Cinema looks so different from Western movies is because the Government prevented the proper development of TV till the Nineties.  

In cuisine, this is mirrored by the rise and spread of Indian “fusion” cuisine, including in India itself, and Indian molecular gastronomy.

I must admit this is a welcome development. I couldn't really say the food in a 5 star hotel restaurant was better than what you could get at a dhaba but molecular gastronomy does justify the vastly greater expense.  

Indian culture (and exports) will continue to rise in influence.  But many Indians will miss the older approach. 

Not if they live in India rather than just visit from time to time.  

They expect talent-intensive cultural contributions, and have come to love them. 

Nonsense! K.L Saigal was a typewriter salesman. Many great Ustads and Pandits claim him as an influence. The Wadali brothers were wrestlers before they took up singing. They seem pretty good to me.  

(Do you really want Pandit Kumar Gandharva to be replaced by a collaboration with some guy playing a mellotron?)

I can imagine Ravi Shankar collaborating with George Harrison who did play the mellotron.  

  The next wave of Indian cultural exports

India's biggest cultural export is Movies. Was a Bacchan or Rajnikanth movie 'talent intensive'?  

will be less talent-intensive, less cognitively challenging,

India does not export cognitively challenging stuff. Boring stuff- sure. The food can be very challenging. But Tagore and Ray are suitable mush for the brain dead.  

and to many people they will not feel “entirely Indian.”

But Indians be kraze for phoren- innit?  

Precisely as India succeeds in spreading its influence, its culture will seem just a bit stupider. 

Tagore and Gandhi were plenty stupid. The Maharishi promoted 'yogic levitation' and laughed all the way to the Bank. Nothing can be stupider than India's contribution to Econ and Poli Sci.  

This will be reinforced by the likelihood that the global marginal customer is not so cognitively well-equipped to understand the greatest glories of Indian civilization.

The greatest glories of Indian civilization were quickly taken over and indigenized by the Chinese the Japanese and so forth. There are superb Yoga teachers of all ethnicities around the globe.  

Indians wielding capital will become increasingly influential, relative to Indians wielding talent.  Vishny Anand as Indian leader will be replaced by ????.

Adani 

#Heckscher-Ohlin

 which says 'countries export the products which use their relatively abundant and cheap factors of production, and import the products which use the countries' relatively scarce factors'. Sadly the Planning Commission thought there was some turpike theorem such that India should concentrate on capital intensive stuff. India still hasn't unshackled manufacturing industry. Maybe it will never do so. What if A.I kills of BPO and decimates knowledge based service industries? You'd have a Leontief paradox. India might still retain a niche in boring shite but smarter and smarter people will be doing that boring shite. Meanwhile the stupid will run the country- unless, like Rahul, they really don't want to coz Granny and Daddy were assassinated to the great benefit of the Congress Party. Come to think of it, Mahatma Gandhi too was assassinated. There's a pattern here is all I'm saying.