Like Donald Trump, Mr. Modi rose to power demonizing ethnic-religious minorities, immigrants and the establishment media, and boasting about the size of a body part.
.. Arguments over what precisely is to blame for Mr. Trump’s apotheosis —
- inequality,
- callous globalized elites,
- corruptible local legislators,
- zealous ideologues,
- a news media either toxic or complaisant — will only intensify in the coming months.
.. In the case of India, the role of institutional rot — venal legislators, a mendacious media — and the elites’ moral and intellectual truancy is clear. To see it one only has to remember that Mr. Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014, was accused of
- supervising mass murder and
- gang rapes of Muslims — and
- consequently was barred from travel to the United States for nearly a decade
— and that none of that prevented him from being elected to India’s highest office.
.. Americans are, as Mr. Frank writes, “a population brought up expecting to enjoy life in what it is often told is the richest country in the world.” In India, one of the poorest countries in the world, “the tutelage of a distant and self-satisfied elite” — to borrow from Ross Douthat, describing America — spawned a much more extravagant sense of entitlement.
.. Suave technocrats, economists and publicists (mostly U.S.-trained) endlessly regurgitated free-market nostrums (imported from America) — what Mr. Frank calls the “liberalism of the rich.”
.. The fervent rhetoric about private wealth-creation and its trickle-down benefits openly mocked, and eventually stigmatized, India’s founding ideals of egalitarian and collective welfare. It is this extraordinary historical reversal, and its slick agents, that must be investigated in order to understand the incendiary appeal of demagoguery in our time.
.. Karl Polanyi described in his 1944 book “The Great Transformation” how civil society and individual liberty are threatened as never before when a society has to reconfigure itself to serve the “utopian experiment of a self-regulating market.”
.. In recent years, smooth-tongued “policy entrepreneurs” (Paul Krugman’s term) advocating free-market reforms and a heavily armed security-state have dominated India’s public sphere.
.. Arvind Panagariya, a colleague of Mr. Bhagwati’s who now works for the Indian government’s economic policy think-tank, took to arguing that Indian children were genetically underweight, and not really as malnourished as the World Health Organization had claimed. The 2015 Nobel laureate Angus Deaton rightly calls such positions “poverty denialism.”
.. economic growth, of the uneven and jobless kind, was creating what the economists Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen have called “islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa.”
.. All the while they stoked hatred against such enemies of rising India as Kashmiri separatists and their Pakistani supporters.
.. Mr. Modi and his hawkish Twitter account emerged into national politics just as growth faltered
.. “Mein Kampf” is a perennial bestseller in India, Hitler being seen as an exemplary nationalist-cum-people-manager.
.. More important, Mr. Modi grasped then, as astutely as Mr. Trump does now, the terrible political potency of ressentiment. Positioning himself in the gap between the self-righteous beneficiaries of globalization and irascible masses, he claimed to be the son of a modest tea-vendor who had dared to challenge the corrupt old dynasties of quasi-foreign liberals.
.. One of Mr. Modi’s most loyal fan bases was rich Indian-American businesspeople, who were naturally attracted to the promise of a wealthy India allied with the United States.
.. Mr. Trump sought their support, and hailing India’s prime minister as a “great man,”
.. Silicon Valley lined up to hail Mr. Modi’s vision of “Digital India.”
.. B.R. Ambedkar, the main framer of India’s constitution, warned in the 1950s that democracy in India was “only a top dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.”
.. India’s press, fearfully self-censoring, if not barefacedly mendacious, has become, as The Economist reported last month, “more craven than Pakistan’s.”
.. Fewer jobs are being created on Mr. Modi’s watch than under the previous government of quasi-foreign liberals.
.. Mr. Modi appears to be an opportunistic manipulator of disaffection with little to offer apart from the pornography of power and a bogus fantasy of machismo. Mr. Trump looks set to follow his lead.
.. In our own time, a global network of elites has tried to restart the discredited utopian experiment of a self-regulating market. The experiment failed, and again the rage of cheated masses has spawned demagogues who simultaneously promise to avenge the left-behinds and to rewire their alliances with the elites.
a16z Podcast: Connectivity and the Internet as Supply Chain
3 forms of connectivity:
- transportation
- energy: 2 million km pipelines
- communications: 1 million km fiber on ocean floor
We think that states are the organizing unit, but we are moving:
- from nations and borders to flow and friction
- things become organized by connectivity
The more pipelines you build between Russia and Europe, the more resistance to turning off the routes
In the gig economy, your connectivity will affect your prosperity.
People’s loyalty is more to their employer because their employer gives them greater access to places where their citizenship would otherwise not.
Get Ready to See This Globalization ‘Elephant Chart’ Over and Over Again
The non-winners in globalization are the Western World’s middle classes.
.. “The biggest losers (other than the very poorest 5 percent), or at least the ‘non-winners,’ of globalization were those between the 75th and 90th percentiles of the global income distribution whose real income gains were essentially nil,” according to Milanovic. “These people, who may be called a global upper-middle class, include many from former Communist countries and Latin America, as well as those citizens of rich countries whose incomes stagnated.”.. “When people like Deutsche Bank are starting to say, ‘maybe capitalism needs a form of reinvention,’ maybe that’s the time to start listening to that,” he said during an interview onBloombergTV. “It’s not Bernie Sanders; it’s a global investment bank.”.. “What’s now captured the interest of intellectuals is the elephant chart, the idea that over the past 30 years the winners were emerging market middle classes and the 1 percent in developed markets, but the developed markets’ middle classes were stagnant,”
The Case for Smart Protectionism
About 11.5 million of the 11.6 million jobs created in the recovery have gone to workers with at least some college education, according to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.
.. The U.S. government spends 0.4 percent of GDP on childcare and early education, while France, Denmark, and Sweden all spend at least three times more as a share of their economies. It is cheaper to publicly invest in the achievement and health of poor young children than to spend billions trying to remediate them as adults.
.. Many workers don’t have time for training, because U.S. welfare policy pushes them to find work immediately, even if it doesn’t lead to a more prosperous career
.. Automation redistributes wealth—from routine-based work to work that cannot be automated. Globalization redistributes wealth, too—from activities that can be off-shored to the owners of global supply chains. Economic history is one long story of wealth being created, destroyed, consolidated, and, yes, redistributed.
.. Of the 27 million net new jobs created between 1990 and 2008, 99 percent occurred in so-called “nontradable” occupations, which is work that must be done locally, such as a treating patients, teaching students, or cutting people’s hair.