So, India and Indian chuds are doing a victory round because supposedly Indian poverty has massively dropped to 2.6%. Supposedly 496 million Indians were lifted out of poverty.

What’s the poverty threshold? Making over $3/day. You are still poor, even in India, at $3 a day. As Cateleya says:

Poverty depends on where you draw the line At the $3 threshold, only 2.6% are poor. At the $4.20 threshold, 16.1% are poor.

And, for the record, at $4.20 a day you’re still in poverty.

Some other stats:

Yeah.

Folks, it’s my annual fundraiser. This fundraiser keeps the lights on. Everything here is free, there’s no ads, I don’t take sponsored posts and I don’t write pro-Israeli propaganda, even though I’ve been offered money (which I could really use) to sell my soul and betray my readers. If you can give, if it won’t cause you hardship, & you value this site and the writing here, please Subscribe or Donate. So far we’ve raised $8,780 from 68 people, meaning we’re a bit over half way to our goal.

Anyway, this is why I don’t trust stats I don’t investigate. There are stats that are somewhat accurate, for sure, but if you eyeball and number and you think it’s off, it probably is. CPI is bullshit in almost every country. Poverty and extreme poverty stats are almost all bullshit as well, except from China, which actually has lifted people out.

As for India, it’s a wreck. Modi’s policies have been terrible, starting with demonetization, when he took all large bills out of circulation to defeat corruption and hit the grey and black markets. Seemed like a good idea, but it empowers middlemen to take an electronic cut, and those markets were huge in India.

And, surprise, it didn’t make any real difference to corruption.

Further, AI is hitting offshoring hard, since companies are keen to replace employees, even cheap Indian speaking employees, with it. This is hurting all those Indian customer service centers, but also a lot of offshored programmers and so on. India went hard into being an outsourcing center, and unlike China mostly hasn’t used it to uplift their population as a whole, create a domestic market or build its own domestic industry meant for consumption in India. It’s a financialized, extremely corrupt state, with government full of criminals, authoritarian and ineffective.

I still see no reason to believe that India will be “the next China”. Yes, they have a lot of young people, but they don’t have much else going for them. Even without onrushing climate change I don’t think they’d make it, with global warming and onrushing water and rainfall issues, I see no hope. While India won’t be the first country hit hard by climate change (various Island states, Bangladesh, etc…) it’s going to be the first major country to be hit hard unless the Atlantic current flips sooner than expected (in which case Europe is beyond screwed._ I fully expect mass famines withing twenty years, and hundreds of millions dead.

I hope I’m wrong, but I see few signs that suggest otherwise.

Subscribe or Donate