China is surpassing the US in manufacturing far sooner than had previously been expected, in part due to the recession being experienced by the US. Some fear it's part of the decline in US power.
"The notion that we can be a nonmanufacturing society is folly," says Peter Morici, an economist at the University of Maryland. "It's pseudo-science that gives rise to the collapse of civilizations."This is why India needs to toss out antiquated fantasies about being a non-industrialized agrarian society.
You don't build submarines using flower power.
6 comments:
America is going down with self inflicted wounds. A dumbed down education system, overpaid and under-producing work force,incentive to NOT work, legally stifling production with goody-goody laws, political correctness to a debilitating degree... a longish list and not quite complete. But in the end it is productivity which creates real wealth. Fancy paperwork and military strength only gives a false feeling of power.
Powerful empires in the past by an excess of the good life have bitten the dust in a real knock-down drag out fight. And India along with Israel and USA are supposed to be the last three major infidel nations facing the jihad... gawdhelpus.
Jim Rogers and Marc Faber advise their clients to stay out of China:
http://moneynews.newsmax.com/streettalk/faber_china_growth/2009/07/30/241896.html
and Andy Xie (famous market analyst?) says China has become a ‘giant Ponzi scheme’:
http://www.my1510.cn/article.php?id=e3fc777cdd24720a
- Satya
sorry, san. why do you think the hans have leased 100,000 sq miles in africa? it's because their land is not that great to begin with and they have poisoned it anyway, destroying agricultural land and polluting the water.
they have leased this land so they can grow food!
you really should read up on ricardo's theory of comparative advantage. we happen to have good land, no point destroying it to manufacture 'rubber dogshit' which the chinese will do just fine. they are good at it. let them make dogshit, we'll sell them rice. at very high prices. (and sort of generally speaking, why are punjab and kerala -- selling agroproducts and services -- so much better off than the industrialized states of bengal, jharkhand and bihar, with all that stuff being dug up out of the ground, and all those "satanic mills"?
you also have to get out of this ridiculous idea that agriculture means a starving guy and a starving bull dragging a plow around.
no, agriculture is hydroponics, drip irrigation, growing algae to produce biodiesel, etc. you know, the sort of thing the israelis have been doing?
you must be kidding if you want to industrialize, push all these people off the land and into crummy urban nightmares like dharavi.
you can live without oil, and rubber dogshit, but you do need food.
for a smart guy like you, san, this is a serious blind spot. i don't know why you get so cranky about industry. what, nehru's or stalin's ghost got you?
but i don't blame you. the entire set of economists in india keeps bleating that we have to get people off agriculture. no, we have to get better jobs to agriculturists. more value added.
rajeev, agriculture destroys land too. manufacturing uses up minimal land, unlike the huge swathes that have be cleared for agriculture.
certainly, we have to migrate our agriculture to value-added production, using automation rather than inefficient brute-force manual labour.
unlike the chinese, we can focus on manufacturing better things than plastic dogshit and rubber sex toys.
our innovative enterprising people can come up with all sorts of useful inventions and devices to mass manufacture, that will make quality of life better. invention can't all be done on the farm. without a good manufacturing base available, those inventions won't be mass produced, or even see light of day.
indians live under particular constraints that will compel particular types of innovation. and the resulting products will be particularly useful to various parts of the world, such as the developing world.
not everyone wants to grow up to be a farmhand, nor can everyone become a neurosurgeon or a programmer. a solid industrial base will soak up a large section of the labor force, and balance our lop-sided economy with its horrendous underemployment.
No one is asking forests to be cut to be given to agriculture. The issue is whether prime agricultural land should be turned over to big industries resulting in the displacement of the native inhabitants.
People may aspire to be anything, but to ask them to leave their homes so they can be provided a 'dream job' working on machines is a concept that its proponents wont understand till their family is asked to silently get out of their cosy flats so their aspiring son can be given an employment.I am sure some of our industrialists are rich enough to buy cities, but thankfully they have not decided to kick us out of our housing colonies yet, ow we would be caught shouting slogans next to mamta bannerjee.
The recent fracas of tata, ambanis(SEZ etc) over land acquisition clearly shows they are not looking for little chunks of land for high end manufacturing but huge swathes of fertile land.Any land required for high end manufacturing is alreday there. get some land from these mammoth PSUs. Their plants are cities in themselves, with enough land wasted.
san, there is enough agricultural land in the country as it is. it is inefficiently used because of tiny plots which cannot use large machines, and because of brutal and stupid government policies: eg, in kerala, there are miles and miles of excellent paddy fields lying fallow because the govt raised minimum wages so high it is uneconomic to cultivate. there is no real need to go out and cut down forests to improve agricultural yield. it is a matter of better management.
if the industrialists are so concerned about not wasting good agricultural land, why aren't they setting up shop in marginal land like the thar desert, or the salt pans of the kutch, or in semi-arid areas of tamil nadu and the deccan? no, all the SEZs are coming up on good land, which will be forever paved over and rendered useless. just as the never-ending expansion of cities is doing. (in trivandrum, there were all these working paddy fields so that from anywhere in town, if you walked 1 mile, you reached a field. now every one of them is paved over and a house has been built on it. sad. that good fertile land? gone for ever.)
this is the consequence of the mania about "industrialization" -- create rootless, indigent, vulnerable populations squeezed into cities *and* destroy the land. remember the 20 million migrant factory laborers in china who were sent home (to hopeless villages) when the recession hit.
why do you think there was the agitation in singur? it was good agricultural land. why couldn't tata motors be moved to salt marshes in gujarat? of course it could.
i am not against industrialization per se, i am against building massive stupid low-tech smokestack industries that force migration from the farms. much better to provide opportunities for people to stay on in rural areas and give them good work there. the innovations appropriate for india are rural, small-scale, or highly-engineered enterprises, not large-scale low-value addition sweatshops that pollute and degrade the land.
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