As an Indian I have to agree with this assessment. But India has gone through the socialist phase, it still maintains a liberal democracy and is now rapidly building out its industry. Socialism is completely dead in the cities, my opinion is it will eventually fall once the rural areas also develop.
I grew up in the USA and the changes in India even in the last 10 years has been completely astounding. For example I’m from Hyderabad and some of things changes I see: A national freeway that didn’t exist 10 years ago, a metro that covers most of the core of the city, skyscrapers, trains that now ship containers instead of boxcars, massive power plants that have recently been built.
Is India perfect? No. It still has a hierarchical society, sectarianism is still pretty acute, like everywhere else in the world India’s fertility rate has dropped off a cliff, and traffic in Hyderabad proper is a nightmare.
But culturally the submissive Indian mindset of my youth is largely gone. The millennial India is entrepreneurial and everyone is looking to get ahead. The next 20 years of India will be amazing at which point a lot of the issues of low fertility rates will start affecting India as well. Lastly, I think India really only has capacity to send a sizable amount of its citizens overseas only for the next 5 years or so at which point migration out of India will largely subside.
> like everywhere else in the world India’s fertility rate has dropped off a cliff
It's amazing when people flag this as a bad thing when it's undoubtedly a key component of getting places to prosperity in the first place. Got to get people away from being starvation-limited.
> I think India really only has capacity to send a sizable amount of its citizens overseas only for the next 5 years or so at which point migration out of India will largely subside.
That's how you can tell a country is ""winning"" in the international rankings, when more people want to move in than move out.
No society today got to prosperity on the back of falling birth rates. And nor did any of the western countries that went through population booms have food-production created famines.
> it's undoubtedly a key component of getting places to prosperity in the first place
The baby boom and a couple previous generations in the US is also associated with getting to high prosperity and high fertility. This part of your thesis is debunked and thus your whole argument falls apart.
> It's amazing when people flag this as a bad thing when it's undoubtedly a key component of getting places to prosperity in the first place. Got to get people away from being starvation-limited.
Exponentially falling fertility rates can create dynamics which can be destructive in its own right. As with other complex phenomena it would be for example foolish to rapidly cool the earth's climate. Stability is the key, here. Right now India is just below replacement which short to mid-term looks very promising but will it stabilize? Looking at worldwide trends I very much doubt that. A growing economy needs some demographical stability so coming from a long-term view fertility dropping off a cliff, now, could be bad news later (in one, two generations).
Turning some knobs one way or the other does not produce linear results, quite the opposite, there are thresholds, there is criticality. To draw on another more time compressed analogy here: I guess some operators thought back then: What could go possibly wrong by running a nuclear reactor (RBMK) at safer lower powers?
