India's Got Time (indiadispatch.com) 76
India Dispatch: The strongest case for India is not merely that it is young, but that it still has time, and it may be the only continental-scale economy that still has it in abundance. India won't cross the demographic threshold for an "old" country -- a median age of 41 -- until the late 2050s, while China reaches that point now. India requires 10.4% sustained GDP growth over 35 years to become rich before aging, compared to China's needed 32% annual growth rate. India's working-age population will increase from 67.5% in 2021 to 69.2% by 2031, with the median age remaining at 34.5 in 2036. The report adds: China's compressed dilemma mirrors what is gripping the developed world, where Europe's share of population over 65 is on track to hit 30% by 2050, up from 8% in 1950. Raising retirement ages -- what economists describe as the closest thing to a silver bullet -- faces older voting blocs, who now make up roughly 40% of those who turn up at the polls in European elections. In the U.S., what J.P. Morgan analysts term a "Social Security cliff" looms by 2033, when the system's trust funds are projected to be exhausted, and hopes that productivity miracles (powered by, hopefully AI) will quietly square this circle look optimistic, leaving much of the rich world and North Asia out of time.
The bad case with India is... (Score:1, Insightful)
... that it has nothing else, except a large and extremely poor population that proliferates at an astonishing rate, compounding the other problems of the country.
Re:On the contrary (Score:4, Informative)
Nonsense. Its not "radical islamic snake in the grass" running india into the ground, its radicalized hindu nationalists burning the country to the ground, and its been that way for a very long time.
Fascists poison everything.
you are either wilfully ignorant or deliberately . (Score:1)
... trying to whitewah Islamic terrorism
https://indiandefencereview.co... [indiandefencereview.com]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
Also lookup Epic City Texas... (Score:1)
... where the Muslims were tryong to implement their Barbaric Sharia law https://www.npr.org/2025/05/22... [npr.org]
Re: On the contrary (Score:1)
Hindu kids are not even safe in schools, 10th grade Hindu killed by a 8th grade radical. imagine if this can happen in a school in Ahmedabad, what can happen in Islamic state like Bengal or Kerala https://x.com/mrsinha_/status/... [x.com]
your ignorance seems to extend to this incident (Score:1)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org].
On 28 June 2022, Kanhaiya Lal Teli, an Indian tailor, was beheaded by two Muslim men in Udaipur, Rajasthan. The attackers filmed the act and circulated the video online.[2][3][4]
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That is true. India is being destroyed from within and it is being destroyed by radical Hindus who are pushing policies which make zero sense and constantly harping on some mythological past where India was the greatest country on Earth implying always that its descent from that position was primarily because people from other religions and cultures came into the country.
This group of radicals - which includes the prime minister and his colleagues, have destroyed every single institution in the country with
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NYC Mayorial candidate Mamdani is an evil traitor to India+USA's democratic+pluralistic societies.
A little bit of socialism and everybody loses their mind. It's fun to see.
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There's a lot to potential in a country that has a massive young labor pool. You can educate them and take over the world economy. You can arm them and take over your neighbors.
There's no guarantee for success though. It boils down to leadership, persistence, and luck. I think China successfully turned themselves around, from a war-torn poor country with a massive population to an industrial juggernaut with significant regional military presence. While I don't agree with their methods but I cannot argue wit
I gotta say (Score:5, Informative)
It sure was the perfect time to raise the US projected debt by $3 trillion in order to give billionaires a large tax break.
It's also more right-wing propaganda (Score:1, Troll)
None of this matters since Trump is probably going to win a third term and the chuckle fucks around here Will celebrate it until they find out what it actually means. Then they'll blame Obama from the McDonald's whose bathroom they use to wash themselves after losing their houses to a bank.
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Well, I dont think Trump can win a third term, firstly because its blatantly constititonal to the point that even the weird old vampires in the supreme court couldn't find him a loop-hole, and secondly because I geninuely suspect by the end of this four years nobody is going to be in much of a mood to forgive the republicans for a very long term. And shit, the dudes so infirm and unhealthy, I'd be unsurprised iif he simply doesnt live that long.
Well, unless they completely steal it , and we get president co
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I think the ACs posting with that sig are trolls impersonating rsilvergun. But it's funny because they're very good at making up the kind of verbosely crazy bullshit that he spews, and he deserves it.
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ffs Boomers weren't in charge of anything when they were 30 years old. It was the Silents and the Greatest Generation who vastly increased government spending and overreach and the military-industrial complex, and who let the ultra-rich take over the world.
Half of Boomers are still poor as shit (which, to be fair, took some remarkably bad planning on their part, given how easy it was to make money for the last 40 years).
The actual conflict is between the ultra rich and everyone else. The ultra rich are winn
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That trust fund they're talking about is specifically created for the large bubble of baby boomers it's supposed to go bankrupt.
No, the trust fund (actually two funds, but those details don't matter) was created when Social Security was created, well before the Baby Boom started -- but it's really a fiction. When social security tax revenues exceed social security payments, the surplus is used to purchase T-bills, which the trust fund holds. When payments exceed revenues, the T-bills are sold to fund the difference. The trust fund will be bankrupt when there are no T-bills in it to be redeemed.
However, the money from T-bill pur
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There's already a lot of wiggly behavior with sovereign debt vs. household; since you get into what currency the debt is denominated in and all kinds of hairy macroeconomics rather than a nice, simple, "assume that the economy is more mor
The subContinent has time (Score:3, Insightful)
The people not so much
before it becomes uninhabitable due to climate change
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This. According to current estimates, somewhere between 2050~2100 India will become so hot and humid that a human stuck unprotected outdoors might ordinarily suffer a wet-bulb heat death. It would become like a reverse Alaska, where for most of the year survival means living inside of cooled and dehumidified buildings. Unfortunately unlike for cold, you can't deal with potentially deadly levels of extreme heat just by adding insulation, something like a spacesuit with a powered cooling system would be neede
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Just to be clear, the "wet bulb death" claim is that a person stuck outdoors at 35C would die within hours even if they were in shade, resting, and had unlimited water. This claim about has zero empirical evidence, despite that temperature having been achieved numerous times within recorded history. There is not a single documented instance of a person actually dying under such conditions; it's based purely on lab predictions.
Dinosaurs lived for 300 million years in a world far hotter and wetter than what w
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*laughs in Australian*
35 degrees is a merely a warm summer day; I grew up in heatwaves without air conditioning.
That said, I would have low tolerance for a Canadian winter.
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You know what we don't have? That temp with high humidity.
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While we haven't fully documented a person dying from wet-bulb heat specifically, it's basic thermodynamics, we shouldn't have to conduct some kind of Josef Mengele experiment to prove that if you massively reduce the effectiveness of a human body's only cooling system, evaporation, through high humidity (a crucial factor, it's not just a matter of 35C+ alone) and turn the temperature up high enough they'll die. Do you have any hypothesis on how a person might survive this? Hundreds of people have likely di
I remember the coming Age of Leisure (Score:4, Interesting)
Inflation (Score:1)
Why is a pound of rice (or any food, really) 4x cheaper in Asia than in the US?
I'll tell you why .. it's because we fucked ourselves on housing by mass blocking every developer from building new homes. Reference: https://www.newsweek.com/san-f... [newsweek.com] That in turn caused inflation. Housing became people's biggest expense. We don't want new housing units in our neighborhoods and cities. So we blocked them. The end result: Housing in most places that have jobs has become unaffordable to most people. The only solu
Re:Inflation (Score:4, Interesting)
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Do a price comparison.
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GOOD - the purpose of this money was to pay the boomer social security bills. It was not supposed to be this giant pot of money lasting until the second coming of Christ that politicians could steal. Once the trust fund is used up, we can decide if we'd prefer to reduce social security benefits or to increase the FICA tax, either way it will be a pay-as-you-go-system as it was supposed to be in the first place.
WTF are you talking about?? Social Security in the USA was created during the great depression to ensure those that either 1) had no other means or 2) paid in go their due. Please read up about the history before you just spout bullshit. It is NOT a trust fund. It is NOT a pay-as-you-go-system (nor was it ever meant to be), it is a social safety net and pension for those who do not have another way of doing so.
If you think somehow America Will Be Great Again if we get rid of social security then you hav
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Please read up about the history before you just spout bullshit. It is NOT a trust fund. It is NOT a pay-as-you-go-system (nor was it ever meant to be), it is a social safety net and pension for those who do not have another way of doing so.
The 1935 Social Security Act did define a system that was designed as a pure pay-as-you-go system with the expectation that a large reserve would accumulate, but the 1937 recession convinced people to change that. Some believed that the SSA actually caused the recession because it collected a large pile of money ($2B; that's $48T in 2025 dollars) which was invested by the government, driving out private investment. Also, the recession created suffering among people who would soon be able to receive benefit
India has a lot of things (Score:4, Insightful)
I have had to deal with people from India for many years. Here's my analysis: the caste system there is still very strong. So what you get is educated people with a sense of entitlement and arrogance matched only (in many cases, but definitely not all) with utter incompetence. Mostly, it's people from the top caste who get the opportunities, and these are the people I have had to deal with. Individual Indian people may do well, but when you take somebody competent and ask them to deal with an upper caste "engineer", the only way it works is if you can find a way to work around the fucker.
I want to be very clear...this is not a one-off. I've had to deal with these people in situations where there was money on the line (and in one case, lives), and the only answer was to go over their heads and get somebody competent to get the work done.
Re:India has a lot of things (Score:5, Interesting)
I think you've misanalysed the situation. India's upper caste can be incredibly competent, but what they entire country is, is culturally task driven. People have a task, not a job. They do the task as defined, they don't have a tendency to think outside the box, come up with solutions, question others (and this makes it very difficult for us westerners to work with them).
Example from a few weeks ago: Security at our office. The guy's task was to put the bags through the xray machine. He didn't do the job of keeping the place secure, he just did the task. The fun part was EVERYTHING went through the xray machine. Regardless of how obviously pointless it was to xray, either because the thing itself didn't need xraying or because ... no one was sitting at the screen of the xray machine. We have the same situation with our Indian engineers. You give them a task to do they will do that task. If your request contains a typo that typo will be faithfully reproduced at the end. When asked if they saw that they say "yes, it doesn't make sense, I think it should have said xxxx, but I was asked to do it so I did it."
This looks like incompetence, it's not, it's just culturally different. I have great success with our Indian engineers since I frame their requirement to think into the task itself when we request them to do work. There's still a few incompetent people out there, but they come from all backgrounds.
Your view that the caste system causes incompetence is off the mark.
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Your view that the caste system causes incompetence is off the mark.
I would say that he is not wrong...
The cast system is the root cause of (and continues to reinforce) the cultural phenomenon you have described. The tendency to perform the task as assigned; to do as you are told without questioning, leaving the decisions to those whose function is to decide -aka those of higher caste.
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Yes but the OP postulated the opposite, namely that the higher castes (educated) are the ones who are task oriented. Maybe the caste system is the root cause, but the result is not distributed across different castes - rather it applies across all of them today.
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Unemployment numbers don't lie (Score:1)
This is a problem all over the world
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Done correctly, OF is a legit career path. While some may feel degraded doing it, other people actually like doing it. I'd do it if there was a demand for beer belly old people. It's not societal decay it's just entertainment like movies, sports, wresting, or magic shows. One could argue a civilization whose people watch a ball being tossed back and forth, instead of toiling on a farm, is societal decay .. I'd say it's a sign of advancement/evolution. A rich life, on top of Maslow's pyramid.
"Trust fund" (Score:2)
In the U.S., what J.P. Morgan analysts term a "Social Security cliff" looms by 2033, when the system's trust funds are projected to be exhausted ...
The "trust fund" consists of federal government bonds. Essentially, the federal government is saying "I owe myself $XXXX gazillion; that's an asset! I will be collecting that from myself, you just watch!"
I don't claim to have a solution, but let's at least be honest about the problem.
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in 2032, december 31st, a new bond will be issued for $XXXXX gazillion to be collected in 2066, problem solved.
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Scam callers won't live to an old age...oh my ! (Score:1)
Time? (Score:2)
1950 is a weird comparison year for Europe (Score:2)
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U.S. Social Security Cliff (Score:2)
[picture of a boot stomping on a young boy's head]
[zoomed out picture of a young boy holding a boot on his head]
Duh, grandfathering (Score:2)
>"Raising retirement ages -- what economists describe as the closest thing to a silver bullet -- faces older voting blocs, who now make up roughly 40% of those who turn up at the polls in European elections."
Of course people will vote that down in nearly ANY government. And for good reason. You don't change the age of retirement for people who have been promised something THEIR ENTIRE WORKING LIVES. Yes, retirement ages should increase, but it needs to grandfather people already working. It needs to