Helpful to keep in mind that India recently changed the way it calculates GDP by updating its base year and moving from a cost-of-input calculation to an expenditure calculation. This will give it a nominal boost as many currently non-market activities (cooking, cleaning, child rearing) enter the realm of the market as paid-for services, and are thus counted in the GDP calculation.
More on that in this previous article and discussion:
One thing that high growth inevitably brings is the negative externality of pollution, as we've observed in China. GDP figures still do not account for this hugely important factor that degrades the quality of living of those in the affected area, as well as the spillover to the oceans and the atmosphere from improper disposal of waste (burning, dumping). It will be interesting to see how bad the pollution gets as manufacturing continues to ramp up, according to the higher "economic complexity" (read: diversified basket of exports) per Harvard's analysis.
I was just in India in September and there are massive hydro-electric programs going on. Those have their own problems of environmental degradation and damage but I think India is keenly aware of seeing what has happened to China and is trying to avoid some of the same mistakes where possible.
I don't have a study to back it up, but it seems the high pollution levels in Indian cities are mostly because of extremely high vehicular density - based on my unscientific observation that most polluted areas of Delhi are next to transportation depots/stations.
Anand Vihar - a suburb of Delhi - for example, is the most polluted place in the world, but that's also because it's the gateway to Delhi for people from the state of UP(200m population). There are like 100 buses coming into that place every few minutes!
But then, there can be solutions which don't negatively affect growth - public transportation, more and better planned cities to reduce vehicular density, and most important of all, elimination of subsidy on diesel - because the sources of pollution aren't fundamentally tied to growth.
I don't usually buy the argument that high growth will bring abnormal levels of emissions in the Indian context. I think that's because manufacturing can be never be the engine of growth in India, because of inherent, almost unfixable problems we have in India.
So, that's why I think that the Indian growth story is fundamentally different from Chinese growth story - or even any other growth story in the world, and it's important to keep that difference in mind.
1. High Govt regulation, permission, licensing, red tape, labor laws, politics
2. Irregular power and water supply
3. Poor infrastructure/Logistics- Roads, Bridges, Rails, Ports
They won't. Software oddly, managed to avoid dealing much with the Govt because no one understood it, customers were overseas, it brought in much needed foreign exchange. Software succeeded in spite of all this.
> That's interesting; shouldn't cost-of-input, income, expenditure measures all equal the same amount?
In theory, yes, they're all the same.
In practice, measuring each of the three has its own challenges, which means the raw numbers will differ.
It's just like physics - you can use the work-energy theorem or Newton's laws and arrive at the same result in theory, but depending on the experiment you're running, one may be easier to measure accurately than the other, and you'll end up with slightly different numbers on paper.
The ranking puts German growth prediction to be almost zero while Japan's to be 2.8? I call this rubbish. Both countries were in the last years demographically pretty similar.
Both countries are however diverging pretty swiftly. While productivity in Japan was falling it was increasing in Germany. Moreover the recent development showed that Germany was making gains in demographics with higher birth rate and net migrations. Japan on the other hand was falling in recession several times in the last 5 years alone. Even without extrapolating the current trend, it is obvious that Japan would not do much with regard to its demographics while Germany's demographics is actually changing very quickly (and rather favorably).
> Moreover the recent development showed that Germany was making gains in demographics with higher birth rate and net migrations... Germany's demographics is actually changing very quickly (and rather favorably).
First, higher birth rate and net migrations are usually a (short-term) drag on GDP, not a boost.
Secondly, you can't look at Germany outside the context of being a member of the EU and Eurozone (and currently a very important creditor in the Eurozone). That has a huge impact on Germany's economy.
you can't look at Germany outside the context of being a member of the EU and Eurozone (and currently a very important creditor in the Eurozone)
This is exactly right. If a few of Germany's key debtors end up defaulting and exiting the Eurozone, a prospect not so far out of the realm of possibility given the leftward political trend in those countries, then Germany could fall on hard times very quickly.
German export oriented economy needs EU and South Europe cannot devalue their currency and pose threat to German export economy. If they move out of EU and devalue their currencies, Germany is in big big trouble. Disintegration of Europe is delayed but very likely narrative of the decade.
> First, higher birth rate and net migrations are usually a (short-term) drag on GDP, not a boost.
This was my thought as well. Germany has publicly declared that they will take 800k refugees (plus there are likely to be several hundred thousand undocumented immigrants). That will be a huge drag on their economy for a few years, but the long term result is projected to be very positive for their economy.
Is there some reason that we should believe that Harvard put little thought into their predictions? An hour doesn't go by on the Internet where someone isn't calling something rubbish based on their limited understanding of a given subject.
Economic Complexity is a bit weird as it only considers actual goods. For instance in the US, around 80% of the US works in a service providing job, and therefore are not considered as adding to economic complexity (that's most of us).
I don't really know how this ever gets wound back in, and would love if someone had an article on how it does. Just something to keep in mind though.
It is sort of horrible, once you think about it. Africa is the last continent on earth to have abundant wildlife. Development in Africa would mean we lose a large portion of wildlife on earth, forever.
You value African wildlife more than improved living standards for the 100s of millions of Africans? I think we should preserve the wildlife as best as we can but I think we should also value increased standards of living for 100s of millions of people....
I understand your point. But don't you think the wildlife are equally important?
There are 7 BILLION people on earth... but there are just 5000 rhinos, for example. That's 1.5 MILLION people to a rhino. This is one of the most magnificent species to have ever walked earth - why shouldn't we prioritize preserving it over human comfort? Why do you value increase in living standards over a sentient species that all things considered, is a form of life just like humans?
> But don't you think the wildlife are equally important?
The implicit end of that sentence is "equally important to the hundreds of millions of Africans living there." And to that, emphatically no.
People are more important. Full stop. I am no anti-environmental activist. I want to see renewable energy take over fossil fuels, I want to see conscientious business taking environmental factors into account at all steps of production. But given the 100% false dichotomy of "African development" or "animals" I am going to pick the one that helps one of the most impoverished, war-torn regions on the planet every time.
Because one of them is a human being and one isn't.
The fact that that's a question that was even asked is shocking, and honestly disgusting. Yes, people are more important than animals. To imply otherwise is downright idiotic.
I don't think it is. But that said, I guess perhaps we as human beings are biased towards our species and/or empathize better with the human condition.
Both lions and humans (like most, or all, animals) are sentient.
You may be referring to some concept of intelligent self-awareness, but you need to be more clear as to what it is to evaluate whether its a real difference between humans and lions; lots of animals have demonstrable self-awareness of various forms.
I agree that the human condition is more important, but I don't think your explanation of why holds up.
One of them we know to be sentient. We can't be so sure about lions.
I'm not talking about higher-order intelligence, I'm talking about sentience -- the ability to experience.
It is rather simple now to find a program that would defeat the original formulation for a Turing test, but no one would describe them as having consciousness.
However, I believe it very possible that humans are doing much the same thing with a sort of sentience Turing test that we project onto animals. They _seem_ to have experience, because they react to stimuli. But the same is true of the computer.
We know that creatures with basically nothing in the way of a brain, take earthworms or severed octopus tentacles, will react to pain, hide from it.
We also know that pain has two parts -- a conscious experience, and an animal aversion. This is made clear by the existence of Pain asymbolia, where a person gets damage to the insular cortex (a lower part of the brain), and is no longer averse to pain, despite reporting that they still experience the pain just as they did before the injury.
I believe it quite likely that consciousness exists in the human brain alone, and is of very recent evolutionary vintage, evolving in conjunction with language. That when humans project sentience on their pets they are basically falling in love with a biological automaton, no different from a person falling in love with a chat-bot.
Unless we find a reason to believe that mere programming couldn't account for the behavior of animals (which seems increasingly unlikely, as our own rather rudimentary robots advance), it seems much more likely that evolution would have evolved the simple instinct system first -- only adding consciousness later on when it became an evolutionary necessity, as could have been the case for complex communication about qualia.
You suggest making better the life of the sentient being even if it kills a non-sentient being? What about a mentally handicapped person who is not sentient?
Given the choice between lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and offering huge economic opportunity to a stagnant global economy and some arbitrary (and disputed) danger to wildlife, development is the only choice.
The snarky answer is probably something about how lions would not be setting up Human Preserves if the situations were reversed.
"lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty"
Objectively, humanity most closely resembles a cancer. The more you feed it, the more it grows. It tramples everything in its path. The belief that somehow exponential economic growth is going to fix everything and everyone will lead happy middle class lives in some kind of harmony with nature is delusional. We are in the midst of the largest mass extinction event of all time. In developed places, the natural forests and wildlife are 90-95% gone. The only places where nature still truly thrives are in undeveloped regions - the rainforests of Papua New Guinea, the amazon, the plains of africa. As "development" accelerates in these places, they too will destroy nature in the name of the eternal quest for positive economic growth, attainment of first world healthcare, buying a car.
In modern economic terms, subsistence living in small communities barely registers as existence at all. However it is the way most of humanity lived for most of history. And generally it seemed to be a satisfying way of life. We evolved to live in this way.
We think of people living in situations of subsistence as being unbearably impoverished and disadvantaged now. We have no evidence that we are really any happier or more fulfilled than them. We have longer life expectancy, and we spend much of it isolated and lonely and sick.
Arguably, Clovis people at the end of the last Ice Age killed off the majority of large mammals in North and South America. Living at a subsistence level is no real remedy against impact on the environment.
What I believe will happen, and really, we are already starting to see this happen in the United States, is that the concentration of humanity into denser populations in the urban and suburban zones means that the more rural zones become abandoned and grow back up. New England is more densely forested now than it has been in 200 years, because the population has concentrated in the cities, and land that was formerly cleared for intensive agriculture has fallen into disuse.
Which is interesting considering you're posting that argument on a forum on the internet, run by a company whose entire existence is based around economic expansion and acquisition of material wealth.
What's wrong with people living in huts? People can be at harmony with nature, there's no need to force them into buildings. There certainly is no indication that living in a brick house makes someone happier than living in a hut.
> Why do they deserve to be prioritised over the millions of other species on earth?
Hmm...should save a human or an animal? Wow this sub thread is shocking. Let me throw in my obnoxious hat into the ring; why not get rid of useless/unproductive/racist/bigoted/terrorists/middle management people to save the animals? Even better, why don't I unilaterally decide who is important and who isn't just to save animals? Just....wow.
Nobody is really talking about killing people in this thread. What is being said is that the unnecessary development of Africa will lead to a population explosion and vast increase in consumption of resources that will hurt animals. We should not be encouraging development, and should focus on curating the African wilderness.
Who is this we? If people in Africa want to exploit their natural resources to develop and improve their lives, they should be free to do so. Everybody else has.
It's a little hypocritical for Westerners who have already reaped the benefits and costs of development to pull the ladder up after themselves for the rest of the world. I'm not of the persuasion that colonialism was the worst thing ever since the start of time, but it is especially hypocritical and racist to say "Oh, sorry, we built some shoddy infrastructure, wrecked a lot of your traditional society, and used you to extract resources, now you should go back to living in grass huts and dying of treatable diseases to save the rhinos."
If Africa can develop by skipping some of the shittier stages of agriculture->industry->post-industry evolution that we've experienced in the US, or Europe, or China, then that's a good thing.
Maybe the Westerners who exploited these lands should pay reparations to Africa and fast-track their development past industrialization. Or just offer Africans resettlement in Europe and the United States, thereby preserving African wilderness.
Amen.
Or developed nations should give away clean technologies to developing nations; as I'm writing this it sounds laughable since I can totally see a CEOs saying "How do we answer our share holders for giving away technology?". Well obviously saving the planet is secondary to filling the pockets of a rich few.
No we aren't. Birth rates slow to replacement levels or lower in first world countries. Look at Japan, or the US and Germany which are only growing due to immigration.
This is not even correct. Endangered species are much safer in the US than Africa, because nobody is eating them for survival or poaching them to sell to the Chinese. Strong institutions and better-than-sustenance jobs are how to protect wildlife.
You are partially technically correct, except for the minor detail that the native tribes who probably hunted most of the American megafauna to extinction didn't believe in "Manifest Destiny" per se. The reason there were so much buffalo around when Europeans showed up was because all of their typical predators had been killed off a long time ago.
Also, as far as I can tell from the limited research I care to do, there has never been a rhino species native to the New World.
So to answer your question - there were probably never any white rhinos in America to begin with, and had there been, the Americans who would have killed them are not the Americans you seem to be referring to.
Do you really think that dirt poor countries are better at preserving wildlife than countries where people do not starve to death, die from diarrhea or burn every bush within reach for firewood?
I think it depends a lot on what any growth is based on. If I understand this report correctly, their definition of economic complexity ranks countries with varied exports a lot higher than single minded commodities exporters. A Kenyan drug or machinery maker is unlikely to hurt wildlife much.
Well, I look at it from the perspective of history. Wherever modern human development has taken hold, we've had a degradation of animal life. It happened in Europe, it happened in China, it happened in America after it was colonized.
A lot of African people live in harmony with their environment. It is external development (investment from China, globalization etc.) that is hurting wildlife in their areas. Why should we accelerate the process of their development? There's absolutely no indication that an industrialized people are happier than a people living as hunter-gatherers, for example. Just let Africa be.
>There's absolutely no indication that an industrialized people are happier than a people living as hunter-gatherers, for example. Just let Africa be.
I think it's for Africans to decide how happy they are watching their children die from diarrhea so that zebras have more space. They will make their choice, but for the overwhelming majority of Africans the choice is not between being a hunter-gather society once again and destroying wildlife. That's a fantasy.
There are much more important (and realistic) choices to make, such as how many children to have, how to beat corruption, how to skip some of the more polluting sorts of development models, how to finance modern infrastructure that enables a modern economy, not just one based purely and digging up commodities until boom turns to bust.
The way to avoid destruction of wildlife is to have to have good policies, good education, good infrastructure and modern industries like IT, telecoms, finance, pharma or entertainment.
In order to go back to hunter-gatherer societies, the first thing you'd have to do is kill 95% of the population. Doesn't sound like a happy solution to me, but if you are so fond of it, please start doing it in your own country and just let Africa be.
Making a prediction for one year may be more difficult than making a prediction over 10 years. Over 10 years, structural factors will dominate, but in any single year something like inventory fluctuations or commodity price jumps/slumps can make a prediction look very incorrect.
The economic complexity chart is interesting. It basically says that all oil producing nations experienced a decade of rapid simplification. That's not what I think happened with the Gulf/Middle East nations with their forays into real-estate, transportation, and tourism.
India has no way to go but up, IMO. Half the country is illiterate, fer chrissakes. Get that number down and growth is more or less inevitable. Social unrest is inevitable as well, though.
More on that in this previous article and discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10649925
One thing that high growth inevitably brings is the negative externality of pollution, as we've observed in China. GDP figures still do not account for this hugely important factor that degrades the quality of living of those in the affected area, as well as the spillover to the oceans and the atmosphere from improper disposal of waste (burning, dumping). It will be interesting to see how bad the pollution gets as manufacturing continues to ramp up, according to the higher "economic complexity" (read: diversified basket of exports) per Harvard's analysis.