Comment Re:Hmm... (Score 1) 33
"China has a decade or two of growth over India"
Yeah but I think that's kind of his point. There's no inherent reason China should have a decade or two of growth over India other than the fact that India decide to skip the whole industrial revolution phase and try and jump into competition with 1st world nations on services. It looked good at first, and then it failed, and it failed hard. Mumbai went from being theorised to be the number 1 world financial centre now to currently being sat around 53rd in the world behind such well known financial centres as Almaty, Kazakhstan and Casablanca, Morocco.
The problem is that you can't have a services based economy without a great education system, and whilst India put a lot of money into marketing the propaganda that India has more graduates than the US has people or whatever, it turned out to be complete nonsense because your average India graduate was less well educated than your typical US high school student is at the age of 16.
That's not to say India doesn't have some great universities, and doesn't churn out some great graduates - you only have to look to see how many end up in Silicon Valley in well paid jobs, but the number of actual good universities is pretty poor. For example both the QS and Times world university rankings don't see an Indian entry until 200+, so if India can't even create a university that's within the top 200 world universities then it's at a clear disadvantage in the services sector. Simply sending students abroad to university cannot produce the volume you need.
China is basically pursuing the path of Western development at warp speed, it's going from an agrarian society, through an industrial revolution, to services in the space of 30 or so years - something that took the West a few hundred. India made a fundamental mis-step when it tried to skip that because you need the industrial step to create the necessary infrastructure and to provide the necessary income base.
"but does anyone really doubt manufacturing is on its way out?"
This is nonsense, it may be on it's way out, but you still need to produce those factories one way or another. We're nowhere near, not even close to robots that can self-assemble for any purpose. People are going to be essential in the field for a long time yet, and even as robots do take over some jobs, those robots are still drastically more expensive than 3rd world salaries workers. So whilst they may make sense for high tech manufacturing in the West where salaries are high, the business case just isn't there and wont be for some time in places like India and China. You can't just linger around until the tech does become available and then build all your factories with robots and have robots build your manufacturing base for otherwise India will be waiting another 50 years at which time the rest of the world will have forgotten about them completely.
"China has had rough economic times for the past decade as American manufacturing returns to American robots (at least, if the Chinese stock market is any guide - hard to be certain)."
You say you've researched things considerably before putting your money where your mouth is, but this doesn't even remotely resemble reality. The Chinese stock market has been in turmoil for the past week. not the past decade, and is now stabilising anyway. Over the last decade China has grown rapidly. It's growth has been between 7.5% at it's lowest, and 15% at it's highest since 2005. In contrast India has seen a low of 4% (barely better than developed economies) and a high of 10%. Chinese average growth has been far faster than India over the last decade. Yes Chinese growth is slowing but it's still much higher than Indian growth and that's more a sign of the fact that China has now grabbed most of the low hanging fruit and is having to compete on tougher terms. In India the low hanging fruit is still there, desperately waiting to be picked.
"Does the word "symbol" in my initial post confuse you? What about the word "inspiration"? As in "half the people my age I know who work in tech were inspired by NASA and science fiction". It's important for mankind that our reach exceed our grasp."
You're exactly right, but whilst India has neither the infrastructure to maintain growth in this sort of area without massive state subsidy, and whilst it completely fails to provide an education system that is sufficient to fulfil those aspirations that that symbol creates for the vast majority of it's people then still, what's the point? It's no use inspiring people to want to travel into space if you have not the means to give them the education required, nor to grow the sector due to lack of infrastructure.
India has a population of 1.25 billion people, but only about 0.5 billion of those people are able to match Western standards because that's all their institutions are able to support, and sure that's enough to get them a space station, but not much else.
China in contrast has made a point of starting from the beginning and following through every step, it has the infrastructure from the ground up, and more and more universities are reaching Western standards. China has 7 in the top 200 vs. India's none for example.
15 years ago India and China were the golden boys of the world economy, the up and comers, both expected to be the top two world economies. China is on track in second place, India fell by the wayside at 9th place, just beneath Italy - you know, one of the PIGS nations of economic crisis fame.
It's possible now that India has a relatively new leader they can finally turn things around, there's really nothing stopping them other than political will, but they've ultimately lost a decade.