I agree on the mentioned hurdles. But are you thinking about India going beyond the middle income range? I meant reaching upto the level that China is right now, which is middle income range. Maybe we’re arguing semantics. Just to make clear, what is your estimate of peak indian per capita income ?

No way in hell India can coordinate enough to be nothing close to China today. Look, if India were a homogeneous nation of 30 million they could plausibly pull off a Morocco. Even a Tunis. But given the mess of disparate nations and jatis in their lousy piece of real estate and their level of overpopulation, there’s no way in hell they can organize a properly functional state. Not gonna happen.

You guys think what China, the country with the longest history of unified government on Earth, has achieved was just a fluke. It wasn’t. It was damn hard and only made possible because China has the smartest people on Earth running on the political capital of 2500 years of rational government. And even they are having trouble pulling away of the middle-income trap. This stuff isn’t easy.

Mauritius is the existence proof for possible indian development. Basically peasant indian stock, but with good institutions. It’s doing fairly well right now. Nowhere near Taiwan or Singapore, (possible chinese comparison), but stil doing well. If Indian percapita reaches mauritius levels, I would consider indian development a roaring success. Again, I don’t think India will overtake china in level of development at any given moment of time, but India most certainly will reach the current level of chinese development sometime in the next 25 to 30 years.

Indians may not be smart on average, but they are conscientious. Who knows that a bunch of them might find the right combination of complementarities with computers, ala “Average is Over” (Tyler Cowen) and average income could rise.

None of this is counting the Indian diaspora which is disproportionately selected from the higher castes. They will mostly be living in other, more comfortable countries.

Yeah, of course oil is not used for energy production, but I kind of doubt anyone is going to pave over US deserts with solar power stations in order to have the ‘leccy for all those cars. NIMBY and BANANA rules!

It’d endanger desert tortoises or something. And in case of solar-thermal power generations, those things are ‘death rays’.

http://www.thewire.com/national/2014/02/nevadas-massive-solar-plant-death-ray-birds/358244/

Doesn’t matter that kitties kill far more birds (estimates range from 1.5 to 4 billion in the US alone), or that scaring birds away with fake or rael birds of prey works pretty well.

It looks like Saudi production has peaked, and is only going to decline. The more they keep the production up now by using better extraction methods, the faster the decline is going to be. US conventional oil peaked gently, same is probably not going to be true for Saudi oil.

Of course, shale oil and gas adds a lot of unknown variables into the mix, the size of such reserves is unclear. It’s a new technology, and there has already been a lot of wild-ass guessing. Poland’s shale gas reserves went down 90% after a re-assessment. And you can bet US companies are probably over-optimistic concerning future production. After all, being overly optimistic is so very human and extremely common in leader types who usually head businesses.

But, one thing is pretty much sure – such oil and gas can’t be economically extracted at low prices, and cheap oil is a very finite resource, so expecting $40 oil to be a reality for a long time seems sort of unlikely, the same as expecting oil prices to spike to $300.

You’re really just engaging in petulant, r-selected herd behavior here.

1. Kgaard says it will, and a good rule of thumb is to bet against anything he says.
2. Indians are stupid on average.
3. Those who aren’t are leaving in droves.
4. 50% of children are malnourished.
5. That won’t improve with further population growth.

India has 27 379 500 births a year. If that kept stable for 70 years it would mean a population of 1.9 billion.

Of course it’s not going to happen. Malnourishment will grow until they actually starve. That’s not how a country develops.
It will get worse until it gets better; best case scenario it breaks up and each region tries to fix the mess by itself. But there’s point 2. to constraint how good it can get.

At any rate it won’t reach Chinese levels of development in our lifetimes.

Something like two decades of low energy prices ahead, if the established pattern is prolonged. There’s either a valuable futurist building-block there, or a provocation for futurological discussion.

“Low energy prices” is quite the understatement. We’re looking at a deflationary death spiral that will destroy the economy unless there’s some reasonable demand management.