But they surely aren’t revolutionizing the place with their genius.

The US and UK already have a sizable Indian population. Where are the great mathematicians, the writers, the philosophers, the thinkers? All I see is Anil Dash.

Great point on India and China IQ distributions. I knew there was something gnawing at me about the argument that China has a higher average IQ than India. This is it …

Ayn Rand once said that in America, the Democrats view human beings as “free spirits in bodies that should be chained to the ground”, and the Republicans view human beings as “productive robots to be programmed from Washington, DC”. Whether or not this is a fair characterization of either party is irrelevant to this discussion; but it’s interesting to see that “free spirits chained to the ground” is an apt take on where India is at in terms of political economy, while “productive robots to be programmed from Beijing” is an apt description of the world according to the CCP.

This naturally stems from the makeup of the human capital of both countries. The average IQs don’t tell us much; what tells us a lot more is the width of each country’s bell curve. India’s is broad and interesting; China’s is narrow and boring. The former is a product of thousands of years of caste breeding that has generated exceptional talents alongside masses that verge on the subhuman; the latter is the product of thousands of years of meritocracy and upheaval- a country where a man could be born a peasant and die an emperor, and born an emperor and die a bandit, gradually bred a population of competent mediocrity. If you spend much time among people who have come out of the top universities of both countries, you’ll spot the difference immediately. In Shanghai, I generally worked with graduates of China’s top educational institutions- and I’m married to a graduate of such an institution, Shanghai Jiaotong University. In general, these guys are driven, productive, competent… but show few marks of genius or originality. IQs in about the 120 range, in general. They can do their jobs well, but that’s it. (And when genius does emerge in China, it often finds itself subverted or smashed out.)

Indians, on the other hand… yow! In business school, I found that Indians were often the smartest guys in the room, or at least among them. India’s international business, academic and professional class is on par with that of America or Western Europe. There’s a tremendous reserve of talent there, genius- and the success of the IITs and IIMs shows it.

Thus, in India, we have a country with a fabulous, visionary elite- and no infrastructure with which to realize their visions.

OTOH, in China, we have a hive of productive worker bees; a massive population of literate and numerate people who have built a near-first-world infrastructure on a massive scale in record time… but lack much in the way of a real vision of where to go next, or much talent to get them there.

India is a golden crown with no body; China is a massive pyramid with no top.

Sadly, the likelihood of the two effectively working together is slim to none. Geography, culture, and mutual distrust stand between them. It’s more likely that China’s “progress” will instead be crowned/driven by some new trans pacific elites via the mediation of Sino-Anglo hubs like Hong Kong, Singapore, Vancouver and San Francisco; what influence India has on that will be via their diasporic elite. I don’t hold out much optimism for India as a polity or empire, whereas China’s impressive structure leaves much to build upon.

I remember once standing on the 35th floor balcony of my apartment in Dapuqiao, looking out over Shanghai, with a group of Indian classmates. One of them looked at the other and asked, “Why can’t we do this?”

I was too polite to tell him why, even though I knew the answer. I have a feeling he did as well.

But there are two problems. The first is that, so long as there is global free trade, there is no incentive to continue to develop better, cheaper pollution-mitigating technology, because operations can be outsourced to the winner of the race-to-the-bottom of health and safety regulations. This is the irony of progressive attempts to impose additional restrictions without simultaneously controlling for free-trade – they don’t get the innovation, and the pollution just moves elsewhere, unless it’s global in nature, like carbon emissions, in which case it’s a purely insane policy mix.

The second problem is that even a 10% additional cost will lose China it’s comparative advantage at its current stage of development. For what it’s worth, the Chinese claim they can’t afford to clean up their act just now because their industries are so cheap-coal-intensive, and they need to build wealth, capital, expertise, and sophistication, and rely on dominating the global market for these particular products, for the ‘temporary’ period they require to move up the value chain, at which point, they will copy the development trajectory of the West and other countries, and implement EPA-style regulations, and clean up the toxified sites, all of which they would now be able to afford.

“So, yes, the people suffer, but this is a noble and temporary sacrifice to build the future for the whole nation where ones descendants can enjoy clean air and water and live in wealth.”

Well, I’ll believe it when I see it. Maybe massive amounts of environmental retrofitting and cleanup will be China’s grand economic stimulus and make-work program circa 2025.

It is comical that a Chinese person should look down on Indians because of the ENVIRONMENT! (Snort)

If what I have heard and read about China’s unbreathable air is true, then it is better to visit a third world country than China. People in most third world countries kinda, sorta have cause to look down on China, for that reason.

If in your pursuit of wealth, you’ve made it so that you can’t breathe the air in any of your cities, then you’ve missed the entire point.

One challenge with holding up China as a neoreactionary ideal would be that, from a Hoppean perspective, it’s not really “owned” by anyone. Hoppe argues that monarchies do better than democracies because there is one guy at the top looking to maximize the value of his fiefdom over the long term. (Whereas in a democracy you have a never-ending chain of caretaker leaders who just want to skim off as much as they can while in power, and pander to the masses to STAY in power.)

Looked at through this lens, what really is the driving motivation behind the leaders in China? At least in part it’s to enrich themselves, hence the corruption. It’s an open question just how bad the current cooling off/downturn period will be. If it’s corruption all the way down, then the bad-debt pancaking effect could be worse than generally anticipated. That said, I like the fact that they have devalued the yuan, as that takes some of the pressure off. It should allow exporters to expand margins, while boosting the nominal value of iffy real estate. So hopefully it should work out all right.