Honestly I do not understand the subtle trolling here. If any country is making a big leap, without biases, just cheer for them. Getting to see humanity's progress, one country at a time, is a better thing compared to seeing none. When the highest populated country facing dozens of social issues, makes a space achievement at a tight budget, they deserve our pat on the back, not ridicule. Sure, they could be a generation lagging in the technology, but they are collaborating with other countries in aviation. Spacefaring is getting bigger, not niche. Comparing them to ESA or NASA is unfair given the gargantuan budgets they enjoy. There is progress and commendable one. Good job India! More miles to your rockets
By making comments like "poor country, donate money" and "Brits are sending money [...]" (actual flagged comments here) some of us are showing inherent racism. One world-one people, guys. It is really not that hard.
> When the highest populated country facing dozens of social issues ...
To put things in perspective: The US declared its "War on Poverty" in January 1964. Tried to send rockets to the moon in March 1964. Signed the Civil Rights Act into force in early July 1964. Got the first rocket to the moon successfully in late July 1964.
So it's not like other "space-faring nations" had everything sorted out before "wasting money on space adventures". That entire "They should fix their social net / railroads / ... before entering the space race"-thing is just pulling up the ladder behind oneself.
comparing india's poverty and social issues (in 21st century ffs) with usa's in 60s is like comparing apples and orangutans, congratulations is warranted but not patronizing
It wasn't meant as a quantitative statement, but you're making my point: if even the US of the 1960s (with its poverty and social issues) could afford to run a space program, how much more India of today?
Any criticism that India's space program resources are better spent elsewhere applied just the same to NASA (and in some ways still applies, given how backwards some parts and aspects of the US are): either people see value in such a program (then India is just fine) or they don't (then NASA should shut down immediately).
India’s poverty problems are leagues worse than the US in the 60’s. The 60’s were literally the decade of “sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll”. The post war economy meant the majority of people could afford to buy a house, car, and raise a family.
Meanwhile, a large portion of India doesn’t even have potable water.
you have no clue about india's problems, its like I talking about some central american country by just reading bits and pieces about it and rag picking facts to support on the interwebs with zero knowledge IRL, please stop
If you extrapolate developmental indicators historically (eg. the AHDI [0]), India in the 2010-2020 period is roughly comparable to the US in the 1950-1960 period.
None of this is surprising if you have an background with US economic history. Similar to India today, the US in the 1940-1970 period had an industrialized half (the North, Midwest, and Western US) and less industrialized hinterland (Appalachia, South, Southwest).
A major component of America's development was because of massive industrial projects targeting Appalachia, South, and Southwest America (eg. TVA, Space Grants, NASA Huntsville, Interstate Highways) along with the expansion of the social safety net (eg. Great Society, War Against Poverty, Civil Rights Act, LBJ's entire domestic policy)
India is seeing a similar transformation via large industrial projects and an expansion of the social safety net via welfare programs/yojanas/"freebies".
This can be seen starkly with Rajasthan (INC run) and Gujarat (BJP run). Both share a similar culture and had similarly laggard developmental statistics in 2000, yet by 2019 both have converged with each other [1], as well as at the developmental work occurring in both Uttar Pradesh (BJP run) and Odisha (non-BJP run).
When it comes to sci/tech/space exploration, it is difficult to segregate nationalism or anti-nationalism from the science and technology ambitions. When the Soviets launched Sputnik, it provoked the US to do the same, with a whole bunch of snickering. When the Chinese started their space ambitions, US became more concerned and argumentative. When the Chinese excelled in supercomputing, Obama tried to rally the nation towards unity in science/tech.
Snickering is part of the equation. And counter-snickering with big launches and achievements is also part of the equation.
It’s not an either/or situation. Developing space technology has historically helped the most vulnerable in India. From better weather prediction to help with protecting crops for farmers to helping prevent natural disasters, space tech has played an important role.
Looking at the number of school children cheering for the launch, that in itself is worth the investment. The spark in curiosity in a child is worth a multiple the amount invested.
I agree but if you want to see even higher doses of racism just change India with China and there will be a lot more here. unfortunately the media created extremely hostile environment toward non white countries that are slowly catching up and surpassing western technology
Nice to see this. India is poised to have a large aviation and manufacturing industry, yet all the hard-skills are in the west. (GE, P&W, Boeing, Airbus). ISRO and Brahmos can serve as a DARPA-esque seed for upskilling highly talented aviation engineering talent.
With HAL, Air India and the aviation industry going private, there might be more opportunities for prospective aerospace experts to build out their own industry after stints at ISRO/Brahmos.
India produces amazing mechanical engineers. As compared to other difficult to break in industries (Chips, Hi-tech agriculture, Genomics), India is actually well situated to break into the aviation industry successfully.
I think India will succeed in its space ambitions. I hope this one makes it! But aviation in general, not as much. China doesn’t have the ability to make engines for its own commercial airliners yet. India doesn’t have the industrial capacity to build the airliners themselves right now. HAL can build a few but India still depends on Russian jets.
Air India going private isn’t a sign of success in the industry. The government ran in into the ground, it got purchased without much of that debt, and the Tatas have limits to how quickly they can remove the tenured “government job” bureaucrats from the system. The government is still doing air India major favors by heavily restricting access to Indian passengers by foreign airlines (just this year they denied emirates an upgrade from 50000/seats a week, and denied a United/emirates codeshare agreement). This ends up hurting them too since they are limited to 50000/seats a week. One place I will give Indian aviation major credit is the air traffic upgrades they’ve done over the past 20 years. They are almost as safe as American airspace with some of the busiest airports in the world.
I think India has a lot of potential though, especially in medical fields, I mean 2/3 of the world already has Indian vaccines don’t they?
Govt. is reducing its investment in HAL and HAL had an IPO in 2018. [1][2]
Ofc, Indian institutions are averse to privatization. So it has been a slow process. That being said, the direction of change is towards steady privatization.
I am not an expert on their space program or the provenance of rocketry inventions but they seem to have developed both the cryogenic engine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE-20) and the boosters in-house (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikas_(rocket_engine) - according to the article, the initial design was based on the Viking engine back in the 1970s but haven't they developed it more since then?!). It also seems the payloads are also built in-house. I would be very interested in more details though.
that’s exactly my point. Those engines are incremental improvements on existing designs from the 1970s and 60s - hence why you will find this tech in western museums. There have been improvements - certainly - and the engines are now made almost entirely in India but the original point stands - the designs are not indian hence why we should temper our expectations of where Indian aerospace can go. They currently occupy the niche of cheap space launches and that is based on excellent work by ISRO and their partners.
That's a valid argument but still a bit strange. One could make the same argument about:
- chip design - modern processors are not fundamentally different from 8086, which also belongs in a museum. Sure, there's much higher transistor density and advances like pipelining, branch prediction, multiple cores etc. but fundamentally it's still the same physics and design.
- machine learning - aren't modern deep networks just scaled up versions (with some new architectural components although one can argue that even these were discovered in the 80s and 90s) of old ideas that still use gradient descent and backpropagation. this too sounds like incremental progress.
- commercial aircraft - aren't modern planes just incremental advances of 50-year old planes (the 747 is from the 60s). sure, they are more efficient, use lighter composites etc.
I guess my point is that either (a) technology as a whole has been making incremental progress when viewed from a certain lens, or (b) that while, superficially, a lot of technology still follows designs discovered decades ago, there have been substantial and deep improvements at various lower levels of the "stack".
Maybe a concrete way of looking at this particular issue would be to compare metrics like efficiency of the engines (is amount of thrust * time thrust was produced for / amount of fuel used = change in momentum / amount of fuel used, a useful metric?) or just raw amount of thrust produced? Then one could argue that an engine is essentially still the same as ones from a few decades ago.
Your thrust argument is borne out in the time it takes indian rockets to reach lunar orbit compared to even the USA’s saturn rockets from the 60s - a week in 2022 versus hours in 1970.
I’m not sure your comparison makes sense. The ability to develop chips is what i’m pointing out. That does not exist everywhere and developing that today is a monumental task. This is why chip design is limited to a few countries and fabrication to even fewer ones.
India first wished to purchase its way to space, but due to US embargo it was forced to develop its space program in house. Thus, it's very cheap to launch Indian rockets these days due to lack of imported parts.
In fact Indian rockets use computers fully made in India, and I think none of its software is taken from anywhere.
There were several attempts to derail its space program like mysterious deaths of Homi Baba, Vikram Sarabhai, arrests of Nambi Narayanan and defaming Madhava Nair, but Indian space program like a tortoise has put one foot forward every time.
The limiting factor for ISRO is not design and R&D, but it's the capacity of Indian industry to deliver. I think its rocket development is open source, any Indian industry can take its blueprints and volunteer to supply parts.
How they [ISRO] stir up such a passion amongst their employees is a mystery.
Are there any sources for your claim that "India's critical space technology is not designed or developed in India" as relating to recent missions such as this one?
Just like the US rockets were based on the German V2 designs. You don't see much mention of the US copying Germans whenever the US launches a rocket; and yet here we are.
It was the same with the Chinese around 20 years ago on the internet as well. A significant number of people in the west don’t want India or China to succeed. Asian countries know how to deal with this though- just don’t engage, ignore the opinions of that segment of the western population (in the case of China, literally block them out with the firewall) and keep chugging on. You silence them with results.
Instead of pointing out that many US rocket designs were German ones you launch into a personal attack. There is nothing wrong with borrowing technical work, just that rocketry is complex, needs investment and has a very long path to benefits.
Mostly the EU. Almost every other reason is at best rationalization in comparison. The same goes for Poland. though people from those countries don't necessarily like to admit that the reason they are richer than their peers (in this case, Argentina) is mostly due to geographical luck.
But Argentina also has a peculiar, almost hard to believe tendency to shoot itself in the foot economically
> Simon Kuznets, the winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize in Economics, famously stated there were four types of economies in the world: developed, undeveloped, Japan and Argentina
Spain benefits from being part of EU, Argentina does not have a "support system" like that and sanctified practice of bankruptcy. In the long run, Argentina will beat Spain but that requires them getting their shit together, which is a big if.
Economic projections like this are notoriously bad. For example, two editions of the same text book used the exact same graph showing the Soviet Union would pass the US is about 20 years... Despite the editions being twenty years apart.
Middle income trap is real. You do not grow like your teens and 20s in your 40s and 50s. Economies become big and complex, the character of the system changes and if the underlying demographics do not fit the growth model it is in danger.
Republic of Korea, Japan got rich before they got old. China got old before it got rich.
India disappoints both its optimists and pessimists. It is a middling country with growth spurts here and there, which is admirable in its own way.
> Middle income trap is real. You do not grow like your teens and 20s in your 40s and 50s. Economies become big and complex
Very true. Economic growth is going to be rough for Mainland China for the next several years, but that doesn't preclude becoming a developed country eventually.
China today in 2023 is at roughly the same spot as Malaysia, Taiwan, and South Korea were in the 1980s. All 3 countries became developed, but at different paces. For example, Malaysia only hit the developed country precipice in 2021 (0.8 HDI), Taiwan in the 1990s, and South Korea in 2000. South Korea and Taiwan didn't become Advanced Economies until the late 2000s/early 2010s.
> India disappoints both its optimists and pessimists. It is a middling country with growth spurts here and there
Because India is incorrectly being compared with China. India is 15-20 years behind China because China opened their markets in 1973-1978, while India didn't conduct similar market reforms until 1992-1996. When factoring that 15-20 year lag, comparisons start making sense [1]
I don’t know if you can call 7-9% growth for the last ~20 years (with the exception of 2020 during covid) spurts. It’s a consistently fast growing economy, at massive scale, that has maintained steam for more than two decades and doesn’t look like it’s slowing down.
No in the sense that one of the authors who coined the term did IRC follow up study and explicitly does not think it exists.
The mostly No part: middle income trap, according to the authors / as metric of development is about countries being unable to progress up higher value economic efforts, which then constrains per capita income potential. But the actual "trap" is being stuck in value chain. If one use that metric, PRC is LONG PAST middle income "trap", apart from US, PRC has relatively complete chain across broad spectrum of sectors in the world. Third place is not even close. The question is really what if even being competent and productive at everything simply is not sufficient to uplift everyone because base population is so massive. There's an upper bound on how many high skilled talent economy can support.
The yes part is being stuck in "middle income", which if you look at world bank revised 2024 high income range is 13,846, PRC 2023 projection is ~13,500, it's basically there, almost inevitable with a few more years of even modest growth even if threshold keeps getting revised up. And if you think PRC is massively lying about population like some demographers (-200m people) then PRC's been high income for a while.
The real question behind these "middle income" rhetoric with respect to PRC is can PRC reach advanced economy levels of high income, and the answer is unlikely because again there's simply too many useless people, 600m+ living on less than $2000 who got left behind by modernization that will drag the per capita stats down until they die. On the other hand they will be the first to go since cohort skews old. Let that stats settle in for a second though, ~40% of population contributes about 5% of economy. Once they start dying (2050+) PRC per capita will start trending towards advanced economy with high % of skilled people wages because PRC population with start reflecting composition of advanced economy without 200m+ farmers and 100s million more low skilled people stuck in informal economy. It's why Xi's China dream only targets modest 40k per capita by 2050 (I think in PPP terms). BTW even PRC demographers realized in 80s that PRC was trending towards old before rich, the entire will PRC get rich before old is western rhetoric. And TBH relative to PRC demography plan (one of the few examples of actual PRC long term planning) - PRC currently doing about expection.
>You do not grow like your teens and 20s in your 40s and 50s.
This is simplistic. A society with 25% skilled labour is going to grow differently than one with 60-80% (advanced economy). PRC is former, trending towards the latter. She's spitting out OECD combined in STEM talent per year, and even with 20% youth unemployment that's stupid amount of talent to improve productivity. The TLDR is PRC is in process of building 5x-10x the amount of skilled talent that pushed the them to 15T economy. It's the greatest high skill demographics divident in human history, even if net demographics will decline. The question is where will that get them? Advanced economy income? My guess is no, but will actually happen is PRC talent will increasingly compete and take pie from high income economies, and wages will start to converge. PRC will get modestly richer while advanced economies will start to get poorer.
On India, I think they'll be a much less successful PRC. Eventually they'll get there, i.e. they'll escape the middle income trap in the sense they will probably be able to competently develop most sectors indigenously - they won't actually be "trapped" by developement. But their sheer population 1.6B+ will likely trap their per capita by denominator of having so many unproductive people - India demographic divident is happening among their states with bad HDI. Nevermind unemployed STEM in PRC, their youth unemployment rate is like 40% (which western MSM doesn't seems to talk about) while being also being less educated with what talent they do generate being highly suceptible to being brain drained. It's... suboptimal.
That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. China's rise will accelerate even further. Growth rate is sinking because they switched to high quality development and dual circulation, which doesn't pump up the numbers as much as low quality development. Looking at Chinese industries, they are on the path of full spectrum domination, from aerospace, chip development, ai, mechanical manufacturing, high tech agriculture, research and so on. Look at the number of research fields where China is now #1. Look at the industries China is dominating.
> China's rise will accelerate even further. Growth rate is sinking because they switched to high quality development and dual circulation, which doesn't pump up the numbers as much as low quality development.
Don't you think those two are contradictory?
If what you say is the case then why is China struggling to retaliate in the chip war?
No, because high quality development focuses on innovation, sustainability and green development instead of raw growth via low quality development (construction, low-end manufacturing etc.) They could ramp up low quality development faster and thus achieving higher growth rates in the short term. But they are focusing on long term strategic goals.
China just retaliated by issuing export restrictions for some rare earths, which is an indicator that they are rapidly approaching self sufficiency in many aspects. There are still some major hurdles(EUV alternatives, high end AI accelerators, software stack) but if the current speed of development is any indication, then these too will be overcome and probably much faster than many anticipate.
> They could ramp up low quality development faster and thus achieving higher growth rates in the short term. But they are focusing on long term strategic goals.
Mathematically there can be only rate of growth at any point in time.
> But they are focusing on long term strategic goals.
You can say the same about US.
> There are still some major hurdles(EUV alternatives, high end AI accelerators, software stack) but if the current speed of development is any indication, then these too will be overcome and probably much faster than many anticipate.
It can go this or that way. With access to Western tech cut off, rate of pilfering from the West will also decrease, so that needs to be factored in too.
> Mathematically there can be only rate of growth at any point in time.
Huh? I don't understand what you mean by that. Different development strategies can result in different growth rates. Some will just take longer to ramp up but will pay off in the long term.
> You can say the same about US.
All major developed economies try to focus on high quality growth. The question is who is able to accomplish their goals faster/better. Considering the flexibility, strategic planning and political will, my bet in on China.
> It can go this or that way. With access to Western tech cut off, rate of pilfering from the West will also decrease, so that needs to be factored in too.
That is exactly why they are doing dual circulation and focusing on Latam, Asia and a Africa.
I know Peter Zeihan. He focuses mainly on energy and demographics. His predictions have a shoddy record. He is your typical "China will collapse any day now" think-tanker. In my opinion his analyses are simple and unscientific. He presents easy to digest ideas in an understandable way, he is also a great speaker. But if you actually deep dive into his narrative and the actual data, you will soon discover that he is mostly wrong or dramatically exaggerating.
Yeah he's just one voice though. Expats are leaving, Global companies are pulling out, the property market is finally crashing, the world is finding other suppliers. Its over.
PRC demographics, as in actual ability to coordinate and exploit divident is SIGNIFICANTLY better than India's whose trending toward's PRC demographers worst nightmare. 100s of millions of undereducated and underemployed youths while their brightest get brain drained to advanced economies.
PRC has the best high skilled demographics in recorded history in the next 30 years. It's only after mid century demographics / risk of Japanification is an issue. PRC demographic collapists (i.e. Zeihan tards) thinks PRC is going to tumble sharply from where she is now and soon, but really she's going to stagnate or fall slowly from a significantly higher position decades from now.
> PRC has the best high skilled demographics in recorded history in the next 30 years
This is a very questionable statement.
"China’s overall education rate is one of the lowest in the middle-income world ... Comparing China’s human capital with that of other countries, it is not only systemically lower than South Korea, Ireland, and other “graduates” out of middle-income status, it is also lower than virtually all other middle-income countries." [0]
This does not mean economic collapse or demise, but there is a very real human capital issue at a macro-level. That said, policymakers in the PRC know this and have been working with SIEPR at Stanford for over a decade on rectifying this at a policymaking level, but there are some very real systemic issues that mean China c. 2023 cannot be compared with countries at a similar levels of development such as Brazil, Thailand, Mexico, Malaysia, etc.
Yes, it's questionable if the context is per capita. But with PRC pop denominator effect, it's fine/prudent to also recognize absolute effects, the trend of PRC talent generation that bias towards skilled individuals means PRC will accumulate historically unprecedented pool of skilled talent over next 20 years since they have pipeline of 10-14m new birth for past 26 years for accessible future tertiary talent. Unless CCP completely cracks down on educating their population, with rate of current tertiary excess capacity and even if bodies get redirected into skilled vocational training, the country is trending towards ~100m new skilled over next few decades. Which assuming PRC has ability to retain and coordinate (and so far they've done reasonable job), that cohort is very much potentially the best/greatest pool of (TBF potential) high skilled demographics divident humanity has ever assembled in a generation period. Like there simply isn't any time period in the past where one country had population or institutions to do so, nor are any countries likely to match including US who would to increase immigration to politically unfeasible levels, or (IMO) India even with 1.6B pop unless they manage to not only stop crippling brain drain but also coordinate talent domestically on par with PRC capabilities. Hence PRC human capita can be per capita lower but also in aggregate better than virtually all other countries, including potentially US + immigration. Hence why c 2023 no one seriously thinks Brazil, Thailand, Mexico, Malaysia are currently or even potential future US competitors, while PRC with poor per capita education metrics is acknowledged as more than enough to be, because for some purposes, the more useful comparison is absolute vs relative.
E: And in agreement, yes there will be macro level issues to low per capita performance - it's not going to be pretty but it's not going to be collapse either. A country can simulatenously improve/lead at top while bottom languish/decline.
> Hence why c 2023 no one seriously thinks Brazil, Thailand, Mexico, Malaysia are currently or even potential future US competitors
Because all those countries largely aligned with the liberal international order and didn't try to antagonize their neighbors.
A notable exception to your list is Russia, a fellow upper middle income country that in 2010-2014 was on the precipice of becoming a developed country (HDI above 0.800 AND GDP per Capita above $12,000/yr c. 2010-13)
Russia began playing a belligerent role in Georgia/Abkhazia/Ossetia (2008-Present), Ukraine (2014-present), Syria (2015-present), and the CAR (2018-president) and we burnt multiple cycles worrying about them.
When I was on the Hill, we were honestly neutral/indifferent about China until you guys hacked our companies (Google, Lockheed Martin) and our government (OPM Hack in 2015, CIA in 2012-13).
This is just the US. The leadership in post-2011 China has unnecessarily antagonized Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Phillipines, India, Australia, and Vietnam despite all those countries preferring to the neutral in any US-PRC confrontation.
All the hawkish comments on here hoping for the collapse of the PRC are disgusting and do not reflect what those of us in a decisionmaking capacity or adjacent to those think.
Yet unbridled nationalism and hubris by commentators on both sides is impacting the ability to get shit done.
> Like there simply isn't any time period in the past where one country had population or institutions to do so, nor are any countries likely to match including US who would to increase immigration to politically unfeasible levels, or (IMO) India even with 1.6B pop unless they manage to not only stop crippling brain drain but also coordinate talent domestically on par with PRC capabilities
India in 2023 is a country with developmental indicators, institutions, and infrastructure largely on par with the PRC in the 2000-2003 period.
A lot of the same problems you mentioned about India are the exact same problems China faced and overcame, and the same playbook is being applied there.
In fact, the same kind of commentary you are bristling too is the exact same commentary people used to give China during the exact same time period, and it's kind of funny seeing Chinese commentators reusing the same comments we Americans made about China in the 2000-2015 period on India.
> A country can simulatenously improve/lead at top while bottom languish/decline
This is a still an open question. No country has ever transitioned from a developing country to an advanced economy with as crippling a Human Capital Handicap as the PRC today. The last large upper middle income countries that had a similar handicap were Mexico, Brazil, Türkiye, and Malaysia.
None of these countries are shitholes, but when they reached a similar pivot as China did today in the late 90s/early 2000s, they had the need to resort to extensive social and economic reforms. While Malaysia has succeeded at that, this hasn't been as successful in Brazil, Türkiye, and Mexico.
If I was a gambling man, I'd lean towards assuming this transition will be a protracted affair. Not "institutions collapse" bad but 7-10 years of malaise, because building human capital takes time and effort.
Or because those countries baseline size means their natural growth trajectory will not threaten western incumbents the same way PRC growth would, including modest 2% military budget which is enough to make everyone shit bricks. Nor would I characterize those countries as "largely" aligned with LIO seeing current headlines and it's not like India doesn't antagonize neighbours when PRC started spread influence in south Asia.
Difference between RU and PRC is RU actually mired in kinetic war with neighbours vs PRC grey zone that pushes region to some security hedging but not at expense of PRC trade. IMO that's natural/forgone, and let's not forget PRC antagonism was rarely PRC initiated. SKR over THAAD, Japan was always weary. PRC also last to reclaim/militarized SCS started by Vietnam (barring Brunei) but doing so at PRC scale revealed gap in capability causing others to hedge and they still do. Current US posture in region under Trump and Biden admins still pale in comparison to initial deterrence proposals of ringing PRC with missiles and agile basing. AU is AU they couldn't stay neutral if US pushed. But overall current US posture is still shadow of what they thought they could get despite going HAM on diplomatic efforts.
On India, note elsewhere I said I'm optimistic they'll get shit together eventually but unlikely to replicate PRC because they lack same levers for state capacity. It's not unreasonable to observe India does not have the same favourable headwinds as PRC in 2000s, i.e. PRC+1 is mostly shifting to where PRC willing to shift and that's ASEAN not India who is unlikely to capture PRC levels of manufacturing base and ability to snowball development for the simple reason that PRC is not willing to relinquish manufacturing advantage and west can only shift so much. The fact that India is at PRC early 2000s indicators despite starting with comparable if not favourable conditions and still not addressing some of the major social hurdles PRC has mostly addressed at the time (i.e. single language to facilitate migrant / labour transfers), reflect inherent inefficiencies that is relatively more difficult to coordinate around. India on par with PRC in 2000 is still India 20 years behind due to systemic differences that extrapolated will unlikely see India catch up at 1:1 time scale.
And yes consensus in washington was OPM fair game but PRC industrial espionage that pushed up PRC industry to compete with west was the real concern. Entire MIC2025 drama. And circling back to India this is exactly why they're not squeezing the level same tech transfers PRC was able to because everyone wised up. The playbook doesn't work as well anymore. US willing to cripple JP semi despite JP being fully LIO aligned, ultimately no one is going to want India to repeat a PRC including the PRC. Nevermind studies showing export oriented models working increasingly less well - countries milk industrialization opportunities faster and settle at lower levels of income due to labour saving technologies that remove a lot of human potential from being realized. Will India make it? Again IMO, yes, but it will take longer and the race against Indian demographics much more difficult. PRC "only" saddled with 600m farmers and informal economy "halfwits" despite deliberate family planning policy to mitigate, India will likely have 1B+ having tried and fail family planning of their own, that's another tier of drag to govern around.
>No country has ever transitioned from a developing country to an advanced economy with as crippling a Human Capital Handicap as the PRC today.
Sure but PRC doesn't need to be advanced across the board it needs regions to be sufficiently advanced to compete with advanced economies and by and large it already has at the scale of tier 1/2 efforts. PRC isn't a large country - it's a massive country the scale dynamics operates differently than turkey mexico or malaysia. At PRC scale, 5M STEM per year is enough to saturate/build up strategic industries with talent and directly challenge advanced economies across the board vs 100,000s of from "large" countries that still has to pick and choose. I'm one of the first to note PRC isn't going to uplift everyone to advanced indicators but it will uplift enough to be extremely competitive and resulting in advanced economies also suffering malaise (which many already are) by spreading out the pie. Convergence is as much about PRC doing better but also incumbents doing worse because they need to compete with segements of PRC that can compete. And that segment set to massively expand in next 30 years while current level is already competing/leading in industries with historically dominant western share. Time and effort has been put in via initiatives in 90s and early 00s and we're approaching divident reaping phase. There's a decent report on PRC leveraging scale in domestic efforts and eventual effect on oversea share of incumbents and effect was something like 50-90% reduction in operating margins of leading (mostly western companies) when PRC pushes surplus abroad. Hence why PRC competitiveness at even current PRC scale enabled by low % per capita skill is making advanced economies justifiably nervous.
Yet will continue to be among the worst in the world in all per capita metrics. Is having a large economy really that meaningful when the benefits are enjoyed by the top 0.1% and not able to trickle down?
That’s essentially impossible. The birth rate in India is below 2 at this point so the population will drop. That combined with a larger economy means the per capita metrics will improve.
Sure it will. Just like China would surpass the US by 2018 and then it didn’t happen. These only apply if the US does nothing and let’s these countries do so.
Congrats India. There will be people here saying "Poor country, donate money" etc, but this is necessary. It will boost the economy and inspire the nation. Some people just don't get that.
In every such comment thread I read a hundred justifications of "people will say India is a poor country but...", yet literally no one has been saying it. Congrats to everyone involved in the effort, now move out of the victim complex.
Okay sure, but why are the top 100 comments on every such article replying to the bottom 10 comments? Who not just ignore them and celebrate the achievement instead? The only thing the white knights are doing is giving them more attention.
given that space is hard, any progress in this direction has real and practical repercussions for all of humanity; for example, knowing how to handle metals, chemicals, mechanical systems, logical systems (production chains and industrial production), lighter and more powerful computers, human biology and so on
furthermore, the fascination with space missions generates hordes of inspired children who will study and thus this plant the seeds of scientists for future generations who will solve tomorrow's problems (in practice, it is a long-term investment)
of the race to the moon we now have the practical and common use of transistors and chips, led, batteries, pace makers, medical pumps, thermal insulation and dozens of other things we use and take for granted every day
to prefer little and bad immediately at the expense of much and good in the future is a very short-sighted and stupid attitude
What makes you think India hasn't been investing in railway safety? While the recent accident was unfortunate, number of railway accidents have been decreasing over years. Here is an infographic:
Yeah and India isn’t even that broke that people trot out the same argument every time. There’s way more money being wasted in just Mumbai’s municipal corporation.
By boosting domestic knowledge and talent in the creation of advanced materials and machinery such as turbopumps, knowledge of fuel injection technology, programming, and electronics
To explore water on the moon, you send a rocket to the moon. Think of the rocket as the top of a very tall pyramid. To build the rocket, you need to build expertise in a lot of different areas: both at the science level (physics, chemistry) but also at the engineering level (material science, fabrication technologies, fluid dynamics, software engineering, jet pump technology) etc etc..
You can think of these as lower levels of the pyramid that support the rocket at the top. Each of these require people to learn these things at a very high level. Local firms must learn to manufacture complex components at high tolerances, universities must produce graduates who are good enough to tackle these problems, government departments have to build the expertise to manage these projects. Forming even more of a broad base of the pyramid.
Once you have built the rocket, all this expertise doesn't just go away. All these trained people, and the processes and institutions that created those trained people, will not go away. They will go into other areas and solve other problems in a much better fashion than if they had not been trained such.
If you instead try to build a car instead, the pyramid will be much shorter, and the type of expertise required will be much less. The training processes will be worse. The spillover effects into the economy would be much less.
Imo, both positions are extreme. I mean to play devil's advocate here. As I think you are doing too.
However, it is not "unnecessarily" pessimistic. There are actual fiction books, congressional hearings, military strategies in motion that play out such outcomes. The US has a space force command. And missiles to space have been sent to knock out targets.
Calling it a fallout, implies when all things fail and hell breaks loose.
Congrats to India on the successful launch, you can't underestimate how inspiring and source of pride this would be to Indians, especially the young aspiring technologists. Having said that, the hard part is in the landing though, which happens only mid next month.
This is such an good news. I hope more countries join the spacewagon. Space is final frontier for humanity. Once we figure out consciousness, load it into our AI superlord robots and send them for interstellar travel, who knew what they will bring. Possibilities unlimited.
A video call with fellow human of another planet will be dope. Till then, live long and prosper!.
Found some negative comments by Indians but then this is a typical attitude of subcontinent, people hardly celebrate good things. I experience same here in Pakistan.
Anyways, congrats India, this is not something casual. The entire ISRO team deserves the applause.
PS: Dumb question, why is it taking so long to reach to that region of moon?
Rough terrain,extreme temperature variations,long periods of darkness,communication difficulties with Earth,limited options for safe landing sites,navigation and guidance complexities etc.
Congrats india and wish they make the rover work this time.
I’m a believer that humans may take 100s of years to be multi planetary, but we’ll be making increasing semi-autonomous intelligent rovers that help us build habitats in space.
Mars and moon is 100% robots. It’s an incredible achievement to put intelligence on other planets.
>One major investment in an Indian bank, intended to expand financial services for the poor, in fact led mainly to expansion of the bank’s credit card business and corporate lending.<
How and why is 'investing' called 'aid'?
I would like to see an itemized bill for the whole 2.3B please.
*A Foreign Office spokesperson said: “Since 2015 the UK has given no financial aid to the government of India. Most of our funding now is focused on business investments... "*
More often than not, reading beyond just the headlines can be helpful.
To me whole of India is basically a mini San Francisco. Yes, water is not clean, yes even now poor people need to walk long distances to get clean water and daily ration of rice at a lower price but these are not because the country is in need of money. It has more than enough money to handle the basic needs of most of its citizens, its government is garbage, inefficient, corrupt and ignorable. If we had any CEO of a tech company run India (think Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Shantanu Narayan), they’d make it a relative paradise in a decade, India could easily reach the living standards of Vietnam, South Korea etc.
Alas, in that context this technological progress is still a good thing because diverting money to more govt bureaucracies will not fix anything. At least here we see the money going to somewhat good use. Though from what I’ve heard, ISRO is also a bloated bureaucracy, albeit in the same way NASA is a bloated bureaucracy compared to SpaceX (ISRO is for all I’ve heard worse than NASA in how bloated and inefficient it is, I’m surprised they ever manage to launch anything)
By making comments like "poor country, donate money" and "Brits are sending money [...]" (actual flagged comments here) some of us are showing inherent racism. One world-one people, guys. It is really not that hard.