Dear NL Hafta team,

I’m new to NL. So here goes. If too long, please read Part B on air only. Part A is for Abhinandan on his crazy prediction at the end of this week’s Hafta.

Part A:

This time on NL Hafta, you made some crazy sociological predictions about the world, based on China. China is not going to be the superpower of the world economy that the US is today. That’s because it’s trying to be Japan and Japan hasn’t grown for 30 years. Average productivity growth in manufacturing properly measured over the past several decades since post-WW2 is 5-6 per cent and demand growth is 1-2 per cent. So, more manufacturing jobs are being lost every year. We don’t need as many people employed in manufacturing. Therefore almost all manufacturing is going to disappear. Thus, China is fucked, like Japan has been fucked. This is going to give rise to a world of services economies, none of which are dictatorships. It would be an oxymoron to have an authoritarian service economy. Also, women have the advantage in the services economy, naturally having more complex skills of socialisation when compared to guys—part of the reason why they do better than guys at school and in developed countries’ college education. Another reason being guys tend to mature later. So, if we are going to be real Marxists about equality, one option would be to delay boys’ education post-puberty by a couple of years, letting them beat one or more out during that gap. This is what Surjit Bhalla’s book is about, by the way. Interesting consequences for dating in developed countries. (Please read Date-onomics by Jon Birger, if interested. Or watch this for a quicker summary of the book.)

The world is going to be multipolar, with India being either a big dog or a chihuahua-Great Dane hybrid. It depends on how we do with our human capital or breakthroughs in medical education.

Also, the reason everybody currently tries to be like the US is because it’s more open than most countries. I think it’s a country that has amazingly managed to create a society that has only monetary incentive and no social incentive, unlike other countries. Google Michelle Gelfand’s work on “tight and loose cultures“. There is a certain Japanese-ness, Chinese-ness, German-ness, but a country of immigrants like the US has no real social norms, which gives it flexibility and gives me a 10-year tourist visa instead of a three-day visa for vacation.

On corruption, South Korea was extremely corrupt for several decades. The US, Sweden, Germany, etc. had more than a century of corruption. India is currently around 1860 AD levels of per-capita income of the developed world. By those standards, India is comparatively very clean. So, pessimism might have to be tempered. On the other hand, maybe not. I could recommend books if interested.

Would you know the cost of activism in India, as done in some study? How great a percentage of the GDP suffers because of activism (blocked dams, non-availability of land, etc.)? Any links to this would be of interest.

Part B:

Regarding reforms for journalism, I have three main suggestions.

1) Get rid of headlines. Make them boring, not sensational. (The Hindu does a good job. The Wire, Scroll, Swarajya—bad.)

2) Don’t use adjectives (or minimise their use). For example, “The women’s harrowing experience…” becomes “The women’s experience…”. 

3) Get rid of personal anecdotes written about general social topics. Add statistics. (So a story on manual scavenging will not have a line like X died doing … in some part of Delhi…) 

Essentially, depersonalise. My suggestions are aimed at making journalism more objective, in the sense of Anand Ranganathan.

Also, I find The Hindu to be the most objective paper in that sense. Your views? Am I wrong?

Thanks.

Best wishes,

Siddharth Tourani