Still digging out of the Amberlanche

Note to self: the next time someone asks whether they can link to you, don't forget to ask about their daily hit rate before saying yes. Mostly, I think, I wanna just sit tight and wait until the tour buses pull out, but I can't help saying to my dear, dear dozen-ish regular readers: if I ever implied you weren't enough...well, I'm sorry. I won't do it again for at least a week.

That said, one of the kids had a decent point: doesn't India's rapid economic growth prove that my personal opinion is factually wrong?

I'm no economist -- as will shortly become very evident -- but I have to wonder about the origins of that GDP claim, especially because I am a statistics fan, and I'm all too familiar with the kind of folks who'll crow about the airtight chain between the results of their multiple regression and the original dataset...forgetting that the chain doesn't end there, but continues back to the proverbial night watchman, who enters into his ledger anything he damn well pleases. GIGO, and all that.

But even if the claim is right, and isn't driven in large part by black market activities, it's also irrelevant, because the rewards aren't flowing in to the (essentially nonexistent) middle class. I'd call it the Mexican model of income distribution, but -- let's be frank -- these days, the media are associating it more with the U.S. and Europe. Sixty percent of Mumbai's population live in slums, and "slum" is utterly the wrong term if it conjures up an image of a tenement in a bad neighborhood. If you don't have access to my photos, go read Shantaram. (The plot is crap, but the descriptions of the slums are accurate.)

I'll go one step further and defend my maligned statement that India's lack of civil society and civic-mindedness will keep it from the sort of social transformation enjoyed by the East Asian tigers. I've never been accosted by street children in any other impoverished nation -- ones substantially lower than India on the development index -- in the numbers I have in India. Other countries don't have the numbers that India does. And that, I think, is the most frightening thing about the country. Right now, the street children throng, harass, and pound on car windows. They don't break car windows, and they don't try to open car doors. There's obviously a thin bit of civic glue that prevents that. But a country of one billion people is an improbability device. Somewhere, sometime -- and I think it'll be soon, and I think it'll be triggered by the widening of the wealth chasm -- a group of kids is going to wade into traffic and take rather than beg. And once it happens, without the social forces in place to keep the phenomenon in check, any possible talk of future comparisons to Shanghai or Singapore will cease, and we'll only be able to talk in terms of Bogota or Port-au-Prince.