Comments on: The Science Gap – Revisited

By: Guru Gulab Khatri

Guru Gulab Khatri — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 04:07:20 +0000

grow up in India? Every last upper middle class and upper class Indian of my acquaintance growing up entrusted MOST child care to domestic help. Can we dump the pious myth of the oh-so-dutiful Indian family please. For god's sake.

I still live in india part time. And people let servants take care of kids but keep an eye out. Nor do they let servants take care of regular book keeping. And the point was that no people dont move to india b/c they can be more productive. Culture ties and family ties are primary reason. It is more easier to be productive in US.

By: SP

SP — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 02:49:49 +0000

Um, about this statement: “No indian trusts any domestic help with the bookeeping or child care(may be diaper changing) but that is it” – did you grow up in India? Every last upper middle class and upper class Indian of my acquaintance growing up entrusted MOST child care to domestic help. Can we dump the pious myth of the oh-so-dutiful Indian family please. For god’s sake.

By: sk

sk — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 06:31:20 +0000

Does anyone wonder why some budding physicists switch to Wall Street?

How about a few wrong moves after college- like doing a Ph.D? Econ equates satisfaction to $, which is not true for most of 'humankind'.

By: dhaavak

dhaavak — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 04:25:06 +0000

aside - I was tracking down "the future of outsourcing' on Businessweek.com when noticed a headline saying berkshire hathaway is looking for a successor to buffett and here are the five nominees. drumroll. i thought... hmm... by the hair on my nose i bet there is some brown in there... sure enough, there's some wunderboy jain who runs their reinsurance. so read on.

By: Guru Gulab Khatri

Guru Gulab Khatri — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 03:34:29 +0000

What I'm trying to say above is that if skills increase progressively from level A through D, and if the report is comparing resources at level D, then it ignores the fact that in outsourcing a business process can be disaggregated to leverage Levels A. Whatever the relative knowledge pool at Level D, countries like India / China score higher in the Level A.

Hmmm grades decrease progressively from A-D:-)

By: Guru Gulab Khatri

Guru Gulab Khatri — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 03:17:57 +0000

As an interesting aside, this is the reason cited by indian executives for returning to india. The low-end personal/business support like gardening, cooking, childcare, driving, accounting, bookkeeping, etc. that a midlevel executive has to do on his/her own time out here is farmed out at a fraction of the cost.

No indian trusts any domestic help with the bookeeping or child care(may be diaper changing) but that is it. The bigger reason is the family ties.

By: dhaavak

dhaavak — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 03:09:35 +0000

What I'm trying to say above is that if skills increase progressively from level A through D, and if the report is comparing resources at level D, then it ignores the fact that in outsourcing a business process can be disaggregated to leverage Levels A. Whatever the relative knowledge pool at Level D, countries like India / China score higher in the Level A.

By: dhaavak

dhaavak — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 02:57:13 +0000

red herrings.
report assumes that the only variant in comparing the countries is the resource pool. The ability to disaggregate processes so that lower-skilled jobs can be taken up by the HUGE resource pool in India is where India scores big. In US/Canada, the disaggregation is not possible. You would have the same high-end resource doing the gruntwork that is farmed out to some cheapie resource. This makes for huge productivity gains operationally.
As an interesting aside, this is the reason cited by indian executives for returning to india. The low-end personal/business support like gardening, cooking, childcare, driving, accounting, bookkeeping, etc. that a midlevel executive has to do on his/her own time out here is farmed out at a fraction of the cost.