melbourn desi: They were shipped out to faraway lands including USA / Australia.

me: hmmmm. and your point is that this would explain the condition of the U.S. and Austrlia of the 20th century?

They were shipped out to faraway lands including USA / Australia.

For probably the first time on SM I must disagree with you. This is a canard spread by vested interests. Offshoring is hard work and the same complaints occur when the Americans offshore to Australia. Further, a key element in the comparison is missing – the quality of management. Sadly, there are far too many incompetent Indian Managers (I was one). Most learn the tech stuff – Six Sigma / MBO etc etc. However very few learn the soft stuff. Western style management struggles in India and blind copying of techniques results in lower productivity. India’s most successful business have learnt to marry to Western techniques with a ‘Desi’ touch.

Would love to hear about your experiences with lower productivity in the desh. I take it that this is in the advertising industry.
As an aside I used to have a hard time convincing Western bosses not to confuse english skills for good management – although that may be true in the West.

SM bloggers – I vote for Floridian to be a guest blogger.

Any victory is the stuff of inspiration, regardless of details. However, it was the Anglo-Japanese alliance that emboldened the Japanese to oppose Russia in war. Got this from an on-line Britannica article, so it’s hardly arcane history. Japan was only just emerging as a technologically developed society, and it would have been foolhardy to wage war on a western country without a backup plan. The London bureau of the Rothschild funded them and began, through Jacob Schift, an association with the great Takahashi Korekiyo that persists to this day (well, not Takahashi, but the Japanese-Rothschild relationship). [Takahashi Korekiyo, the Rothschilds and the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–1907, Richard Smethurst recalls the genesis of the relationship between the Rothschildbanks and one of the great figures in Japan’s history, Takahashi Korekiyo] http://www.rothschildarchive.org/ib/articles/AR2006Japan.pdf (Smethurst paper)

Still, Russia was a big butt to have kicked, so the Japanese entered the 20th century as a power to be reckoned with.

risible Also interesting, Indian private industry, as represented by a consortium of Mumbai industrialists was very much behind the command economy, even though it prevented their entry into many “national” industries.

Just a brief comment now, might add more later. I think you’re referring to the ‘Bombay Plan’ – a document put together in 1944 by a group of Bombay industrialists including JRD Tata. Here’s what PM Manmohan Singh said in 2004, at the 60th anniversary of the plan.

‘The Bombay Plan laid great emphasis on public investment in the social and economic infrastructure, in both rural and urban areas, it emphasised the importance of agrarian reform and agricultural research, in setting up educational institutions and a modern financial system. Above all, it defined the framework for India’s transition from agrarian feudalism to industrial capitalism, but capitalism that is humane, that invests in the welfare and skills of the working people. In many ways, it encapsulated what all subsequent Plans have tried to achieve’.

Link

However, there is also an argument to be made that the Bombay Plan merely ‘acknowledged the inevitable’ – i.e., that the British were leaving, that Congress with its mass-base politics would form the next government, and that Nehru, who had already formed the National Planning Committee with Mahalonobis in 1938, would introduce centralized economic planning, so the Bombay industrialists better get on the good side of Congress, and hope thus to have some influence on the shape of things to come, and head off a more drastic nationalization scheme. Also, the plan argued for better infrastructure and schooling, which makes sense from any businessman’s standpoint, not an endorsement of the command economy per se. And in what happened subsequently, the big business houses prospered like never before – Tata, Birla, etc did extremely well throughout the next fifty years of ‘central planning’, they seemed not to have trouble getting licenses and permits. Tata did lose control of his airline later, but continued as Chairman and MD, so the difference was barely noticeable, at least in the beginning.

The link above also shows that, as a practical matter, some industrialists hedged their bets between the British ‘sarkar’ that was handing out war contracts, and the Congress leaders, many of whom were still in jail. As well, the Bombay industrialists did not even make a token above-the-table and on-the-record contribution of Rs 1,000 to the National Planning Committee! This can be taken to mean their commitment to planning as a concept was not nearly as deep as Nehru’s.

response = heritability X selection differential

if a trait is heritable and there is a selection differential associated with that trait, evolution will occur. here’s an example of how the calculation would work: http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2007/08/how_fast_do_gene_frequencies_c.php#comment-533382

It’s even older than that. After the new Municipal Act of 1923, Calcutta Corporation became the first important public body to pass from British to Indian control in India. It was run by Congress. But after C.R. Das, the first mayor, died in 1925 and Subhash Bose was put in jail, within a decade, the Councillors became so greedy and bribes were so commonplace that it was widely known as ‘Calcutta Corruption’ — the Bangla version was Chorporation.

In Delhi, even before independence, the comforts and luxuries enjoyed by the Interim Government ministers were a stark contrast to their humble backgrounds and Gandhian austerity and it must have been hard for some not to succumb to it. Patel wrote about it — “.. scramble for power and office is there, but it is not any defeatist attitude that is required but firmness and determination to combat these evils from within” [link]. Ironically, Patel himself was the target of a Muslim League atttack published in Dawn when his orders of luxurious furniture for his new residence at 1 Aurangzeb Road were “inadvertently” billed to Government of India. [Thy Hand Great Anarch, Page 833].

how the hell are they “so civiized” these are the people that held the world up at gunpoint for hundreds of years. is that ‘civilized’? f-ck that.

Right. I think the downward mobility leads to less “lower” class (and comparatively more robust) “upper” class breeding. Clark apparently reviewed medieval will records to confirm this. In time the lower classes whittled away, and with their genomes cast to oblivion, so fled disorder, mayhem and maybe even laziness. The manna of “upper class values” percolated through the new stock. The current Englishman are largely descended from the rich upper classes. This explains why they’re so civilized.

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/08/a-genetic-expla.html