Almost two decades ago, in my mid-20s, I saw a documentary about the lifestyle of heirs to very large inherited fortunes made by Jamie Johnson- himself an heir to the Johnson & Johnson family fortune. I found that documentary, known as ‘Born Rich (2003)’ interesting for many reasons- but one stuck out more than any other. The heirs to these billion dollar fortunes were, to put it mildly, rather mediocre. If they hadn’t been born into a super-rich family, they would have almost certainly have ended up working at some generic office in a nondescript office park or downtown high-rise.
In the US - Wealth is decided by wealth. Socio economic status of your parents is far and away the biggest factor that will affect your success and failure in life and to what extent. Lets deal with the empirical. But how useful ultimately are generalizations?
I’m not so sure if I would hold up India as a shining example of exponential growth. I forgot who said it, india is categorized as “one Sweden and three Nigerias”. My own current and former coworkers fall into two categories, from Mumbai and not from Mumbai. The Mumbai ones have the hustle you write of, the others aspire to a house with a generator, air conditioning, and a car, and that’s about it. Painfully, the really smart ones want to go back to India and start some sort of business, the smart ones desperately try and get citizenship in a western country, and the rest just wants the bragging rights of having been found good enough to have been sent abroad. My take on the sudden explosion of india upon the international stage is threefold:
1. Volume. While other countries are already settling into decline, Indian births were providing a huge wave of supply (that wave has spent itself now).
2. Poverty as a driver. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” is the best way to describe their mindset, where 30 is the age you have to have made it. Combined with volume this is very potent.
3. Initial high quality. I’ve only once met an IIT grad, and if I could have spent more time with him I would have forgone sleep and food. In 2002 these men were on par with the US, and they were synonymous with high quality low cost.
Now the factors that are limiting India haven’t been been completely resolved but they’re less thanks to all this foreign investment. Water, food production, power generation, transportation, housing, to name but a few issues continue to run on a knife edge, and will likely continue to for centuries.
My father spent months in india in the 1970s and 80s and ran on anti malaria pills and antibiotics, whereas I only had to take antibiotics in New Delhi and never took any antimalarials in the 2010s. Reverse osmosis public water fountains were everywhere, and air conditioning seemed to be ubiquitous.
That said, india remains a developing country where paying off the bureaucracy and keeping money off the books is a national sport, getting a passport involves bribing police a month’s salary, and this pesky caste system isn’t going away.
Wealth generation in the US was very much the result of aping other countries that were way ahead, especially Britain. The infrastructure that allowed for the extraction,
transportation, and refining of oil wasn’t developed in the US. The families most able to gamble on a new technology could look at others abroad that already had implemented and started refining this technology. There’s an excellent documentary on YouTube that explains the speed of industrialization in terms of generations, trail blazer Britain took 7 generations to industrialize. India is doing it in one.
In the US - Wealth is decided by wealth. Socio economic status of your parents is far and away the biggest factor that will affect your success and failure in life and to what extent. Lets deal with the empirical. But how useful ultimately are generalizations?
I’m not so sure if I would hold up India as a shining example of exponential growth. I forgot who said it, india is categorized as “one Sweden and three Nigerias”. My own current and former coworkers fall into two categories, from Mumbai and not from Mumbai. The Mumbai ones have the hustle you write of, the others aspire to a house with a generator, air conditioning, and a car, and that’s about it. Painfully, the really smart ones want to go back to India and start some sort of business, the smart ones desperately try and get citizenship in a western country, and the rest just wants the bragging rights of having been found good enough to have been sent abroad. My take on the sudden explosion of india upon the international stage is threefold:
1. Volume. While other countries are already settling into decline, Indian births were providing a huge wave of supply (that wave has spent itself now).
2. Poverty as a driver. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” is the best way to describe their mindset, where 30 is the age you have to have made it. Combined with volume this is very potent.
3. Initial high quality. I’ve only once met an IIT grad, and if I could have spent more time with him I would have forgone sleep and food. In 2002 these men were on par with the US, and they were synonymous with high quality low cost.
Now the factors that are limiting India haven’t been been completely resolved but they’re less thanks to all this foreign investment. Water, food production, power generation, transportation, housing, to name but a few issues continue to run on a knife edge, and will likely continue to for centuries.
My father spent months in india in the 1970s and 80s and ran on anti malaria pills and antibiotics, whereas I only had to take antibiotics in New Delhi and never took any antimalarials in the 2010s. Reverse osmosis public water fountains were everywhere, and air conditioning seemed to be ubiquitous.
That said, india remains a developing country where paying off the bureaucracy and keeping money off the books is a national sport, getting a passport involves bribing police a month’s salary, and this pesky caste system isn’t going away.
Wealth generation in the US was very much the result of aping other countries that were way ahead, especially Britain. The infrastructure that allowed for the extraction,
transportation, and refining of oil wasn’t developed in the US. The families most able to gamble on a new technology could look at others abroad that already had implemented and started refining this technology. There’s an excellent documentary on YouTube that explains the speed of industrialization in terms of generations, trail blazer Britain took 7 generations to industrialize. India is doing it in one.