He addressed the charges in a series of tweets, concentrating on the following elements: the economy, the demise of manufacturing, the impact of token distribution employment, and the cousin abroad syndrome.
India’s perspective, according to Sridhar Vembu of Zoho, is influenced by events in the US and UK.
He clarified his argument in a series of tweets, concentrating on the following elements: economics, the demise of manufacturing, the impact of token distribution employment, and the cousin abroad syndrome.
“English is the dominant language in Indian thought, hence events in the US and UK have an impact on Indian thinking. I’ll go over some effects right here,” he wrote.
He began by saying, “Let’s talk about economics first. The economies of the US and the UK are both “post-industrial” or “post-manufacturing,” and increasingly financialized.
In order to somewhat offset the goods deficit, he added that the US and the UK both have big trade deficits in manufactured products and services, but the resulting net trade imbalance is still quite large and has continued to increase.
He went on to describe how these nations finance this ongoing deficit.
“To pay for imports, they issue “bonds denominated in their own currencies.” This is extremely important and has made it possible for them to continue issuing debt well beyond what nations like India can. He wrote that this “luxury” came at the exorbitant cost of completely destroying their industrial industries.
Raghuram Rajan, a former governor of the RBI, was also highlighted by Vembu. He claimed that economists like Rajan consider the fall in US and UK manufacturing to be the norm and advise India to seek to export services in order to resemble them.
The belief is that manufacturing jobs will vanish and IP/Finance positions will become more lucrative “He claimed that this occurred in the US and UK, even for India.
“They never questioned if ‘IP/Finance pay well’ is some kind of immutable law of economics or simply an artifact of running large trade deficits for decades, which completely warped their domestic economy,” he continued.
Vembu also asserted that the collapse in manufacturing led to a sharp rise in inequality.
In his essay, he claimed that the fall in manufacturing exacerbated inequality by lowering real wages for former factory workers who were driven to look for low-paying service jobs as alternatives.
He said that the financial sector reaped significant benefits by repurposing bonds sold to overseas investors on domestic asset markets and that as a result, the sector compensated well.
He wrote, “Mainstream economists welcomed that as growing “wealth” and this recycling of trade deficits to domestic asset markets also generated large asset bubbles in the US/UK.
Vembu argued that asset bubbles exacerbated inequality, which was already rising as a result of the decrease in manufacturing.
During this time, mainstream economists of Indian descent reached their prime. These decades of US/UK experience ruled their entire conceptual framework and all of their models. We in India run the risk of learning too much from this experience.
Vembu argued that the US and UK produced a large number of “token distribution jobs” whose function is to generate cash so that imported products can be claimed. Vembu then went on to explain these jobs and their effect. As the pandemic showed, just dispersing printed money would have achieved the same results. According to him, careers in psychology emerged to fill these positions.
During this time, mainstream economists of Indian descent reached their prime. These decades of US/UK experience ruled their entire conceptual framework and all of their models. We in India run the risk of learning too much from this experience.
Vembu argued that the US and UK produced a large number of “token distribution jobs” whose function is to generate cash so that imported products can be claimed. Vembu then went on to explain these jobs and their effect. As the pandemic showed, just dispersing printed money would have achieved the same results. According to him, careers in psychology emerged to fill these positions.
Additionally, he said that the Indian elite had learned too much from the US and UK experiences and that upper middle class children in India wanted to spend a lot of money on degrees in essentially meaningless fields in order to compete with their American and British counterparts for “token distribution jobs.”
The “cousin abroad syndrome,” another factor, was also noted by the CEO of Zoho.
What factors in India’s upper middle class youngsters’ educational decisions? The cousin abroad affliction He claimed that they wanted to follow in the footsteps of their cousins who were studying psychology, sociology, and economics rather than the unfashionable mechanical, electrical, or aerospace engineering.
Vembu concluded by saying that we have absorbed and used the UK and US experiences excessively.
“The impact is deep and subconscious. In a sense, it is in the air we breathe. It is challenging to reverse this distortion of our own thought processes. That is the reason I write,” he said.
