Kerala has extremely aggressive out-migration (including my entire family): it is a bad place to be ambitious, particularly with the France-like union culture. If India is to become China-rich or Mexico-rich, my prediction is Kerala will regress to the mean of India states. Its model seems geared towards being an extremely good place to be poor (which is a huge achievement to be clear: they dealt with COVID better than the US, universal literacy is amazing etc) but not towards getting richer.
I noticed this in Taiwan between 2018-2020 when I was staying there. A highly educated population but with little to no opportunities. Most of very ambitious talent found jobs in China or Singapore.
A strong business environment, or strong investment opportunities, or a large consumer base is very much needed to have attractive jobs. A strongly educated workforce does little to enable such an environment. Intuitively, it is just very hard to make money off of a small, low income population, and it is even harder to export services built for a local market to a non local market. So the ambitious talent just find opportunities elsewhere.
It also depends how hard it is to migrate out of the region. If there are strong family ties and good standard of living, you'd be surprised at how much talent is willing to stay.
Interestingly enough, Taiwan in 2024/2025 has seen huge growth in wages, for many reasons, but the biggest IMO being the highly educated workforce.
I think its just perception. A place that is smaller will appear to have more movement because its across country, while in China or the US you would just move internally. Taiwan had amazing economic growth for 50+ years.
The reality is that in all places the most ambitious people are likely going to move, as such talents usually depend on specific environments.
And with things like TSMC in Taiwan, claiming anything close to 'no opportunities' is a bit ridiculous.
I worked in a recruitment company in SEA for software devs and management/exec layers.
Just sharing my perspective, Taiwan's Software Devs were paid 1/3 of what devs in SG or HK are paid, the biggest reason being there aren't any software companies headquartered in Taiwan that are big/growing fast enough to offer competitive salaries to SG / HK. In SG/HK you have banks, hedgefunds and tech companies all competing for talent—Grab, Amazon, Google, Shopee, DBS, HSBC, etc, pushing up prices to be competitive globally. Taiwan's local companies have to make enough money to pay global salaries for strong talent, or they just get their best talent poached by SG/HK or China (which has plenty of strong tech giants of their own).
But... a tiny 23 million population island where the average wage is low and people are generally happy and content... is not a great business environment for startups. I think some local startups saturated the Taiwan market with like 70% of the island's population in their database... and like $2-5m US revenue/yr? Great achievement but not a large base for continued rev growth.
As a Taiwanese company, you are not winning against bigger tech companies in China. Neither are you building for english speaking audiences of SEA because Taiwan's english is not native... in short, the local market conditions is just unable to pay for global level talent, who leave.
This is a software dev focused view of Taiwan, but it applies to all or most other industries not named TSMC.
Interesting view of Taiwan. What is the Taiwanese view of China. Do a lot not mind migrating to China or do they hate China, and want to be independent?
I'm curious, how does their "aggressive out-migration" play out? Extremely high, progressive tax system? No funding infrastructure for new business? I can imagine many ways but my thoughts lean toward financial reasons due to your last sentence.
Inability to build a business easily nor allow others to build one. The union culture is way too strong. There is a joke that the Kerala model of development requires a rich oil state nearby.
Ambitious Keralites move out of the state to set up businesses. The ones who remain usually get rich through a mix of unethical businesses, political party connections and corruption, or the gold and money-lending businesses (which were inherently shady). Keralites are either highly ambitious, in which case they go to more welcoming cities such as Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai, or extremely lazy, in which case they stay at home and abuse the welfare state. The welfare state is so abused by lazy government employees who will do anything to block you from setting up your business. And if it isn't them stopping you, it's the pesky political parties who will send their goons after you to charge for every task.
For instance, the richest Keralite, Yussufali MA, made his fortune in the Middle East. His sons-in-law, both billionaires, as well as KP Basheer, Ravi Pillai, PMC Menon and Mohammed Ali of Gulfar made their fortune in the Middle East, all of whom are silent billionaires even most Indians barely know of. Vivek Ramaswamy's parents were from Kerala too, as is Thomas Kurian (head of GCP).
If you look at the West, Keralites are increasingly taking spots in the medical and healthcare sectors, especially nursing, and now even the education sector. There are Keralite teachers in the oilfields of Midland, Texas, because most people are otherwise not ready to work there. Some of my neighbours relatives from back home were even working in Afghanistan for the USG, making bank for working in a warzone. The only groups that are more or equally as prominent as Keralites worldwide might be the Gujaratis (the Patel motel guys and diamond merchants) and the Jews.
The article specifically talks about how Kerala has some of the highest concentrations of startups in India.
Also, the Communist party in power has not stopped themselves from adapting to the new times and dumping older views.
The most recent Econ Nobel showed how institutions create wealthy nations, and Kerala is building those.
Perhaps the statement “not a place to be ambitious” can be seen in a narrower sense, while seeing that it leaves much more space for the median individual.
Typically "a bad place to be ambitious" implies that others will try to exploit you instead. Keep in mind that a mismanaged government can be a lot more predatory than any private actor.
> Keep in mind that a mismanaged government can be a lot more predatory than any private actor.
What's the basis for this claim? What is a "mismanaged government" but one that is controlled by narrow private interests? Or is this coming from a "all tax is exploitation" angle?
Is there a government that's not ultimately controlled by narrow private interests? A well-managed government is merely one where inbuilt norms and traditions (including the Western traditions of constitutional human rights and separation of powers, but not only!) manage to limit the extent to which the narrow private interest of government actors can lead to predatory exploitation of the broader public.
> including the Western traditions of constitutional human rights
I never really got why the west is so proud of not establishing basic rights of access to food, shelter, healthcare, and education. I don't quite understand the point of them otherwise.
Actually, when literal communists run your government, you become China-rich, as OP put it. Contrast China's economic development with that of India's post 1950.
Compare the policies and results of Deng to Mao, the latter is more "literally communist." Their embracing of capitalist principles is what enabled their boom, same with Vietnam with their Đổi Mới policies.
Deng famously said "white cat, black cat, as long as it catches mice it's a good cat". His policy choices were not driven by 'embracing' of any principles but pure pragmatism.
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
It is the Communists who are flexible and pragmatic. It is the Communists who can free the market. It is capitalists who shoot themselves in the foot over pride in 'principles' and 'ideals', a great irony when no country on this earth today is 'purely' capitalist. They misunderstand Marxism, which is the doctrine that capitalism itself is revolutionary as it develops into its own opposite, that communism and capitalism are two stages of the same course of development.
He can say whatever he likes, but in reality, what he did is literally throw in the garbage the complete intellectual baggage of the European socialist/communist movement and basically copied what Western allied South East Asian nations were already doing.
If it makes him feel good not to call that 'capitalism' then that's fine. I guess it wouldn't have played well with the base back then.
But in reality and operations, its is how capitalism has worked in practice.
The state that one-sidedly 'threw away' the baggage of communism was the USSR, and we all know how that went. Any China scholar could tell you that China was already implementing market reforms before Deng, and that their controlled transition, managed by a strong party-state, is the grounds for their success. China is still a country operated on the basis of five-year plans. China is still a country governed by a Communist party adhering to democratic centralism. China is still a country where the state owns all land. China is still a country where capital is not allowed to usurp the public interest. And the judge of that is not any logical syllogism of 'definitions' of capitalism or socialism that exist in your head but do not premise the actual world. It is outcomes, observations of material reality. In this, the reforms of Deng and the continued path of Xi are simply the highest synthesis of communism, in the Chinese context. They are the most faithful to Marxism, which has never preached any kind of static dogma, especially as it relates to economic policy.
> The state that one-sidedly 'threw away' the baggage of communism was the USSR, and we all know how that went.
That's not actually what happened, you should look up some history.
The USSR didn't throw away, communism, the member states just simply left.
And many of those states were then free of the communist party actually did quite well. Russia didn't, Ukraine didn't, but that's the reality when a country splits apart, some parts do well others don't.
> Any China scholar could tell you that China was already implementing market reforms before Deng
Part of it wasn't even voluntary on the party front, they simply accepted what was already happening instead of reversing it again.
> China is still a country operated on the basis of five-year plans.
hose plans are mostly projects of what they hope they can encourage private business to do and some public investment. Guess what many countries do, planning and public investment.
Lots of things they plan don't happen, lots of things that happen aren't planned. The planning is constantly adjust to what actually happens in the economy, including the global context.
> China is still a country where the state owns all land.
Legally maybe, but if you hand out control for 100 years the relevance of that isn't all that great. And that land can be freely traded between people. So in practical terms it works far more like private land ownership then anything the socialist thinkers of the late 19 and early 20th century.
> China is still a country where capital is not allowed to usurp the public interest.
That is just factually false, large companies in China regularly do things that hurt public interest. Unless you mean 'interest of the party leadership' and even then its only mostly true.
> In this, the reforms of Deng and the continued path of Xi are simply the highest synthesis of communism
Lol, they literally copied other East Asian economic models almost 1 to 1. They are just a log bigger and have more people. But I guess copying other successful clearly capitalist countries can be resold as 'highest synthesis of communism' to people who have irrational hate for capitalism.
And China economic growth or wealth isn't all that magically, its simply that China is much bigger then most others who have done it.
> They are the most faithful to Marxism, which has never preached any kind of static dogma, especially as it relates to economic policy.
I love Marxism, since he didn't actually define any outcome beyond maybe 'stateless and moneyless' you can just make up whatever the fuck you want as long as you are claiming to 'get there'. And China doesn't seem to go into a stateless moneyless direction.
Marx's "Historical materialism" is wrong for Western Europe and laudably false for China.
His critic of capitalism seems to be mostly ignored in China. As is his theory of class struggle as in China there is an ever growing Bourgeoisie.
But I guess copying what Taiwan and friends did and calling it 'Marxism' is one way to go.
"Capitalism" is a very confusing word that should be avoided in a serious discussion one way or the other, society is a lot more complex than that. For instance "crony capitalism" is also seemingly capitalism but is directly opposed to the broad principles of a market economy that people think of as good.
"Crony Capitalism" is just a term socialists came up with to shit on capitalism. The reality is every society is going to have some amount of corruption and cronyism. But "Crony Capitalism" isn't an actual coherent concepts, it doesn't have 'principles', its just highlighting something negative that happens in countries, including capitalist ones.
Socialists love to add some negative word 'X' to capitalism to highlight that all bad things in the world are connected to capitalism, and if they could finally defeat capitalism, then the world would be perfect. Instead of actually trying to fix 'X' they will tell you that what we really need to change is 'capitalism'. Surveillance Capitalism, Crony Capitalism, Disaster Capitalism and so on.
Trying to fix corruption, to hard, lets just destroy property rights and money instead. Great idea!
Let me give you a tool for your mental toolkit. When you find yourself saying this:
> <some group> loves to
...it's a smell. What follows may be perfectly reasonable, but in my experience it's more commonly unexamined twaddle.
If you happen to be American, see where you get with these:
- many Americans fetishise America
- J Edgar Hoover spent 20 years programming Americans to consider socialism to be "un-American"
In this case, I think a little reflection would reveal a J Edgar Hoover homonculus in your head, pulling your levers.
I'm all for emotional arguments. Ultimately, we all have core values, and I like to lead an argument by stating mine.
But hating socialism isn't a core value, it's _at best_ a reaction. Which is to say, if you're from, ooh, Bulgaria or Cuba, then I can indulge you. You may not be logical but you do have cause.
If you merely have a little J Edgar Hoover homonculus in your head, pulling your levers, then refrain from posting, because a J Edgar Hoover homonculus is not an interesting conversationalist.
Just like anything else that can't be back up with solid empirical research in a discussion forum. With is 99% of what we are dissing. (And most books written by intellectuals of both the socialist and capitalist variety).
Communism is originally a utopian social movement, and there is a strong tendency and a very well document intellectual history of communism that asserts that pretty much most problems at its root are an issue with capitalism and that they can only be solved in the absence of capitalism. So much so that it was pretty normal for communist to oppose working with social democrats on any reform of existing systems.
> Americans to consider socialism to be "un-American"
I'm not american and I couldn't care less if something is 'American' or not. And I have no idea what 'americanness' has to do with our discussion. So far as I can tell, nothing what so ever. And I don't hate 'socialism' either.
> But hating socialism isn't a core value, it's _at best_ a reaction. Which is to say, if you're from, ooh, Bulgaria or Cuba, then I can indulge you. You may not be logical but you do have cause.
So unless you are the victim of rape, being against rapist isn't a 'core value'? That's a outright crazy line of argument.
P.S: I really think you are waste overestimate the importance of Hoover.
Haiti is capitalist but people don't use it an example for capitalism as a whole. More important than a stated ideology is whether a government is corrupt
It's only fair to compare them to other victims of unprovoked Western aggression, like Libya. In that arena, they are actually doing relatively well, and imagine how successful they could be without the "global policeman's" boot on their neck.
Honestly, reading this article, it's not making Kerala-style communism sound bad. What's more, they appear to have pivoted when they'd achieved their aims into making people richer. It's a classic "invest, then profit" story, only for an entire state.
The article is co-written by a member of Kerala's Planning Board and heavily oversells the state. I'd say Kerala is nowhere near rich so even the title is technically incorrect.
When COVID was spreading around china the state govt was putting out public announcements about this disease and what symptoms to watch out for. I remember that even in the month of Feb 2020 there were public announcements in train stations. There is a lot of emphasis on education and health in the state. Granted it may not be rich as other states but it leads other states in a lot of other markers
That may be but the topic of the thread is how rich Kerala supposedly is, not how super awesome their public train announcements are. The claim is not just false, the article is outright propaganda given how one of the co-authors works for the state government.
I guess my main point is that a communist type govt was not exclusively bad for Kerala since they took a lot of effort to improve education and public health.
You can look at other sources to see how good kerala is doing wrt other states but I do agree the article over emphasised the good parts without any hint to it's bad parts
To put this in context, during Covid, hundreds of bodies were being dumped in the Ganges river, buried in shallow graves on the sandbars in states like Uttar Pradesh. The state govt took an active role to remove the grave markers so that an accurate estimate of the numbers could not be ascertained. These were covered by local bloggers, vloggers and news channels.
Kerala is one of the few states that managed medical supplies of Oxygen pretty well. In many other states many died because hospitals ran out of it.
In India atleast, 'communism' or 'Marxism' in the names of political parties that actually run a state is just a name that has stuck. These entities and people have to be a lot more pragmatic. This is in contrast to those who are arm chair think tanks that you would find in advisory boards, universities etc. These would be people who do not run for elections.
Now, as for Kerala's handling of Covid, that was funded by state govt coffers. So Middle East money had a negligible contribution. What made a difference though is a history of preference for investing in social safety nets and basic infrastructure for people, such as schools, nutrition, hospitals.
What really happened was that the health authorities in Kerala were prepared for an outbreak because Kerala has had a history of past outbreaks and a health system with very well trained doctors and health professionals to handle it. See the 2018 Nipah virus outbreak in Kerala that was handled really well, there was even a popular movie about it (Virus) that came out the year after.
It's the same story in east Asian countries where they had the SARS outbreak in early 2000s and so they were prepared for new outbreaks.
To be clear I'm not saying Kerala is particularly bad by regional standards, it's not. But compare Kerala and India as a whole with other parts of Asia, they're not doing well. Look at China vs India in the 1970s vs 50 years later. Compare India/Kerala and Thailand in the same time frame. Kerala and Korea, etc etc. South Asia as a whole is doing worse than many other parts of Asia. Kerala government excels at what many socialist governments are good at: Praising themselves. In reality is has made little difference.
India has a lot of other issues, I grant you that the socialist ideology probably had a positive influence in some ways other than economics, particularly socially. But no offense, if you've ever walked the streets Trivandrum and other cities you know there are much more pressing issues.
Socialism with Kerala characteristics? I'm a bit skeptical of that, people often point to the Scandinavian model as especially successful but when you look into the data, that actually combines redistribution (funded by higher taxes) with a lot of economic freedom and a light-touch attitude from government that are all ideologically counter to "communism" or "socialism" of any kind.
This is a no true Scotsman argument. If you define socialism as purely being policies that don't work, of course socialism doesn't work. If you accept that you can stick to your principles whilst being flexible about the implementation strategy, socialism seems to work out pretty well in some places.
Portugal also has a similarly active communist party. I think what distinguishes Portugal and Kerala's communist parties from other communist parties is that they were (and are) first, and foremost, democrats.
A capitalist dictatorship will be every bit as horrible as a communist dictatorship.
That's how "communism" is in India. Two states (West Bengal and Kerala) are run by "Communist" parties. But these parties are quite different from what people typically mean by "Communists".
Have you read the Communist Manifesto? It also makes Communism sound like a good idea. Nevermind that Kerala doesn't have a particularly high GDP per capita even by southern Indian standards. It's not rich by any rational measure, not in median income or otherwise. There is a lot of poverty, slightly better compared to some of the northern states but then South India in general does a bit better than the north so there isn't anything particularly noteworthy.
Btw, for some historic context this part of India used to be extremely rich in the past by global standards, centuries ago. They became rich with international trade. Modern India is nowhere close to its wealthy past, the subcontinent as a whole produced the largest percentage of the world's GDP during Late Antiquity, surpassing China and all others!
