A Different Species

There is this strange sense of duality that India seems to bring upon you. On one hand there is this feeling of being on the cusp of something extraordinary. The giddy experience of watching something once so far removed from the developed world morph so rapidly and palpably into a modern society. The sense of possibility, the sense that something big is about to happen is now regular dinner party conversation.

The journey of one generation to the next has been so fast that parents often have little context for the lives of their children. Particularly for the lives of the children who have been abroad and returned speaking, dressing and acting differently. This new India is English speaking, moves easily from one city to another, sometimes one country to another. It is hyperconnected and watches all the same TV shows as the rest of the English speaking world, hears the same news, and eats burgers and chicken nuggets almost as often as dhal and rice. This is more significant than you might think. “You know”, a friend tells me at dinner last week, “when I was young when we met kids who had grown up abroad we never knew what to talk about. We used to feel so awkward – they watched shows you never heard of, ate things you never heard of and talked about things you never heard of and had an accent you could never understand”. “But now it’s so different”, she says “recently my kids met some kids that had grown up in Singapore and the US and they got on immediately playing games with the same characters and constructs”. There is the feeling that we are increasingly becoming one world. Another friend who runs a global business and has lived in London, New York and Moscow has decided to now base out of India because its “here that its happening now and you want your children to understand it”. It’s easy to go to the US or Europe and get into the system in a few years, but to understand India is much harder, he contends.

Gross Domestic Poverty

As posted on yourstory.in

For those of us with a memory of India in the 1980s and before there is no doubt at all that this is a country moving forward economically. From my schooldays when there were only two or three sub-standard brands of everything from soft drinks to soap to chocolate to cars, today’s India is remarkably different. It’s not just that there is every major brand available today. There is construction everywhere and sleek glass buildings are slowly but surely replacing old concrete structures. And there is a palpable feeling of change and a growing national pride. Incredible India. Every so often I get caught up in it and then I look at the numbers and I realize how easily we can distort our self-perception.

Here are the facts. India and China are often compared as the Asian giants, both with over a billion people. But China’s economy is three times as big as India’s – a GDP of 5 trillion US dollars compared to India’s meagre 1.4. According to the Global Language Monitor, The Rise of China has been the most frequent news story for over a decade across over 75000 print and electronic media publications. India doesn’t feature among even the top 20. For further perspective, Tokyo, which is the largest city economy in the world, has an economy the same size as India – 1.4 trillion. Tokyo has only 13 million people though, which means that they are pretty hard at work there. About a third of them are either kids or old folk which leaves about 8.5 million people out there getting it done each day, producing an output as large as our entire country.

Income Distributions around the World

In my last, and much lighter post Who cares about the average income! I talked about the heavy tailed nature of income distributions. Here’s a link to some actual income distributions for the USA, India, Japan and France (scroll all the way to page 3 and look at Figure 1 on that page). Of course, the data for India includes only that of taxpayers and most of India has insufficient income to pay taxes so this is grossly misrepresentative. And unfortunately, the authors also note that the Indian data, even for taxpayers, is incomplete relative to the other countries for the reason that: “In spite of the best of our efforts in collecting the equivalent data from the Income Tax Department of the Government of India or the Reserve Bank of India, we are unable to give or compare with any better data”.

But before you eagerly click on the link, note that when you take a heavy tailed distribution that looks like the graph on the left below (where the number of people that have a particular income is equal to that income raised to some negative power) and convert the axes into log units it turns into a straight line which is easy to recognize visually.



Since many income distributions tend to have such power law properties (misleadingly called a power law since there is no law here, it is just a power relationship), they are generally shown in the log-log coordinate form to easily be able to distinguish them from other kinds of heavy tailed distributions which are not power laws.

It’s a pity that power law distributions are not taught alongside the normal distribution in school since if you work with them a few times they become as easy to intuit. More importantly though is that this arrangement describes so much of nature and society that we would gain a much better understanding of our world.