Covid-19 Pushes India's Middle Class Toward Poverty (nytimes.com) 59
An anonymous reader shares a report: Now a second wave of Covid-19 has struck India, and the middle class dreams of tens of millions of people face even greater peril. Already, about 32 million people in India were driven into poverty by the pandemic last year, according to the Pew Research Center, accounting for a majority of the 54 million who slipped out of the middle class worldwide. The pandemic is undoing decades of progress for a country that in fits and starts has brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Already, deep structural problems and the sometimes impetuous nature of many of Mr. Modi's policies had been hindering growth. A shrinking middle class would deal lasting damage. "It's very bad news in every possible way," said Jayati Ghosh, a development economist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. "It has set back our growth trajectory hugely and created much greater inequality."
The second wave presents difficult choices for India and Mr. Modi. India on Friday reported more than 216,000 new infections, another record. Lockdowns are back in some states. With work scarce, migrant workers are packing into trains and buses home as they did last year. The country's vaccination campaign has been slow, though the government has picked up the pace. Yet Mr. Modi appears unwilling to repeat last year's draconian lockdown, which left more than 100 million Indians jobless and which many economists blame for worsening the pandemic's problems. His government has also been reluctant to increase spending substantially like the United States and some other places, instead releasing a budget that would raise spending on infrastructure and in other areas but that also emphasizes cutting debt.
The second wave presents difficult choices for India and Mr. Modi. India on Friday reported more than 216,000 new infections, another record. Lockdowns are back in some states. With work scarce, migrant workers are packing into trains and buses home as they did last year. The country's vaccination campaign has been slow, though the government has picked up the pace. Yet Mr. Modi appears unwilling to repeat last year's draconian lockdown, which left more than 100 million Indians jobless and which many economists blame for worsening the pandemic's problems. His government has also been reluctant to increase spending substantially like the United States and some other places, instead releasing a budget that would raise spending on infrastructure and in other areas but that also emphasizes cutting debt.
The problem with the middle class in India.. (Score:3)
.. is that they are a fairly small part of the total population and thus have a social call to show their relative wealth compared to the "poor people" and thus there is a lot of spending on flash things and a lot less savings.
(Note that this is an outside view so may be distorted, but based on talking with quite many people from India over the years)
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1) eat at a restaurant indoors*
2) go to a bar indoors
3) get on an airplane or subway car
4) attend a concert
5) go to school -- (* outdoors is ok, as long as you don't get right in other peoples' faces)
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Re: The problem with the middle class in India.. (Score:4, Insightful)
People with more resources are always in a better position to weather some kind of disaster. Maybe they still lose a lot, but they simply had a lot more to lose and even enough that they still might be considered rather wealthy even after losing much of what they had. People who are utterly poor (India has a lot of these) have practically nothing to lose. If COVID destroyed half of everyone's wealth, but you had none to begin with has anything changed?
This is just a reflection of the fact that people with next to nothing can't move much further down the ladder, especially if they're already at the very bottom. People quite high, might move down a few rungs, but if you were already at the top, you may still be quite close to it after moving down. People in the middle or the lower part of the middle, might find themselves at the bottom after moving down a similar number of rungs.
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This is common with the Middle Class everywhere.
Homes over 1500sq feet for 2 people, people driving New SUV's and Trucks. A big industry where people lease cars so they pay less monthly, and get a new car every 4 or 5 years. Spending thousands of year to make sure their homes are properly landscaped...
They may not be mansions, or High End Luxury Cars, but the middle class spends a lot to show off, far more than we tend to want to admit.
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AKA, living the middle class life, having enough money to buy and own a decent house (1500 sq ft is NOT what I would consider large).
You live in a middle class house in a middle class neighborhood, you can afford the upkeep of said house (landscaping isn'
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I understood the author...
I was saying the things he described are not a display of wealth, those are just every day normal things for pretty much all middle class people.
Why would someone making enough to live out of squalor, still live in squalor.
That listed above is not in any way excessive, certainl
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AKA, living the middle class life, having enough money to buy and own a decent house (1500 sq ft is NOT what I would consider large).
It's actually quite large for two people considering that previous generations often raised large families in smaller homes. When examining trends though, the average house size has been increasing over time even as the average family size has been decreasing.
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Except in many countries where being middle class is a larger proportion of the population there is a lot less of that show off. In fact in many countries an extravagant show off is seen as.. not good.
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What I described above, in the US (especially back a few years when we had a much larger middle class), is not in any way extravagant.
That is normal middle class living for pretty much everyone on that level.
It isn't showing off....a $1500 sq/ft house?
That isn't showing off, that's pretty much bottom level
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I do not mean the specific levels of stuff.
I mean the fact that in many countries where middle class is "the normal" there is less spending among middle class on flashy stuff show that you are better than "the poor people".
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1500sqft is quite a lot for two people, and more than I've ever lived in with one other person. The median single-family home in the US is around 1600sqft, and they're occupied by families with children! Yes, newly built single-family homes are 2300sqft on average, but that's a small fraction of the housing stock and skewed toward the high end. Actual middle-class people can barely afford to buy or rent existing homes. (And in some markets, they can't. I'm living in a formerly middle-class 1260sqft house in
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Stepping a bit higher, India is really scewing up with the pandemic. It is a crowded country but there are some absurdly bad violations of social distancing going on. Masses crowded shoulder to shoulder for religious festivals for example. For any country, where there's a second, third, fourth, etc wave of covid, it is usually because of crowd behavior and not because a new variant. People get lax with behavior when the numbers go down, which makes the numbers go up. Yes, the economics are bad, but the
That's just Keeping Up With the Joneses (Score:2)
If a 12 month downturn permanently reduces your socioeconomic class then your position was so precarious that you were never really middle class.
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The thing I understand of the Indian situation, that most of their middle class is what you call working poor. Basically they spend their money instead of saving.
Traditionally in most countries middle class is a has been the most resistant to all change and the one that saves most money and similar things to try to secure a stability in their position.
That does not seem to apply so much in India, where the "appearance of middle class" is the important part for many people.
Importance in Disaster Planning (Score:3, Insightful)
Disaster planning for a country is one of those things that are often bad politically, because they are expensive, and a lot of upkeep for something that may not be used.
There really should be plans for a lot of disasters ready to be implemented.
Pandemic, Extreme Temperature, Weather, Volcano, Earthquake, Fire, Space Event, War...
These disasters tend to hit different infrastructures more than others, so we need to be ready to use the existing infrastructure to help.
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Imagine the horror if a meteor hit Washington DC. ... on second thought...
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Disaster planning for a country is one of those things that are often bad politically, because they are expensive, and a lot of upkeep for something that may not be used.
This is what makes disaster planning something that defines a competent government. It is hard, it does take resources, and it's not going to ever get done except by those with the will to do something for the common good. This is how I see the political war in America - it's between those that wish the government to be competent and function for the common good (the Democrats), versus those that want it to crash and burn (the New Republicans) which was so aptly exemplified by the previous administration's
Conspiracies (Score:3)
I feel like some conspiracy theory types are going to have a lot to say here... something about how person X saw into the future and planned this 20 years ago. Let's get India some money, then we'll... steal it all back with a worldwide pandemic and GameStop shares. We just need Joe in China to help spread the disease, Moe in India to make bad policies, and Curly in the US to help create the worst divided politically people we've had in a century.
Re: Conspiracies (Score:2)
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... Joe in China to help spread the disease, Moe in India to make bad policies, and Curly in the US to help create the worst divided politically people...
What is this - a conspiracy to forget that Larry was part of the Stooges?
Larry, Moe, and Curly.
Then Curly had to bow out. Shemp came in.
Larry, Moe, and Shemp.
Then Shemp left and it went seriously downhill from there, with "Joe", then "Curly Joe".
Nyuck-yuk-yuk.
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Not sure you are putting your finger on the problem here. There are powerful people scheming all around. Are you complaining about people looking into powerful people scheming, or are you complaining about stupid people fantasizing about powerful people scheming?
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Hardly Surprising (Score:2, Insightful)
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Christians have virtually no influence there, get real.
A world-wide problem (Score:5, Insightful)
That's becoming a problem everywhere. The world is slipping to a winner-take-all framework. Even Warren Buffett has admitted he can make certain deals that a smaller investment firm can't simply because his org is big. In short, he has more opportunities to get bigger because he's big. And variations of the Network Effect are common in "big tech". Orgs use Microsoft because everybody knows it and you can find help in online forums because everybody uses it. NOT because it's "good": everyone uses it because everyone uses it*.
And almost every college graduate understands the problem of not being able to get experience because you don't qualify for the jobs until you have experience. Those who get their foot in the door early can jump ahead of the pack quicker.
* Teams and Power Apps are such a convoluted POS, but people get used to them over time because they have to. If they had to survive on merit alone, they'd die on Day One.
Re: A world-wide problem (Score:1)
Subject (Score:3)
At some point we're going to have to decide when the negative impacts to the economy outweigh the benefits of restrictions.
This isn't just a "money vs lives" issue - particularly in poorer countries like India such a massive blow to the economy WILL cost lives as well. The 2019 (ie, pre-COVID) GDP per capita in India was already around $2000 US. Even in a completely equitable system where they were splitting everything equally $2000 per year isn't much to cover a person's basic needs. Reduce that even further and people are going to start starving - or turning to crime out of desperation which has its own associated collateral damage.
We really need to roll out the vaccine with extreme expediency and get things back to normal. Our current method of dealing with this is simply not sustainable for much longer.
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There is no economy without people, and this virus is not only lethal but easily spread by networks of interactions. Eliminating the virus must be the priority.
1. There comes a point when the lethality of the preventative measures exceeds the lethality of the virus itself (which is relatively small - not as small as the flu or a common cold, but the lethality is still relatively low).
2. There is no eliminating the virus. You're on a wild goose chase. Vaccines can help reduce its impact on society and slow the spread but COVID-19 is a part of life now - period. We had a duty to try to slow the spread as much as possible until vaccines were out, and now that they'
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In India, many people did die due restrictions (Score:3)
The first lock down was crazy. Millions of workers found themselves with no job, no money, no food, no train to go home. They walked, and thousands expired on the way.
To be fair, a few thousand deaths in India does not even register on the scale. But it was savage, unnecessary, incompetent.
Here in Oz, there is no Covid at all, so in a sensible western country it can be controlled, and quite easily.
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Aren't the restrictions a positive impact on the economy? The premise of restrictions is that not-having-them is more expensive (e.g. increased viral spread, which causes hospitalization, death or downtime of otherwise productive people, etc). We are restricting viral get-togethers in order to lower the pandemic's impact on the economy.
Obviously, in America lots of us opt out of the restrictions and try to get sick (followed by presumed immunity) the fastest instead of waiting around for a vaccine, but that
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The tradeoff is different for different countries.
In Western countries, there is enough wealth to provide for the unemployed people while preventing viral spread. In India, there isn't enough wealth, and many people have to work or else starve. So lockdowns are more harmful relative to the virus.
Dictatorship (Score:2)
Modi is a classic, clinical case of a fascist (Score:2)
"Modi is a classic, clinical case of a fascist" --Ashis Nandy (in 1990);
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
3 Essential Features of Fascism: Invoking a Mythic Past, Sowing Division & Attacking Truth https://archive.is/O2Prf [archive.is]
Except Ambani/Adani Wealth, everything collapsed for Common man in India;