One of my best friends recently told me that the prestigious multinational corporation he worked for was itching to permanently send him to India. They wanted him to manage their expansion into that market. And, obviously, India is a huge emerging market. They gave him the Godfather offer to go — enough money to live in a mansion, with personal chefs, private drivers, everything. The irony, of course, was that my friend is a first generation Indian-American. His parents gave up everything decades ago and fought their way to the US to give their kids opportunities they would never have had back in India. They succeeded. What they didn’t expect was that that opportunity for their son they gave up everything for? It was back in India.
One of my big take-aways from Naim’s The End of Power is that emerging economies have a lot going for them. If the future belongs to auto-didacts, it also belongs to people who are comfortable living in more than one country.
I’m big on the potential of parts of India, but the reality is still far behind. I visited two of its major cities recently and it’s a mess. Electricity routinely cuts out daily, for two-hour stretches during the middle of the day: residential or commercial, it doesn’t matter. Traffic is horrific, it takes you half an hour to go a mile or two. Wired internet is a joke, unreliable speeds and tough to find more than a single provider. Although wireless internet, in the form of 3G services, is improving things, no 4G almost everywhere. These are the most basic of infrastructure services, that everybody expects to be ubiquitous and rock-solid in the US, yet the bumblers cannot get even these basics right.
I suspect that this Indian-American kid would run screaming if he ever took his company up on their offer, if he were ignorant enough about the status quo to take it in the first place. There are only a couple types who can live in these shitholes, the highly ambitious or those who don’t much care about these basic amenities.
The emerging economies have exactly one thing going for them: they are so far behind the US that their rates of growth can explode for a decade or two, and still not catch up. But they’re making so many mistakes in the process that you wonder if they’ll ever get close. There is no alternative to the US right now, and the only reason the US isn’t even further ahead is because the US govt keeps hamstringing us with dumb regulations, not because any credible threat is on the horizon.