[lars512]

You can check out a range of important development statistics on India here: https://lars.yencken.org/projects/country-explorer/india

The one we're talking about today is "extreme poverty", which is the $2.15 purchasing-power-adjusted line. It's fantastic news that most Indians have surpassed this line, but it's also helpful to think of this line as just one rung in a ladder out of poverty. Life just above this line is still not great.

This chart, which shows how much of the population lives in different poverty lines for India, gives you a sense for the population as a whole. You can compare it to other countries to see their distribution, and China is probably a good comparison to make.

India: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio...

China: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio...

Despite progress on extreme poverty, you're right that there are still some 3 billion people in the world who cannot afford a nutritious diet, and likewise 3 billion people who live in energy poverty, meaning they have to cook indoors with solid fuels (wood, coal, dung) that damage their health and shorten their lives. It's important that we make progress on all these things in the coming decades. We absolutely have the power to.

The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better!

[ethan_smith]

Some of these graphs are highly inaccurate due to how the government skews employment data. For example, the government counts jobless people as "employed" if they return to their villages from cities due to lack of employment and occasionally help on family farms.

Agricultural employment has actually increased post covid [1][2]:

2018-2019: 42.5%

2022-2023: 45.8%

This isn't because the number of farms is growing, but because more people are working on the same farms due to lack of jobs elsewhere. This casts doubt on the overall poverty reduction narrative.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS?location...

https://dge.gov.in/dge/sites/default/files/2024-02/Employmen...

https://thewire.in/economy/share-of-agriculture-in-employmen...

[anon291]

As someone of Indian descent, realistically speaking, Indian nutrition is going to be bad so long as the upper classes continue to moralize over it. Recently, there was a kerfuffle in Maharasthra because the state government wanted to remove eggs from the state lunch program and go lacto-vegan only. This is due to some people considering eggs unclean (like many other animal products). This sort of moralizing is extremely common in India, despite being a poor country. To put it bluntly, moralizing over diet is a past-time of the wealthy, not a way to run a country.

[maxglute]

>moralizing over diet

Interesting. There's seems to be some fuckery with Indian hunger data, i.e. malnourishment, stuntness have stalled at a relatively high level 10 years ago and even occasionally gets worse. Which kind of makes sense if one realizes India added 400 million mouths in last 20 years, and distribution is an issue. I remember also news a few years ago Indian average height decreasing, all proxy indicators that hunger/nutrition was not improving (granted this was during covid). But cultural drama over diet also explains a lot of it. Cultural drama seems to explain a lot in India... one other stark stat is Indian female work participation rate declined as country got wealthier... culture seems to be women stop working out of neccessity if men can sustain household. It's a... different development trajectory.

[anon291]

I honestly think most Indians eat too many calories, not too little. It's just trash nutritionally speaking, and deficient in protein, which is a large determinant of height. It's cultural

> It's a... different development trajectory.

My two cents: the rest of the world is highly westernized. If you consider Islam a western religion (which you should, since it's a derivative of Judaism, and is a cousin to Christianity), then basically all of the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa was westernized with the Islamic conquests. Sub Saharan Africa has adopted western norms wholesale after colonization (no written language, so very hard to keep old customs). Later, China adopted communism (a western ideology), which made its way into parts of Korea and Southeast Asia, and Japan / Philippines were colonized by force. India actually stands out as never having undergone much of a western colonization. Obviously, the entirety of the Americas are the result of Spanish/British/etc colonization.

India stands out as the only country to have never been properly colonized, with a long written record. A lot of economic theories we have are really not universal truths, but things that only hold true in the global monoculture. That's why India's development trajectory is so different, and why states like Kerala basically defy all expectations (even if it's 'communist', it's 'communist' in a non-'communist' federal framework).

Again... my highly controversial opinion. I don't really pay a whole lot of attention, but this is my take.

[octopoc]

Interesting! I agree that India’s colonial history is unique in that it wasn’t settled by Europeans like North America.

But Judaism isn’t a western religion, it’s a Middle Eastern religion with strong ethnic ties. Hence it hasn’t evolved and branched like all the major religions have. Christianity isn’t western religion either, but modern Protestantism and Roman Catholicism arguably are. Eastern Orthodox is actually a great example of the diversity of all major religions— they have national churches (Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox).

Islam is multi ethnic of course and so there are branches that are western (Albania is an example) but calling Islam as a whole “western” is mostly incorrect.

[anon291]

Then let's just break it down between Jewish descended (Abrahamic) and not

China adopted communism which is ultimately a philosophy whose patrimony is European and all that entails.

> Eastern Orthodox is actually a great example of the diversity of all major religions— they have national churches (Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox).

I mean... Sure and they still have common beliefs descended from Judaism and Christianity?

[octopoc]

I think we agree but let me just as some nuance to what you’re saying.

The Jews didn’t invent their beliefs out of whole cloth—this is true whether it’s Judaism or communism (Karl Marx, Lenin, and most Russian communists were Jewish though I think you know that already). They borrowed monotheism and a bunch of their religion from local religions at the time. Jewish communists learned a great deal from the French Revolution. They put a Jewish stamp on these beliefs so to speak, then handed off some of those beliefs to other people who, like the Jews before them, discarded what didn’t make sense to them and kept what did. China is barely communist now, by Russian standards, it’s more fascist to be honest.

Another good example is how in modern Protestantism they talk a lot of about “the biblical definition of marriage,” when what they really mean is one man and one woman—more of a northwest European definition. The biblical definition of marriage is one man and one or more wives. But you can’t get a modern Protestant to accept what the Bible says because everyone reads their own beliefs into these religions.

There is no discernible ultimate source to any religion—it’s more like a chain of beliefs, where people take their existing beliefs and project them onto their religion.

Having said that, Hinduism is is a chain of beliefs that has stayed within the same ethnic group for a very long time, which maybe is what you’re saying? And that is indeed something rare and very precious.

[dpig_]

> India actually stands out as never having undergone much of a western colonization.

I don't think I'm understanding the sense in which you're using 'colonized' here?

[aziaziazi]

While I agree morale is something for the riches (slavery ban, woman right… happens more where there’s many wealthy than when they are the exceptions), a diet-especially in a poor country- may also consider the efficiency (which some wealthy don’t give a sh*t because « they pay so they can »).

INMH the interesting questions is « what are the proteins options, considering the ressources of Indians/India? If your poultry is fed with soy you’ll have many times more proteins and other nutrients eating directly the beans instead of transforming them the eggs. However if your poultry find their food by themselves on a field, you have free eggs without input waste.

[hilux]

Eggs are an outstanding source of protein, culturally well-known, easy to transport, cook, etc.

I think your theoretical argument is - "what if instead of eggs we could feed hungry people with all the soy used to feed those chicken to produce those eggs?" You and I both know that's not going to happen.

[ouilala]

Cheap meat sources are either banned by law (beef in some areas) or quite thoroughly socially banned due to the two major religions being Hinduism and Islam ie beef and pork. Hinduism technically does not forbid beef but the current strain of Ram-ization does vehemently so.

[anon291]

> INMH the interesting questions is « what are the proteins options, considering the ressources of Indians/India? If your poultry is fed with soy you’ll have many times more proteins and other nutrients eating directly the beans instead of transforming them the eggs. However if your poultry find their food by themselves on a field, you have free eggs without input waste.

Just completely and utterly false, and reflects the poor understanding of diet and nutrition that is pervasive throughout India and in Indian culture. There's a reason why Indians have the highest rates of metabolic syndrome. I've basically shirked all of it, and my blood numbers, weight, etc are substantially better than my parents and my brother.

Firstly, chickens eat more than soy, and chickens (and animals in general) can turn undigestible, useless biomatter into actual food (such as ruminants digesting grass, and then humans drinking milk or eating the flesh). Using animals, you are able to use much less bio-matter to get an equivalent amount of calories and nutrition, simply because humans are terrible at digesting.

That being said, on to eggs. Eggs are an excellent source for protein and orders of magnitude better than soy when looking at both the amino acid profile as well as the protein / calories.

One hard-boiled egg contains about 70 calories and 6 g protein.

Meanwhile, you'd need 50g boiled soybeans to get 6g protein. However, Soy is less bio-available (about 90%), so you'd actually need to eat about 6.6 g protein or 60 g soybean, containing about 70 calories. So far so good, right?

Wrong. Because soy beans are low in essential amino acids like methionine. For an average adult you need about 1.3g methionine / day. This is 3 eggs or 210 calories.

Meanwhile, you need about 480 g of soybean to meet your methionine requirement, which is 830 calories.

If you analyze the Indian diet, you'll realize it's replete with these sorts of insane substitutions, where a perfectly good source of nutrition, whose protein profile matches exactly the human requirement, is substituted for a sub-par product. Obviously, since these are requirements, you'll see Indians compensate by simply eating more to make up for the deficiency. But eating these vegetarian sources of protein in the right amount to get to the required intake leads to insanely high calorie numbers, which is why diabetes, stomach fat, heart problems, etc are so prevalent in India. And it's also why Indians in India are shorter than the Indians in the diaspora despite Indians in India actually eating more calories (hence the weight).

And that's just calories and basic metabolism, we're not even talking body composition, which again suffers within India simply because the best sources of protein are eschewed due to moralizing. There's a reason why Indians, despite constituting 25% of the planet, do not constitute a large portion of world-class athletes and have low average rates of grip strength. It's an insanely self-inflicted pathology.