From The Street...
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
Sugar Bad...
I am a Type 2 diabetic and so I watch sugar and carbo intake carefully.
A "best selling" book, published some time ago, Sugar Blues, got into the historical "damage" done by refined sugar and its cultivation and sale. The author goes off for awhile on this Whole Big Theory Thing and gets off thread a bit; but the science part seems plausible.
From a doctor's website - albeit one selling books/diets/seminars/etc, comes this: a list of Why Sugar Is Bad For You, with citations for all of the assertions. Hmmm....
http://mercola.com/blog/2004/jan/19/us_government_influenced_by_sugar_industry/http$3A$2F$2Fwww.mercola.com$2Farticle$2Fsugar$2Fdangers_of_sugar.htm
Why Sugar Is Bad For You
FWIW
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Florence King Goes To WalMart....
Celebrated Misanthrope Florence King's 1997 piece on greeters and toaster shopping and grandmothers, replayed on National Review Online's The Corner...
Great Stuff...
JMW
==========
Amidst all the chatter over immigration, gay marriage, and caucuses, we will now provide The Corner readers with a selection from Florence King's beloved "The Misanthrope's Corner" column. This April 21, 1997 gem finds Miss King taking on superstore "Official Greeters" and toaster warnings. Enjoy.....
==========
IT all started when I went to the mall to buy a new toaster. It should have been a day off, which in my case means not writing about America, not taking notes on America, not thinking about America. But such days don’t exist. I got a column out of my day off, and here it is.
Shopping at the big discount chains is a painful experience for me because I’m scared of the Official Greeters, especially the one in the wheelchair. As soon as she sees you come in, she revs up and zooms in on you, shrieking, “How can I help you have a fun-filled shopping experience?” They had her in a TV ad once, racing through the aisles and burbling, “I love people! I love people! I just love people!” Having been stalked by irony all my life, I know an omen when I see one. If there’s the slightest chance of someone being run over by a people-loving disabled American, it’s a dead cert to be me.
My first task was getting into the store without being seen by the cadre of Official Greeters. There’s a way to do this. Lighting a cigarette, I stood outside the door smoking until I saw a covey of Fam Vals approach: distracted parents, three or four kids, everybody dropping things and talking at once. If there’s one thing OGs love even more than human beings it’s kids, so I got behind the Fam Vals and surged in with them. It worked. As soon as the OG on duty saw the munchkins she shrieked, “Hiya, fellas!” and immediately engulfed them, allowing me to sneak past on my little cat feet.
I hadn’t bought a toaster for twenty years so I was unprepared for the new four-slot models (one even had six) that had come on the market since then. Fam Vals again: the bigger the toasters, the better we feel about ourselves. Finally I found a two-slotter and bought it.
Back home, I plugged it in and was about to throw the packing away when I noticed the “Use and Care Guide.” I started reading it, and in minutes I was underlining my favorite passages and making marginal notes in typical workaday fashion.
It opens with “WARNING: A risk of fire and electrical shock exists in all electrical appliances and may cause personal injury or death.” Next comes “IMPORTANT SAFEGUARDS: When using electrical appliances, basic safety precautions should always be followed to reduce the risk of fire, electric shock, and injury to persons, including the following.”
What follows is a list of 17 Dos, Don’ts, precautions, safeguards, warnings, and dire caveats that leave nothing to the imagination, common sense, or sanity itself. Not even those unrivaled connoisseurs of peril, Jewish mothers and grandmothers of all stripes, could come up with a list like this. Things happen here that could happen only in a “Pink Panther” movie.
“Do not use appliance except as intended.”
“Do not use outdoors or while standing in a damp area.”
“Do not place on or near hot gas or electric burner, or in a heated oven.”
“Do not place any part of this toaster under water or other liquid.”
“Do not insert over-sized foods, metal foil packages, or metal utensils into the toaster.”
“Do not clean with metal scouring pads. Pieces can break off the pad and touch electrical parts creating a risk of electrical shock.” “Use toaster in an open area with 4-6 inches air space above and on all sides for air circulation. A fire may occur if toaster is covered or touching flammable materials including curtains, draperies, towels, walls, and toaster covers.” “Failure to clean crumb tray may result in a risk of fire.”
Is Paris burning? You bet; Inspector Clouseau has done with one toaster what von Choltitz failed to do with a whole German army.
Meanwhile, non-klutzy toast lovers are stymied by two SAFEGUARDS that never before crossed their minds: “Do not use appliance unattended” and “Unplug from outlet when not in use.” You don’t really have to go to the bathroom, it’s all in your mind; just stand there and watch the toaster toast and everything will be all right as long as you remember to unplug it before going downstairs to get the mail.
At this point the guide dissolves in repetitive babble. SAFEGUARDS is followed by a CAUTION about extension cords, which “may be used if care is exercised in their use. If an extension cord is required, special care and caution is [sic] necessary.” CAUTION is followed by another WARNING (“Unplug before cleaning. . . . Do not immerse in water”), followed by a four-point CAUTION, only two of which are new. One says: “Avoid using items with ‘runny’ frosting, fillings, icings, or cheese. This includes pre-buttered foods. When these substances melt, they cause a sticky build-up and may result in a risk of fire.” The other new CAUTION says, “Do not physically hold down the toast lever,” which, when combined with “Do not operate unattended,” raises the distinct possibility that there are people in this world who get their kicks from hanging around toasters.
The purpose of this frenzied flyer is to protect the manufacturer against lawsuits, but there’s more to it. The surface of American craziness is only the beginning; the really good stuff is found underneath. Looking at my day off as a whole, I would venture to say that there would be no litigiousness or Official Greeters if we had real Family Values, instead of the fake kind that hangs over everything from shopping malls to focus groups like a damp shroud.
I mean, for example, grandmothers who did not dye their hair and date, but lived with their married daughters and enlivened breakfast with: “If you stick a fork in that toaster you’ll be burned to a crisp. There’ll be nothing left of you except a little pile of ashes and everybody will say, ‘Do you remember that poor little girl who electrocuted herself?’”
That’s called a “loving warning,” and if you grow up hearing them you won’t have to sue people or hug strangers to get attention or prove that somebody cares.
========================
Sunday, January 11, 2004
George Will...Social Hypochondria
George Will writes that perhaps our fascination with little bad news-es is a survival behavoir. The big picture, not good for helping the out-guys throw the in-guys out in an election year - is seen by few and appreciated by fewer, it seems.
JMW
=========================================
DISCONTENTED
George Will
January 11, 2004 -- "What good is happiness? It can't buy money."
- Henny Youngman
SOCIAL hypochondria is the national disease of the most successful nation. By most indexes, life has improved beyond the dreams of even very recent generations. Yet many Americans, impervious to abundant data and personal experiences, insist that progress is a chimera.
Gregg Easterbrook's impressive new book, "The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse," explains this perversity. Easterbrook, a Washington journalist and fellow of the Brookings Institution, assaults readers with good news:
American life expectancy has dramatically increased in a century, from 47 to 77 years. Our great-great-grandparents all knew someone who died of some disease we never fear. (As recently as 1952, polio killed 3,300 Americans.) Our largest public-health problems arise from unlimited supplies of affordable food.
The typical American has twice the purchasing power his mother or father had in 1960. A third of America's families own at least three cars. In 2001 Americans spent $25 billion - more than North Korea's GDP - on recreational watercraft.
Factor out immigration - a huge benefit to the immigrants - and statistical evidence of widening income inequality disappears. The statistic that household incomes are only moderately higher than 25 years ago is misleading: Households today average fewer people, so real dollar incomes in middle-class households are about 50 percent higher today.
Since 1970 the number of cars has increased 68 percent, and the number of miles driven has increased even more, yet smog has declined by a third and traffic fatalities have declined from 52,627 to 42,815 last year. In 2003 we spent much wealth on things unavailable in 1953 - a cleaner environment, reduced mortality through new medical marvels ($5.2 billion a year just for artificial knees, which did not exist a generation ago), the ability to fly anywhere or talk to anyone anywhere.
The incidence of heart disease, stroke and cancer, adjusted for population growth, is declining. The rate of child poverty is down in a decade. America soon will be the first society in which a majority of adults are college graduates.
And so it goes. But Easterbrook says that such is today's "discontinuity between prosperity and happiness," the "surge of national good news" scares people, vexes the news media and does not even nudge up measurements of happiness. Easterbrook's explanations include:
* "The tyranny of the small picture." The preference for bad news produces a focus on smaller remaining problems after larger ones are ameliorated. Ersatz bad news serves the fund-raising of "gloom interest groups." It also inflates the self-importance of elites, who lose status when society is functioning well. Media elites, especially, have a stake in "headline-amplified anxiety."
* "Evolution has conditioned us to believe the worst." In Darwinian natural selection, pessimism, wariness, suspicion and discontent may be survival traits. Perhaps our relaxed and cheerful progenitors were eaten by saber-toothed tigers. Only the anxiety-prone gene pool prospered.
* "Catalogue-induced anxiety" and "the revenge of the plastic" both cause material abundance to increase unhappiness. The more we can order and charge, the more we are aware of what we do not possess. The "modern tyranny of choice" causes consumers perpetual restlessness and regret.
* The "latest model syndrome" abets the "tyranny of the unnecessary" which leads to the "ten-hammer syndrome." We have piled up mountains of marginally improved stuff, in the chaos of which we cannot find any of our nine hammers, so we buy a tenth, and the pile grows higher. Thus does the victor belong to the spoils.
* The cultivation - even celebration - of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint.
Easterbrook, while arguing that happiness should be let off its leash, is far from complacent. He is scandalized by corporate corruption and poverty in the midst of so much abundance. And he has many commonsensical thoughts on how to redress the imbalance many people feel between their abundance of material things and the scarcity of meaning that they feel in their lives.
The gist of his advice is that we should pull up our socks, spiritually, and make meaning by doing good while living well.
His book arrives as the nation enters an election year, when the opposition, like all parties out of power, will try to sow despondency by pointing to lead linings on all silver clouds. His timely warning is that Americans are becoming colorblind, if only to the color silver.
=================
Friday, January 09, 2004
Gilder pooh-poohs Bonner, TDR.../More After TV Dies...
George , the eternal optimist, takes on Gloom and Doom of TDR/Bill Bonner:
=============
Excerpted from George Gilder's 12/27/03 post, "Buffetted in Bonnerville"
on the Gilder Technology Report subscriber message board on
www.gildertech.com To read more of Mr. Gilder's posts, and share insights
with other Gilder subscribers, visit http://www.gildertech.com
"...It's nonsense. The best answer came from Thomas Macaulay, who I quote
at length in Wealth&Poverty on the growth of the British national debt
while all the greatest British economists from Adam Smith to David Hume
prophesied disaster. I update his insights here:
"Those who uttered and those who believed that long succession of
despairing predictions erroneously imagined that there was an exact
analogy between the case of an individual who is in debt to another
individual and the case of a society which is in debt to part of itself;
and this analogy led them into endless mistakes....They were under an
error not less serious touching the resources of the country. They made
no allowance for the effect produced by the incessant progress of every
experimental science, and by the incessant effort of every man to get on
in life. They saw that the debt grew and they forgot that other things
grew as well as the debt....[the economists] went on complaining that [the
nation] was sunk in poverty till her wealth showed itself by tokens which
made her complaints ridiculous....Meanwhile, taxation was almost
constantly becoming lighter and lighter, yet still the Exchequer was
full."
The chief difference today is that the relevant economy is global and the
advance of real wealth is vastly accelerated by the progress of
technology.
Yes, Bonner is right that the stock market might go down and gold might go
up. But he has no clue why. Nothing would accelerate the process so much
as Bonner's (and Buffett's and Soros's) prescriptions: Raise taxes and
devalue the dollar.
--George Gilder
Another 12/27/03 excerpt from George Gilder's message board comments:
"...The future of these companies depends on the expansion of full
broadband last mile links--meaning TV-killer full motion video pipes--into
the US. With fully one third of TV time now devoted to commercial
messages according to the latest reports, TV today is on an avid death
trip, aching for euthanasia. With the death of TV at the hands of two-way
full motion broadband, the funds that support it will flow to the net and
multiply, as Americans regain control of their cultural lives.
Despite all ridiculous claims to the contrary, however, in this richest
and most technological fertile of all nations, two-way broadband scarcely
exists at all, except on the increasingly thronged USB and PCI busses
between monitors and harddrives and UPS busses between Netflix et al and
your front door.
Broadband is expanding explosively in several countries around the globe.
But isolated by distinctive languages, Korea, Japan, and Italy do not
suffice to ignite a surge of global traffic. Thus from XO to GX to 360, to
Broadwing (CORV), the big backbone scavenger carriers continue to wage
price wars for the business of a few hundred giant corporations....."
--George Gilder
Thursday, January 08, 2004
THE IDEA OF AMERICA
A view of what "American" means, from the editor of TDR
===============
THE IDEA OF AMERICA
By Bill Bonner
"Elizabeth," I asked this morning, as my wife climbed out of the
pool. "How would you describe that sea turtle we saw on the
beach?"
Pausing for a moment, she replied:
"Rotating its slow and majestic flippers, it ground its way
slowly and inexorably towards China... "
The sea turtle was headed east. Whether China was its destination
or not, I don't know. I only know that it was about to leave the
Latin America isthmus, from the west coast of Nicaragua, and put
out to sea when a muscular, brown young man picked it up and
carried it back up on the beach. He and his friends had dug a big
hole in the sand where the turtle was placed.
At night we often see the dim light of flashlights along the
beach. "It's the locals looking for turtle eggs," Manuel
explained. "It's illegal to take them, but... " Manuel shrugged
his shoulders.
Sea turtles are protected by international convention. But here
in the wilds of Nicaragua they still end up in the soup from time
to time.
This is America too... but it is not the same America. It is the
New World... but not as new as the world north of the Rio Grande.
Here, the Old World has not yet been snuffed out. It survives in
a semi-tropical paradise.
But the object of our attention in today's Daily Reckoning is
neither the Old World nor the New one - but the ever- changing,
never-fully-explored idea of America.
"Proud to be an American" says one bumper sticker. "One nation -
indivisible," says another. America was, of course, founded on
the opposite principle... the idea that people were free to
separate themselves from a parent government whenever they felt
they had come of age. But no fraud, no matter how stupendous, is
so obvious as to be detected by the average American. That is
America's great strength... or its most serious weakness.
After September 11, so many people bought flags that the shops
ran short. Old Glory festooned nearly every porch and bridge.
Patriotism swelled every heart.
Europeans, coming back to the Old Country, reported that they had
never seen anything like it. A Frenchman takes his country for
granted. He is born into it, just as he is born into his
religion. He may be proud of La Belle France the way he is proud
of his cheese. But he is not fool enough to claim credit for
either one. He just feels lucky to have them for his own.
America, by contrast, is a nation of people who chose to become
Americans. Even the oldest family tree in the New World has
immigrants at its root. And where did its government, its courts,
its businesses and saloons come from? They were all invented by
us. Having chosen the country... and made it what it is...
Americans feel more responsibility for what it has become than
the citizens of most other nations. And they take more pride in
it, too.
But what is it? What has it become? What makes America different
from any other nation? Why should we care more about it than
about, say, Lithuania or Chad?
Pressed for an answer, most Americans would reply, "Because
America is a free country." What else can be said of the place?
Its land mass is as varied as the earth itself. Inhabiting the
sands of Tucson as well as the steppes of Alaska, Americans could
as well be called a desert race as an arctic one. Its religions
are equally diverse - from moss-backed Episcopalians of the
Virginia tidewater to the holy rollers of East Texas to the
Muslims of East Harlem. Nor does blood itself give the country
any mark of distinction. The individual American has more in
common genetically with the people his people come from than with
his fellow Americans. In a DNA test, your correspondent is more
likely to be mistaken for an IRA hitman than a Baltimore drug
dealer.
America never was a nation in the usual sense of the word. Though
there are plenty of exceptions - especially among the made-up
nations of former European colonies - nations are usually
composed of groups of people who share common blood, culture, and
language.
Americans mostly speak English. But they might just as well speak
Spanish. And at the debut of the republic, the founding fathers
narrowly avoided declaring German the official language... at
least, that is the legend. A Frenchman has to speak French. A
German has to speak the language of the Vaterland. But an
American could speak anything. And often does.
Nor is there even a common history. The average immigrant didn't
arrive until the early 20th century. By then, America's history
was already 3 centuries old. The average citizen missed the whole
thing.
Neither blood, history, religion, language - what else is left?
Only an idea: that you could come to America and be whatever you
wanted to be. You might have been a bog- trotter in Ireland or a
baron in Silesia; in America you were free to become whatever you
could make of yourself.
"Give me liberty or give me death," said Patrick Henry, raising
the rhetorical stakes and praying no one would call him on it.
Yet, the average man at the time lived in near perfect freedom.
There were few books and few laws on them. And fewer people to
enforce them. Henry, if he wanted to do so, could have merely
crossed the Blue Ridge west of Charlottesville and never seen
another government agent again.
Thomas Jefferson complained, in the Declaration of Independence,
that Britain had "erected a multitude of New Offices, and set
hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their
substance." Yet the swarms of officers sent by George III would
have barely filled a mid- sized regional office of the IRS or
city zoning department today.
Likewise, the Founding Fathers kvetched about taxation without
representation. But history has shown that representation only
makes taxation worse. Kings, emperors and tyrants must keep tax
rates low... otherwise, the people rise in rebellion. It is
democrats that really eat out the substance of the people: the
illusion of self-government lets them get away with it. Tax rates
were only an average of 3% under the tyranny of King George III.
One of the blessings of democracy is average tax rates that are
ten times as high.
"Americans today," wrote Rose Wilder Lane in 1936, after the
Lincoln administration had annihilated the principle of
self-government... but before the Roosevelt team had finished its
work, "are the most reckless and lawless of peoples... we are
also the most imaginative, the most temperamental, the most
infinitely varied."
But by the end of the 20th century, Americans were required to
wear seat belts and ate low-fat yogurt without a gun to their
heads. The recklessness seems to have been bred out of them. And
the variety too. North, south, east and west, people all wear the
same clothes and cherish the same decrepit ideas as if they were
religious relics.
And why not? It's a free country.
Bill Bonner,
The Daily Reckoning
===============
Tuesday, January 06, 2004
Like to Hate Do You?
From The American Thinker
January 5th, 2004
The Democrats have built a mythology around the 2000 Presidential election, as Richard Baehr convincingly demonstrates in today'sAmerican Thinker. The energy generated by the resulting anger has been a prize sought by party officials and candidates alike. But like the thrill brought on by amphetamines or other nervous system stimulants, the short term surge comes at the cost of longer term damage to health.
Anger has become the fashionable political mood in America’s faculty lounges, big city newsrooms, and best-attended Democratic political events. Howard Dean, the former governor of one of America’s smallest states, has propelled his candidacy to a commanding position, financially and in the public opinion polls, based largely on his superior skill at articulating and embodying the fury which has gripped a substantial fraction of core Democrat activists.
Anger is a terrific motivator. Angry people contribute money, go to events, wear buttons, t-shirts, and funny hats, and readily slap bumper stickers on their Volvos, Beetles, mini-vans, and Lexuses. They enjoy meeting and spending time with others who are in tune with their particular emotional orientation. Some even find that sharing outrage can lead to sharing other passions, via computer dating services linked to the Dean campaign.
But anger has many drawbacks as the basis for an American political movement. Americans tend to favor optimism and a sunny disposition in their political leadership. Ours is a nation built on the pursuit of happiness as an inalienable right granted us by our Creator. More than two hundred years after this right was articulated in the Declaration of Independence, Ronald Reagan won overwhelming electoral support running on the slogan “Morning in America.”
Let the Balkan peoples define themselves by their ancient wrongs waiting to be avenged. Let clans like the Hatfields and McCoys in the hollows ofWest Virginia carry their grudges for generations. They are the curious exception to our general rule of concentrating on what we can become, rather than what our ancestors were. Americans take seriously their birthright, and would rather wipe the slate clean than nurture a collective grudge. Anger is like an acid which curdles the sweet mother’s milk of happiness, whose pursuit is so much a part of our national character.
Of course, there are some who do choose to define themselves by their ancestors’ tragedies, and whose vision of a world put right consists of extracting vengeance of some sort. Most prominently, the movement to collect reparations for slavery, payable 150 years later to the presumptive descendents of slaves, is being touted as a path to cosmic justice. But even its most fervent proponents do not foresee the public ever using the democratic process to enact a reparations law. Rather, litigation, giving the judiciary the opportunity to impose reparations on parties found somehow liable for the damages incurred in the past, is the primary tactic being employed.
Aside from its limited electoral appeal, anger is operationally a tricky, even dangerous force to harness. “Blind anger” is a common expression precisely because anger tends to render its carriers insensible to the complexities and subtleties of their environment. Particularly when the angry gather together, their anger feeds on itself and multiplies its force. It is precisely for this reason that mobs are recognized as dangerous.
Even if the shared anger is nonviolent, it still is capable of blinding the angry to the probable reactions of others. Convinced of their utter righteousness, seriously angry political movements readily overplay the cards they are dealt. Haters of Bill Clinton learned the hard way that the middle/majority of Americans could not be mobilized to share their passion, even when they held an ace, in the form of their enemy’s false testimony under oath.
Anger, held by the candidate and shared by his coterie and followers is the probable reason that Howard Dean has proven so gaffe-prone. He honestly does not seem to understand how most people will react to his assertion that Osama bin Laden is innocent until proven guilty, and nobody around him can caution him to watch his step. The rage which brings them together also precludes them from seeing its dangers. Of course, Dean also seems to have a problem with talking before thinking, and acting on impulse is another characteristic of the angry.
Anger requires an object. There must be someone or some group at which the anger is directed. By its nature, therefore, anger divides people. If the object of the anger is external to the nation, then anger can unite a people, as it has such nations as the Greeks, Koreans, and Poles. But if the object is internal to a nation, then schism, a rejection of the “we the people…” ethos, rears its head.
In George W. Bush, a large segment of the American intelligentsia has found an object wholly outside their framework of affection. People who obtained their status and income partially from the ability to speak articulately, and master a body of learning, find it troubling when one who gives no evidence of even caring about reading books and newspapers, or developing a large vocabulary of eloquently-spoken words, rises above them in status. It is an insult to the personal values they have embraced, and on whose rightness their own sense of self-worth depends.
Even worse, George W. Bush shows no shame or guilt in his character. Rather than embrace his insecurities, and embark on a lifelong path of searching for relief via the therapeutic talking cures so common to the urban educated classes, George W. Bush embraced Jesus Christ, and appears to have been done with his personal demons - no more drinking, no more rebellious streak, no more troubling doubts.
George W. Bush incarnates a rejection of the very values, beliefs, skills, style, and psychology by which large numbers of America’s educated class define themselves. Their self-concept is violated by his actions, his manner, his attitudes, and especially by his triumphs. If he is correct, then they are terribly, terribly wrong.
Charles Krauthammer, a psychiatrist by training and former practice, hascoined the term “Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS)” to be an affliction quite common today. He defines it as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency -- nay -- the very existence of George W. Bush.” Dr. Krauthammer is better situated than I to diagnose paranoia as an outcome of rage at George W. Bush. But it is consistent with the behavior of other groups which have been animated by anger.
Paranoia is rarely the basis for successful political action. Reading far too much into the actions of their opponents, the paranoiacs dissipate their resources fighting unnecessary battles. Their readiness to assume others are against them creates enemies where neutrals or even friendlies are present. Paranoia is quite simply dysfunctional.
Should the Democrats nominate the angry Dr. Dean, they will find it very difficult to extricate themselves from the problem they will be creating for themselves. A crushing defeat may not only be likely, it may be beneficial in the long term.
Thomas Lifson
==============================
India, not China....Continued...
From Guru Peter Drucker -
=================
The interviewer is FORTUNE editor-at-large Brent Schlender. The title of the piece is "GURUS: Peter Drucker Sets Us Straight" To a question: Does the U.S. still set the tone for the world economy?
Peter Drucker answers as follows:
The dominance of the U.S. is already over. What is emerging is a world economy of blocs represented by NAFTA, the European Union, ASEAN. There's no one center in this world economy. India is becoming a powerhouse very fast. The medical school in New Delhi is now perhaps the best in the world. And the technical graduates of the Institute of Technology in Bangalore are as good as any in the world. Also, India has 150 million people for whom English is their main language. So India is indeed becoming a knowledge center.
In contrast, the greatest weakness of China is its incredibly small proportion of educated people. China has only 1.5 million college students, out of a total population of over 1.3 billion. If they had the American proportion, they'd have 12 million or more in college. Those who are educated are well trained, but there are so few of them. And then there is the enormous undeveloped hinterland with excess rural population. Yes, that means there is enormous manufacturing potential. In China, however, the likelihood of the absorption of rural workers into the cities without upheaval seems very dubious. You don't have that problem in India because they have already done an amazing job of absorbing excess rural population into the cities - its rural population has gone from 90% to 54% without any upheaval.
Everybody says China has 8% growth and India only 3%, but that is a total misconception. We don't really know. I think India's progress is far more impressive than China's.
