This chapter is mostly about his experiences in the States, but very interesting as an Indian view on the USA
p.69
..My school was 80% "white" when I arrived and 80 percent black" when I left three years later"..
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p.70
The classroom was filled eith lathes, tools and machines, and we learned to work with our hands. We learned to repair a window, make a table, unclog a sink. At the end of the year , we ha lost our fear of technology.
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If America is a melting pot, India is a mosaic. A good mosaic has a unity of style, and India's civilization and its way of life has a stylistic unity.
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p.75
The economists, it seems, turned out to be hopelessly omtimistic about the ability of poor countries to transform their economies through investment in import substituting manufactures and overly pessimistic about their ability to export.
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India and much of the Third World created state-owned companies which turned out to be hoplessly inefficient. These companies did not provide adequate returnds and they did not add to the stock of domestic savings. Instead, they began to lose huge amounts of cash and became a drag on the economy Import substitution led local businessmann to reinvent the wheel, resulting in the manufacture of poor quality, high -cost goods without any reference to comparative advantage.
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Ironically, these and other state interventions ended in making the poor countries wasteful of capital. The investments did not pay off, their capital-output ratio was poor, and massive corruption was an unfortunate side effect.
Regarding Japan and the Far East: Their secret lay partly in their investments in education and health which helped to create the initial conditions of greater equality as they undertook rapid industrialization.
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Amartya Sen has propagated this idea of investing in human development with a missionary zeal. it may have won him a Nobel Prize, but it has not spurred the Indian State to act. The neglect of primary education remains our single biggest failure.
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About JK Galbraith coming back from India.
I had expected Galbraith to be happy at the prospect of living in a country that was practicing his ideas. Instead I found him gloomy and ambivalent. During lunch, he expressed serious concerns about excessive state controls on the Indian economy. He confessed that it might be better to have more private enterprise in a country at India's stage of development.
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p 79
Rawls contended that we would agree to two principles: first that each person should have the maximum liberty compatible with equal liberty for others; second, we would opt for equality unless the inequality helped everyone, including the worst-off, and everyone had a chance to reach the top.
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Although Rwal's starting point was egalitarian, he had found a moral basis for inequality. His great insight ws that free individuals would voluntarily consent to inequality in certain circumstances.
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Despite my concerns with distributive justice, I have come to believe that alleviating poverty is more important than achieving equality.
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Even in an elitist place like Harvard, half my classmates were one scholarship and came from ordinary backgrounds.
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Tocqueville, a Frenchman who visited America in the 1830, wrote that Americans were "joiners": they joined all manner of local organizations (unlike the Europeans), and this was the strength of American democracy. They have a dense network of voluntary organizations: churches, professional groups, charitable institutions, neighborhood clubs, and so on.
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The great thing about an American liberal education is that it allows an undergraduate the fredom to explore many subjects.
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As I look back on my four years at college, I am shocked that we were so concerned with the distribution of wealth in those days that we ignored the whole subject of wealth creation.
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