WSJ: “Many countries have followed a similar economic trajectory: As they develop, women increasingly enter the workforce, further fueling the country’s upward climb…India, which overtook the U.K. last year as the world’s fifth largest economy, hasn’t followed that path. Since 1990, its female labor-force participation rate has hit a peak of only 31% in 2000, according to data from the World Bank. Last year, it was 24%. That rate is among the 12 lowest in the world, a list including Afghanistan and Somalia. Saudi Arabia has a higher percentage of women working or looking for a job…Economists blame India’s low figures on two main factors: weak job creation, which has led to intense competition for the available opportunities, and a deeply conservative culture that emphasizes a woman’s place is at home.”
Economist: “The Chinese claim that universal values are an imposition is upside down. From Chile to Japan, the World Values Survey provides examples where growing security really does seem to lead to tolerance and greater individual expression. Nothing suggests that Western countries are unique in that. The real question is how to help people feel more secure. China’s answer is based on creating order for a loyal, deferential majority that stays out of politics and avoids defying their rulers. However, within that model lurks deep insecurity. It is a majoritarian system in which lines move, sometimes arbitrarily or without warning—especially when power passes unpredictably from one party chief to another. A better answer comes from prosperity built on the rule of law. Wealthy countries have more resources to spend on dealing with disasters, such as pandemic disease. Likewise, confident in their savings and the social safety-net, the citizens of rich countries know that they are less vulnerable to the chance events that wreck lives elsewhere.”
Arnold Kling has a critique of industrial policy. “The big winners of the new industrial policy will not be working-class Americans. They will be lobbyists loitering in the halls of Congress, earning huge salaries playing the game of dialing for dollars to take from your pockets to give to favored businesses.”
Ajay Shah and Nitin Pai: “We think that replacing the JEE with a lottery-based allocation to IITs will have transformative effects for Indian education. It is already a lottery today, but one where the ticket so expensive that only well-off families can afford it. A typical fee for a year’s JEE coaching is close to what an average Indian earns in a year. The JEE is a poor estimator of true capability, and it is hard to say the 80,000 who do not make it are systematically inferior to the 20,000 who do. Many chance factors are tipping the scales today, such as a student being unwell on the exam day, or a heat wave at the test centre. There is a better way to allocate public resources. The price of an IIT lottery ticket can be reduced to zero. Seats can be randomly allocated to applicants who meet basic requirements. Specifically, we could envision a first-level exam, which is not about the things that Google knows. Out of that the top 200,000 ranks are shortlisted. At the second stage, a random list of 20,000 would be chosen to attend the IITs. Such an approach, we contend, outperforms the current method on several important dimensions.”
Indians like women to work at home as the public spaces are not safe for them. The new work from home using online systems now allow Indian women to work from home and deliver good value to the national economy. As more tools are available to them online, they can do very well. When the well educated and better skilled women work from home (or by going to the workplace) their household jobs can be delegated to other less educated people and a greater degree of jobs will be available to people in the nation. Even the household work can be better organized and technically enhanced that such work can be outsourced to small entrepreneurs. It will be win for all and the nation.