With a large enough labour market, which India has, that level of sorting and allocation will take place unless you posit that all people in a caste are good only for jobs their caste isn’t allowed to perform.
Does the caste system “randomly assign” individuals to jobs such as software coding? There’s no software coding caste, is there? Furthermore, modern Indian firms, especially technology firms, are well known for mixing different social groups together contrary to tradition. The same thing happens in top educational institutions.
No doubt, caste does not have negligible negative effects on individuals and society, but not quite in the ways being conceived of in this thread.
My understanding of Muslim castes is that it’s (1) rare, and (2) only superficially related to the Hindu caste system. Muslim castes are more simple racism where group A is better than group B. Hindu castes are more complicated than that.
Huh, what are you talking about? You yourself say that caste is most important for Brahmins and Untouchables, and less important for everyone else. That’s exactly the same thing I am saying. You have clearly privileged castes, clearly disadvantaged castes, and the rest of the castes fall somewhere in between. That’s like a perfect definition of shades of gray.
I’m going to need a cite for this.
There is not literally no lower caste software engineers or other professionals, but it’s clear the high castes are over represented. And this affects GDP because that guy cleaning toilets might have been an awesome programmer. When you are putting people in jobs for reasons other than their ability to do the job you create inefficiencies.
How much overrepresented? I don’t have the exact numbers of software engineers, but I would hazard a guess that in a population of a billion people, the theoretical inefficiencies with respect to any particular profession don’t manifest very quickly.
I think that hindrances in productivity are much more strongly affected by bad economic policy on the part of the government and widespread corruption.
shrug I disagree. I mean you have a large segment of the population that is (1) discriminated against in the private sector, and (2) discriminated for in the public sector. It’s not difficult to see the problems associated with that.
I had culture as #4 on my list, to be fair.
I think there has been too much emphasis put on the caste system historically. The response to that seems to be to completely discount the effects of the caste system. Neither are a true reflection of reality.
You don’t get the kind of correlations he did through luck.
Getting back to the earlier comment, if cognitive ability predicts national economic performance (see research by Heiner Rindermann, Garrett Jones, Joel Schneider, Rati Ram, Eric Weede etc) then how is that off topic to these discussions?
From that information you can see the extent it suggests a problem for India’s development are the effects of malnutrition. India has a higher rate of malnutrition among children under the age of three (46% in year 2007) than any other country in the world. That is going to impede the cognitive development of those children and limit the skill development of their future labor force.
I’m gonna repeat myself here because it doesn’t seem like anyone else is acknowledging this:
India’s growth has been very impressive. Much quicker than many thought possible even 10 years ago.
If it weren’t for China, they’d be dozens of threads on the dope about the threat of India, how they are exploting the US blah blah.
I think it would be a terrible mistake to race China for bragging rights, and potentially let inflation get out of control and/or an asset bubble implosion.
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Shifting goalposts. You earlier said that you cannot have castes without Hinduism. And, the castes that Acsenray and I mention among South Asian christians and Muslims are not ‘only superficially related’. Caste was a dominant cultural practice and people who converted to other religions continued to follow it.
Besides, how does ‘complicated’ matter in the least?
No, you categorically stated that -
And I pointed out that this was simply not true. It is most true(please note, “most true” does not mean the same thing as “true”) for untouchables, but only because they suffer from being economically disadvantaged and do not have the advantages of a well off family which can spur their intellectual and personal growth and allow them to participate meaningfully in the economy. This is, I think, exactly the sort of problem blacks in America face. This is also the exact problem that many other poverty stricken people in India face. My point is, caste is not the significant factor. In fact, it’s far easier to escape the effect of caste than it is to escape your race. All you need to do is change your last name to a generic ‘Smith’ equivalent and voila, you’re done.
I actually wanted to modify the post when I saw you’d mentioned Brahmin and scheduled caste. I apologise. What I read was about poor Brahmins marrying lower vaishya caste women for money, not scheduled castes. I’m unable to find where I read this, and I’m willing to retract that statement. However, it’s not material to my point. The child’s caste is definitely determined by the father’s caste, even if a Brahmin man married an untouchable, which I’ll admit would be rare, although I’m certain it would have happened at some point.
You’re reaching here. How is it clear to you that higher castes are over represented?
And what makes you think the private sector puts anyone in jobs for anything other than their ability? Ever hear tell of a certain something called market forces?
I think this is just your (somewhat half-informed) view. And nobody’s discounting the effects of the caste system. I’m just discounting the relative economic effects of the caste system. To sum up, 16% of the population was historically disadvantaged and are in a poor economic situation today, but the caste system is just one of the many reasons for their poverty, and that 16% is just a subset of a much larger population that is in similar economic straits for some of the reasons mentioned before - colonialism and poor economic policy. Take the caste system completely out of it, and, ceteris paribus, things would not be substantially different from the situation today.
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Because it makes it different than simply racism.
To be clear, are you claiming that your caste did not, historically, determined careers, standing in Hinduism, or access to political? Things such as only Brahmins being priests, political power being reserved for certain castes, or the military being made up of certain castes didn’t happen, and are historically inaccurate?
I’m still going to need a cite for this.
Are you disputing that lower castes are overrepresented in menial and dirty work?
They’ve never stopped racism before.
So, for example, you don’t think reserving a significant portion of government jobs for specific castes has any material impact on India today?
I don’t think caste matters. I was simply responding to bs’ question, which boils down to, “even if caste did matter, how could it affect economic growth?”
Ok..casteism is different from racism.
I’m stating that it is not as cut and dried or deterministic as you think it was. There was social mobility, intermarriage, the creation of new groups, and the movement of whole groups from one set of ‘varnas’ to another. I have already given you a cite for this which summarizes the work of somebody who’s widely recognised as an authority on the matter. Read it or not. Only your own ignorance is at stake here.
I consider it to be self evident, but here’s a cite of how the courts treat this today. Modern civil law in India is based on religion. Hence the courts interpret civil cases as Hindu tradition would interpret it. And the courts interpret it thus -
I’m disputing that it matters in the overall economic scheme of things. I readily admit that there’s a social problem to be faced up to.
I’m not clear on your stance on this. Do you want to have the ‘casteism is different from racism’ cake or do you want to eat it?’
We’ve been over this. Yes it does have a material impact. It makes caste a political issue. As soon as you give me even a halfway convincing argument that it is an important economic factor, I’ll happily reconsider my position.