I still think the Philippine bagnet is superior to the Mexican chicharones.
With regards to hard work; it’s worth pointing out there is relatively little correlation between hard work and wealth. Some of the hardest working societies have had a lot less wealth than we have today. If the economic system for whatever reason isn’t quite right then all the hard work in the world will struggle to produce wealth.
This article is the answer to the OP. Jobs and innovation are driven by small companies with good ideas being transformed into big companies. However, as the article spells out, in Mexico many small companies exist in the black or grey markets because of difficulties in getting permits and paying taxes. Since these companies exist off the books they have no access to capital and can not grow. This protects big companies who have fewer competitors and less reason to innovate. There is a direct relationship between how easy it is to open a new business and grow it and how fast a nation’s economy grows.
Could be a correlation-causation problem though. Mexico could be corrupt because of its poverty, not the other way around.
“Here” is China and as fellow international assignees (yes, engineers) only make their home country salaries (I have one direct report in India, so I know how little they make).
I don’t do this. I’ve lived all over the world, and I currently live in China which is also a developing country. I’ve also lived considerably in Mexico, a country that others seem to think is a shithole but that I will defend with vigor. 
The fact is I have higher expectations for India. It’s a liberal democracy, a nuclear power, learned good governance from a great nation; produces brilliant engineers and scientists, has world class private medicine, and more. Yet for everything it has, it is still a shithole compared to other nations that have the same things going for them.
Good points. Your post seemed bereft of any prejudice or arrogance .
However , I am very curious to know which part of India these engineers come from if they would rather stay in China. What kind of background/family did they have in India ?
That being said , India is a bipolar enigma. World class things next to absolute poverty ,
Can put people on Mars but half the population does not have access to a toilet , Some of the most expensive RE on the planet next to vast slums.
To even begin to understand this , you have to know a very basic fact about Indian ( maybe even Chinese ) society. There is a **permanent underclass **in India ( caste system has a lot to do with it ) and unlike let’s say the U.S ( post civil rights movement U.S that is ) , it constitutes the majority of the population. I would say , around 80 percent. Yeah… think about that for a moment. This is shocking … I know.
This section of the population has suffered for years and years now. Maybe forever even.
The kind of equality that the " West " has achieved will NEVER be achieved in places like India.
Even when India was a " rich country " ( and it has been spectacularly wealthy for almost all history except past 150 or so years ) a majority was poor. That is where it is headed in the future too I think. It doesn’t matter if the GDP is 2 trillion or 20 trillion , a majority of the population will be **** poor.
I don’t know what the solution is to this conundrum.
On a global scale, Mexico really isn’t that bad. Compared to the US they have serious problems but they seem pretty median for Latin America and they are about to break into upper income per capita territory.
There’s a part I believe you’re missing. What you describe, minus castes, was perfectly applicable to Europe and America c. 1800; much of it was still there c. 1900. Most of the population lived hand to mouth, most of it was uneducated, the way society was set up made upward mobility extremely difficult. Even when those countries were ridiculously rich, the money, power and education were in a few hands. I know people who grew up illiterate in Europe, 1940s and 1950s (and I’m not even going into “traditionally disenfranchised minorities”, these people are members of the majority); my brother’s mother-in-law was born in a one-room shack, slept on the floor for most of her childhood and was sent to school by her first employers at age 14.
The rest of us keep hoping and expecting India to move beyond those limitations, as we did. Right now many of us are in a point at the cycle in which the money/power distribution is again becoming more extreme (that was the actual, original point that Wilfred Pareto studied, the relationship between property distribution + political power + social unrest), and yet it’s nowhere near what it was 100, 200 years ago.
India is a big society and big things always have a lot of inertia, but saying that it can’t break out of that social pit is exceptionalism. Indians are human, if they/you want to change you can.
Caste system is a HUGE social handicap. There are about 400 million Indians living today who were considered unworthy of even a physical touch ( untouchables ) decades back ( and still in more rustic , rural areas ).
Another factor is how the Indian Government handles the nation’s economy. The concept of true free market seems lost on them. They did open up the economy in 1991 and it has worked wonders for a small subset of population but even in 2015 the heavy handedness is there. India could be an economic powerhouse if they can figure this stuff out.
Another major factor I believe is the crazy diversity in races , ethnicities , castes , languages. The country was literally created out of a collection of Princely states in 1947.
Bullshit.
A boil water alert would be big news anywhere in the US, including the South, where I have lived for my entire adult life.
In fact the only supposed mass water contamination issue I recall for the entire country was the one in Oregon recently where they emptied a bazillion-gallon reservoir because one guy pissed in it.
Now, the tap water in some places like LA may taste so bad that most people go bottled most of the time. But the water is still safe to drink.
There have been some chemical contamination issues. 4-Methylcyclohexanemethanol in WV, and that mine breach into the Colorado come to mind. And lead in Flint. But yeah, not much in the way of biological hazards. Other than a few highly localized issues related to floods, water main breaches, etc.
Boston 2010 comes to mind. A pipe broke and the backup water wasn’t treated, so they told everyone to boil.
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I had in mind chronic contamination as opposed to isolated, single-occurrence contamination due to such things as equipment failure and weather.
But to be fair about it I googled “boil water alert” after I posted, and there were enough hits on the first two pages from all over the place to make me think it is possible I jumped the gun with my reply to Really Not All That Bright.
Indeedy. From Ole Mississip:
*State health officials have lifted the precautionary “boil water alert” for customers who get their drinking water from the Chunky Shoals Fish Camp water system in Lauderdale County.
The Meridian Star— 10th Oct 2015
*
That name…
Your cite on pesticide contamination does not support your claim that the US standards are relatively low; for example, the UK allows twice as much ethylene dibromide in drinking water than do the national US standards. The UK’s one size fits all number for contaminants seems sloppy to me, I’d rather have actual reasons for the acceptable thresholds and thus tighter standards for the really bad ones, as in the US standards.
Do you have a cite of a similar boil water alert (one affecting at least 300,000 households, as the one in your cite did) that did not generate national news in the US?
I’ve never needed my passport for Mexico unless I was going deep into the country. Crossing the border into Mexico for the day and then returning to the US, I always just declared to the US border official that I was American. Being white and sounding like an American is part of the trick, but I could have been Canadian. Still, I was never even asked for any ID, let alone a passport. (Admittedly, I have not tried this since before 9/11, but I still find it hard to believe you now require a passport just for a day trip to Juarez.)
And entering Mexico? Sometimes no one checks because sometimes there is not a single human being present. Not a one, on either side of the border. I’m thinking of walking into Tijuana from San Diego. There was a big turnstile at the parking lot on the border where we parked our rental car, the kind where you can’t come back through, and once you walk into Mexico, there’s a big “THUNK.” Like they’re emphasizing you just left America. If you suddenly remembered something you forgot, you have to go all the way over to the main entry point. So I’m wondering why your brother even needed his passport? Was he on his way farther into the country?
Why? We’ve had boil water alerts occasionally in SE Michigan, often when under pressurization due to overutilization in the summer causes a pipe to collapse. We boil water for a few hours after the repair is complete, with the expectation that the chlorine in the system will sanitize the rest of the supply soon thereafter.
It’s never “big news”; it’s just one of those things.
My guess is, that local government in Mexico doesn’t have a lot of money. The last time i was in Mexico (Juarez), I saw a public (city) park-it was nicely planted with shrubs and flowers. Next door was an empty lot, which was used as a trash dump. Clearly, the city didn’t have the money to keep the trash collected.