07-02-2008, 10:41 PM
Is India Running Out Of Smart People?
Posted by John Carney, Oct 20, 2006, 4:24pm
Just in time for Hindu Christmas, The New York Times today runs an article on Indiaâs dearth of smart workers. That might strike a lot of finance people in New York as surprisingâWall Street seems pretty well-populated by folks from the subcontinent. But just because there are a lot of smart, skilled people in Indiaâpeople who want to work in finance, become engineers, programmers, etcâthat doesnât mean there is an endless supply.
Our Indian friends tell us that the problem is rooted in the countryâs wildly divergent population groups. Some groups just make better workers for the information ageâeither because they have better access to higher education, are more familiar with the culture of international capitalism, are less prone to disease and other afflictions that can retard intellectual progress or just have better native intelligence. Weâve never been to India and canât quite evaluate this kind of claim.
Steve Sailer says the mainstream media isnât helping because it is somewhat allergic to questions about intelligence, fearing that someone, somewhere might draw racist conclusions from the facts.
So we turn to DealBreaker readers. Whatâs up with India? Has India reached the bottom of its talented talent pool or is this just a temporary problem? (Bonus question if you can explain why the New York Times is running this as Diwali kicks off.)
Comments
Posted by blah, Oct 20, 2006 5:30PM
Just do a normal distribution on a population of 1.2 (give or take a few hundred million) billion people and yes you will have a lot of smart people.
Until recently, Indian economics was socialism (which as you might know doesn't provide a good infrastructure for most anything).
There are still many backwards places over there.
As for the NYTimes, ahm, maybe someone there thinks they have troops in Iraq? Or maybe they don't like capitalists?
Posted by Beach Bum, Oct 20, 2006 5:58PM
Maybe India is running out of so-called "smart workers" because they've all immigrated to the US!
"Smart worker" = "Smart-Ass worker"
I swear, the Indian guys working in IT and finance in the US (and UK) are some of the most fucking arrogant, cocky SOBs I've ever come across. Talk about "Cocky Fucks"!
And Indians are no more intelligent than Westerners--they're just more willing to accept lower wages. Still, they all act as if they're Brahmin. WTF?
In the Great China Vs. India debate, I'm on the side of China.
Sure, India may be a "democracy" (like who really gives a sh1t) and the Indian middle class may be on the rise (hurrah! more global waming!), but the country is wallowing in poverty, violence, arrogance, delusions, and multicultural-induced ethnic violence.
Posted by indian bum, Oct 20, 2006 7:54PM
why are you linking to the racist scum Steve Sailor. He uses the IQ Zoroastrian Parsees of Bombay as an example. For those who don't know Zoroastrian Parsees are driven out from Iran by the Islamists and have nothing in common with the rest of the Indians either culturally or genetically.
Posted by comments, Oct 20, 2006 10:34PM
Assume an IQ of 130 is required to work on Wall Street. How many workers does India have which match that?
CIA Factbook: India Population is 1,095,351,995. Assume India IQ is 81, then only 595990 Indians are smart enough to work on Wall Street.
China Population is 1,313,973,713. Assume China IQ at 100, then 29,893,075 Chinese are smart enough to work on Wall Street.
There are several advantages India has over China which also need to be considered. First, in terms of personality, Indians are much better than Chinese because they are extremely extroverted. Second, they tend to be better speaking English than the Chinese. Third, the population structure of India is younger than the population structure of China. Thus many of the smart Chinese are too old to want to emigrate.
John, it's nice that your boss is so down with the GNXP crowd and can handle biodiversity issues.
Posted by Does it Matter, Oct 21, 2006 1:25AM
Ok..I will bite. I'm a regular DealBreaker reader and this is my first comment.
I am an Indian, working in the financial industry in San Francisco. I came to this country five years back with $100 in my pocket. I'm now worth about half a million dollars. I'm a brahmin, the so-called priestly class in India. I studied in Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), arguably the most difficult engineering institution to get admission to (tougher than getting into MIT).
ok. The reason I mention the above is because:
1) Talent or success is a function of individual initiative, hard work and availability of opportunity
2) At the age of 18, I worked in a coal mine and was destined to earn $10 a day mining coal. By sheer stint of hard work, I got admission to the IITs, which enabled me to learn. I touched my first computer at age 19. I'm now 28.
Stop categorising people on the basis of nationality, race, and ethnic background. When the economic conditions and policy is in the right direction, people will prosper. Individual entrepreneurship and initiative knows no boundaries.
Best.
Posted by rama, Oct 21, 2006 4:29PM
beach bum,
better you and hang yourself. I can simply guess that you are a moron on account of the lanuage you used. You like it or not Indians are the best brains , not the Chinese.
Indian should not care about such an idit like yu. Indian are really smart guys.
Posted by AR, Oct 22, 2006 3:26AM
The basic point of the article is that the demand for IT workers in India has outstripped the supply. If India has been turning out X # of workers annually, but the # of needed workers is growing significantly larger, then clearly a shortage will occur. Yes, pretty damn obvious.
Any high school econ student knows that in the short run supply is fixed. India definitely has problems as far as who is able to access its educational system, but with continued foreign investment in the country, those problems will hopefully be resolved, at least to the point where it will be able to catch up to the growing demand for IT workers.
Posted by blue shlu, Oct 23, 2006 1:23AM
India is among the fastest growing economies today...and to sustain the growth the manpower requirement is huge. Obviously, even for a country with a billion people its difficult to produce skilled people at that rate.
I am an indian, and working on wall street as a techie. I have worked in India and here...and am surprised by some of the comments here. Indians are the last person you expect to be arrogant snobs, they work hard though not necessarily at lower wages (another misconception), they have an IQ that is pretty high (dont want to use superlatives for matters of modesty).
On the other hand..i see the dumbest things done by non indians ( and non chinese. take a guess ! )
Some people would use any chance to come up with racist slurs which is unfortunate - the world is becoming smaller by the day and it is very much a global economy. If anybody wants to harbor ideas of their superiority well they are free to live in their ignorance, but dont have any doubts on who comes out as the loser.
I saw the issue of ethnic conflict also being raised. Might i add here that india is one country which is probably the most tolerant to diversity. So many religions and so many languages all living happily. If you want to see conflict try speaking english in japan, or being a hindu in pakistan, or a sunni in Iran.
Sure India has its problems - but is on the way to getting rid of them. For a democratic country that diverse, it takes time to change things.
Posted by VS, Oct 23, 2006 3:48AM
I can see that the guys at Dealbreaker know the truth but are afraid to speak it. They just hint at it and leave the dirty job for the posters to comment it.
Unfortunelly, none of you guys had the guts or knowledge to land a crushing blow to popular beliefs (which may I add, are synonimous with political corectness). Nor I will sacrifice myself here, as I am posting from the company's computer and we all know they trace and read everything you do on the net.
But all things aside, you know what I mean. I am from Romania, an emerging market that will soon catch up with the west, much, much sooner than India or China. And you know why? Of course some of you know, but most of you have no clue about it. Let's just say that we're not into the danger of running out of Brahmin, so our talent resources are only limited by our population number, which is as best as it can get.
So Dealbreaker guys, in the future I advise you to be more corageous and come forward with your beliefs.
Respect,
VS
Posted by Vic, Oct 23, 2006 9:58AM
VS
Please send me the recent report that Romania will catch up with the west soon. As for the fact that political correctness prevents people from saying what they want to say, how's this? Romania will remain a shithole for a very long time. You don't see the president or Goldman Sachs or American Enterprise Institute talking the vast potential of Romania whose biggest export seems to be underage girls for the streets of Paris and London.
India is running out becuase demand is far outstripping supply. The solution as the middle class emerges is to increase the number of world class institutions in India to produce more graduates. You seem to hint that somehow it has to with whites vs non-whites. Maybe from your Eastern European shithole, where black soccer players are routinely mocked, you can see things that way. In the real West, people are begining to transcend that and work with Indians, Chinese, and others to grow the global economy. We'll get to Romania, the paragon of capitalism, in about 200 years.
Posted by John Carney, Oct 20, 2006, 4:24pm
Just in time for Hindu Christmas, The New York Times today runs an article on Indiaâs dearth of smart workers. That might strike a lot of finance people in New York as surprisingâWall Street seems pretty well-populated by folks from the subcontinent. But just because there are a lot of smart, skilled people in Indiaâpeople who want to work in finance, become engineers, programmers, etcâthat doesnât mean there is an endless supply.
Our Indian friends tell us that the problem is rooted in the countryâs wildly divergent population groups. Some groups just make better workers for the information ageâeither because they have better access to higher education, are more familiar with the culture of international capitalism, are less prone to disease and other afflictions that can retard intellectual progress or just have better native intelligence. Weâve never been to India and canât quite evaluate this kind of claim.
Steve Sailer says the mainstream media isnât helping because it is somewhat allergic to questions about intelligence, fearing that someone, somewhere might draw racist conclusions from the facts.
So we turn to DealBreaker readers. Whatâs up with India? Has India reached the bottom of its talented talent pool or is this just a temporary problem? (Bonus question if you can explain why the New York Times is running this as Diwali kicks off.)
Comments
Posted by blah, Oct 20, 2006 5:30PM
Just do a normal distribution on a population of 1.2 (give or take a few hundred million) billion people and yes you will have a lot of smart people.
Until recently, Indian economics was socialism (which as you might know doesn't provide a good infrastructure for most anything).
There are still many backwards places over there.
As for the NYTimes, ahm, maybe someone there thinks they have troops in Iraq? Or maybe they don't like capitalists?
Posted by Beach Bum, Oct 20, 2006 5:58PM
Maybe India is running out of so-called "smart workers" because they've all immigrated to the US!
"Smart worker" = "Smart-Ass worker"
I swear, the Indian guys working in IT and finance in the US (and UK) are some of the most fucking arrogant, cocky SOBs I've ever come across. Talk about "Cocky Fucks"!
And Indians are no more intelligent than Westerners--they're just more willing to accept lower wages. Still, they all act as if they're Brahmin. WTF?
In the Great China Vs. India debate, I'm on the side of China.
Sure, India may be a "democracy" (like who really gives a sh1t) and the Indian middle class may be on the rise (hurrah! more global waming!), but the country is wallowing in poverty, violence, arrogance, delusions, and multicultural-induced ethnic violence.
Posted by indian bum, Oct 20, 2006 7:54PM
why are you linking to the racist scum Steve Sailor. He uses the IQ Zoroastrian Parsees of Bombay as an example. For those who don't know Zoroastrian Parsees are driven out from Iran by the Islamists and have nothing in common with the rest of the Indians either culturally or genetically.
Posted by comments, Oct 20, 2006 10:34PM
Assume an IQ of 130 is required to work on Wall Street. How many workers does India have which match that?
CIA Factbook: India Population is 1,095,351,995. Assume India IQ is 81, then only 595990 Indians are smart enough to work on Wall Street.
China Population is 1,313,973,713. Assume China IQ at 100, then 29,893,075 Chinese are smart enough to work on Wall Street.
There are several advantages India has over China which also need to be considered. First, in terms of personality, Indians are much better than Chinese because they are extremely extroverted. Second, they tend to be better speaking English than the Chinese. Third, the population structure of India is younger than the population structure of China. Thus many of the smart Chinese are too old to want to emigrate.
John, it's nice that your boss is so down with the GNXP crowd and can handle biodiversity issues.
Posted by Does it Matter, Oct 21, 2006 1:25AM
Ok..I will bite. I'm a regular DealBreaker reader and this is my first comment.
I am an Indian, working in the financial industry in San Francisco. I came to this country five years back with $100 in my pocket. I'm now worth about half a million dollars. I'm a brahmin, the so-called priestly class in India. I studied in Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), arguably the most difficult engineering institution to get admission to (tougher than getting into MIT).
ok. The reason I mention the above is because:
1) Talent or success is a function of individual initiative, hard work and availability of opportunity
2) At the age of 18, I worked in a coal mine and was destined to earn $10 a day mining coal. By sheer stint of hard work, I got admission to the IITs, which enabled me to learn. I touched my first computer at age 19. I'm now 28.
Stop categorising people on the basis of nationality, race, and ethnic background. When the economic conditions and policy is in the right direction, people will prosper. Individual entrepreneurship and initiative knows no boundaries.
Best.
Posted by rama, Oct 21, 2006 4:29PM
beach bum,
better you and hang yourself. I can simply guess that you are a moron on account of the lanuage you used. You like it or not Indians are the best brains , not the Chinese.
Indian should not care about such an idit like yu. Indian are really smart guys.
Posted by AR, Oct 22, 2006 3:26AM
The basic point of the article is that the demand for IT workers in India has outstripped the supply. If India has been turning out X # of workers annually, but the # of needed workers is growing significantly larger, then clearly a shortage will occur. Yes, pretty damn obvious.
Any high school econ student knows that in the short run supply is fixed. India definitely has problems as far as who is able to access its educational system, but with continued foreign investment in the country, those problems will hopefully be resolved, at least to the point where it will be able to catch up to the growing demand for IT workers.
Posted by blue shlu, Oct 23, 2006 1:23AM
India is among the fastest growing economies today...and to sustain the growth the manpower requirement is huge. Obviously, even for a country with a billion people its difficult to produce skilled people at that rate.
I am an indian, and working on wall street as a techie. I have worked in India and here...and am surprised by some of the comments here. Indians are the last person you expect to be arrogant snobs, they work hard though not necessarily at lower wages (another misconception), they have an IQ that is pretty high (dont want to use superlatives for matters of modesty).
On the other hand..i see the dumbest things done by non indians ( and non chinese. take a guess ! )
Some people would use any chance to come up with racist slurs which is unfortunate - the world is becoming smaller by the day and it is very much a global economy. If anybody wants to harbor ideas of their superiority well they are free to live in their ignorance, but dont have any doubts on who comes out as the loser.
I saw the issue of ethnic conflict also being raised. Might i add here that india is one country which is probably the most tolerant to diversity. So many religions and so many languages all living happily. If you want to see conflict try speaking english in japan, or being a hindu in pakistan, or a sunni in Iran.
Sure India has its problems - but is on the way to getting rid of them. For a democratic country that diverse, it takes time to change things.
Posted by VS, Oct 23, 2006 3:48AM
I can see that the guys at Dealbreaker know the truth but are afraid to speak it. They just hint at it and leave the dirty job for the posters to comment it.
Unfortunelly, none of you guys had the guts or knowledge to land a crushing blow to popular beliefs (which may I add, are synonimous with political corectness). Nor I will sacrifice myself here, as I am posting from the company's computer and we all know they trace and read everything you do on the net.
But all things aside, you know what I mean. I am from Romania, an emerging market that will soon catch up with the west, much, much sooner than India or China. And you know why? Of course some of you know, but most of you have no clue about it. Let's just say that we're not into the danger of running out of Brahmin, so our talent resources are only limited by our population number, which is as best as it can get.
So Dealbreaker guys, in the future I advise you to be more corageous and come forward with your beliefs.
Respect,
VS
Posted by Vic, Oct 23, 2006 9:58AM
VS
Please send me the recent report that Romania will catch up with the west soon. As for the fact that political correctness prevents people from saying what they want to say, how's this? Romania will remain a shithole for a very long time. You don't see the president or Goldman Sachs or American Enterprise Institute talking the vast potential of Romania whose biggest export seems to be underage girls for the streets of Paris and London.
India is running out becuase demand is far outstripping supply. The solution as the middle class emerges is to increase the number of world class institutions in India to produce more graduates. You seem to hint that somehow it has to with whites vs non-whites. Maybe from your Eastern European shithole, where black soccer players are routinely mocked, you can see things that way. In the real West, people are begining to transcend that and work with Indians, Chinese, and others to grow the global economy. We'll get to Romania, the paragon of capitalism, in about 200 years.