[WSJ] Rajeev Mantri : Job Creation and Income Growth

Rajeev Mantri, executive director of Navam Capital writes in WSJ: 

The distinction between job creation and income growth is not as well understood as it should be. Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman once visited China at the height of Communism, and was taken to a construction site. He asked why the contractors were not using machinery and modern equipment, and was told that the project was part of a government job creation program. Friedman replied that the spades used by the labor force should be replaced with spoons, and that would increase employment even more! The lesson is that it is easy to "create" jobs, but harder to grow incomes because incomes rise only when productivity increases. Productivity increases when companies compete and innovate.
If we are serious about creating jobs, we should focus on creating an environment where people like Jobs prosper. Bharat will become more like India.
In the current regime, India is being turned into Bharat. Well-intentioned policies that claim to employ the poor are distorting the labor market by incentivizing people to migrate back to villages from cities. The country must urbanize if it has to develop economically, it cannot continue to live in villages.
Much has been made of India's demographic dividend. An average of nearly 1 million people will be entering the work force every single month for the next 20 years, a scale unprecedented in human history. The only comparable event is the post-World War II Baby Boom in the US. This is an opportunity, and can be a huge challenge, because all those people will want to be well-fed, educated and productively employed. It would be futile for the government to even try employing so many people.

Read the full article: The Genesis of Jobs on WSJ.

Javed Akhtar on Devil's Advocate on Art and Freedom of Expression and of Dissent

Javed Akhtar trumps Karan Thapar who sits there looking like an idiot after having failed to pigeon-hole the discussion while Akhtar makes complete sense. Loved watching the videos.

See the transcript and watch the videos here.

Sanjeev Sanyal : Marathi Manoos will take Mumbai where Bengali Bhadralok took Kolkata

An insightful comparison between today's Mumbai and yesterday's Kolkata by Sanjeev Sanyal (the author of The Indian Renaissance: India’s Rise after a Thousand Years of Decline )  :

The decline of Kolkata tells the same story. Till the mid-60s, the city was the most important cultural, intellectual and commercial centre in India. Its industrial hinterland was the largest in Asia, excluding Japan. The city was a multi-cultural mix of Bengalis, Marwaris, Biharis, Anglo-Indians, Europeans, Jews and Armenians. It even had a vibrant China-town. However, attitudes changed from the 60s — multinationals were squeezed out, new technologies were discouraged and the teaching of English was banned. Even the works of Rabindranath Tagore could only be performed according to strictly-prescribed formulae. The result was not a renaissance of Bengali culture. Instead, Bengal has never again produced individuals of the calibre of Tagore, Satyajit Ray, Vidyasagar, Vivekanand or Subhash Bose.
The lessons of Kolkata are important for Mumbai, especially since its own rise was partly helped by its rival’s decline in the 60s. Many of the companies that drive Mumbai’s current success were originally headquartered in Kolkata, and, in some cases, are still registered there. The self-proclaimed protectors of the Marathi Manoos may want to consider what happened to the Bengali Bhadralok. Today, the Bengali middle class (including me) lives in “exile” in Bangalore, Delhi-Gurgaon, New York, London and even Mumbai. We were not exiled by foreign rule or by the invasion of migrants but by close-mindedness and the lack of imagination.

Read the full article in Business Standard here.