From India, .... and then ....

I suppose I am not unlike many from my generation in India who, as impressionable youth, firmly believed in Marxism--how ever incorrect our understanding might have been of that "ism" .... and then we slowly drifted out of it as we read Orwell or Solzhenitsyn, before signing off on capitalism, and yet with a nagging worry that this "ism" has a lot of flaws as well, and forever wondering whether a right "ism" will somehow miraculously show up and make this world a fantastic place .... the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then Tony Blair and Bill Clinton talking up a "third way", .... and now we are down to one--the liberal democratic capitalism.  History is over, spake Fukuyama.

This is International Education Week and my classes have aspects of globalization as the topics.  I remind students about this week.  They forget.  I nag them.  They forget.  It goes on :-)

In such a context, it was neat to read Jagdish Bhagwati's comments.  It was all the more fascinating how he uses "we" when talking about Americans.  I sometimes wonder whether my students take it on face value when I also employ "we" Americans, or whether the accented "we" makes them think otherwise .... One of the fantastic things about America is how "we" becomes quite easy--very easy to become one of the 300 million ..... So, here is Bhagwati talking about "us" Americans, and "we" ought to favor free trade:

America’s great comparative advantage lies in innovation. For someone like me who has come from India it is very obvious that this country is full of innovators. When I was a student I read about Britain’s Industrial Revolution. And it was powered by all kinds of people, inventing the spinning jenny and so on. They were like little Americans, you know, thinking of new ways of doing things and making a buck. Almost every other American I know is thinking about something, some way to do something. We are a highly inventive people, and technology therefore is our driving force. It’s not savings and investments which are driving our productivity. It’s technology and innovation and immigrants like me—not me in particular—lots of people who come here and by the second generation go through the mill and become Colin Powell or Orlando Patterson at Harvard.
Nobody can compete with us in the long run, in my view, because these are not advantages which people in traditional societies can reproduce. So we’re always going to be doing high value. We’ll lose the high value we generate to others quickly because now technology diffuses very fast. But then we’ll have new ideas, new technologies.

I am impressed with the supreme confidence with which he states "nobody can compete with us in the long run ...." Perhaps one needs to be an immigrant to truly relish the flavor of this sentiment :-)

Yet, many of "us" immigrant do not completely ditch the old country either--particularly with the technological innovations that is seemingly only one step away from teleporting a masala dosai fresh from Madras all the way across here!!!.  I think we are in the best possible situation--we get to enjoy everything. 

Sen, of course, wonderfuly defined "us" in the old country as the "argumentative Indian" .... I don't think we ditch that either, much to the displeasure of many of "our" friends and colleagues here :-)

When I was in graduate school, one of my trips across town in the university's free shuttle to UCLA was to listen to a talk by another economist from India--Pranab Bardhan.  A question during the Q/A then was why he was not keen on becoming a formal adviser to the Indian government, which was the direction Manmohan Singh was going at that time.  Bardhan replied that his job was to be a critic, which I thought was a wonderful position to be in :-)  The journeys in life brings me one degree of separation away from Bardhan--apparently a colleague and Bardhan know each other from their younger days in Calcutta.

And "we" are all here in America.