Giant Strides

For instance,while China’s poverty reduction between 1981 and 2005 was “tremendous” in absolute terms — 625 million — oddly,much of it occurred not in their current-day rampant globalisation phase,but in the 80s,due to an “egalitarian distribution of land use rights”,which gave the poor a safety net. The higher current-day growth,for the most part,said Bardhan,didn’t translate much into reduction of poverty,particularly in India,due to the “crucial” inequality of opportunity.

In China,decentralisation had “gone much deeper”,which made a “dazzling difference” in terms of physical infrastructure,as did the fact that civil servants had incentives to perform well. Their incentive-less Indian counterparts,on the other hand,“don’t rock the boat and go somewhere else”. However,he pointed out,the Chinese incentive system was also responsible for capitalist excesses such as environmental degradation.

Sociologist Patricia Uberoi praised the book,and recounted an amusing anecdote about a “brave Chinese social scientist” who presented a paper on sexual frequency which found party members to have a “more vigorous sex life” and better sex,co-related to high education. She added that in the “reproduction of inequality”,“education counted less for social mobility than party members making the “right marriage”,or the sort of jobs they got and directed their kids into. This,among other sociological factors,also needed to be taken into account for a complete picture of comparative development,she said.