Education

Below is the latest regurgitation of his own work from Prater Tom (Friedman) in today's NYT.

"I think keeping a constant flow of legal immigrants into our country — whether they wear blue collars or lab coats — is the key to keeping us ahead of China. Because when you mix all of these energetic, high-aspiring people with a democratic system and free markets, magic happens. If we hope to keep that magic, we need immigration reform that guarantees that we will always attract and retain, in an orderly fashion, the world’s first-round aspirational and intellectual draft choices."

One does not have to change a word to have the second sentence apply to in toto to India. Which is why the new bill to allow a few foreign universities into India has merit; someone who never leaves his cultural comfort zone but can leave his intellectual comfort zone may well opt to stay in India.

I note that many commentators in India are now saying that the two tier structure being set up in India will give new entrants a leg up and decimate our current IIT's and IIM's and others much as private airlines decimated Air India, Bharti bombed BSNL and Reliance whacked ONGC and OIL.

None of them mentions the two tier reform that has made much of the current Indian economic miracle possible - that of allowing private banks. True, they have taken a chunk of business from nationalized banks; it is also true that the nationalized banks have themselves reformed under business pressure.

And merit does not matter; so long as overall India has better education, just as it now has better telephone service and more oil and gas, you and I should not care. It is about the nation and not about fairness or certain interests. Of course there will be clever Indian businessmen who make money out of this and the IIT's may die. But that is the way we embraced in 1992.

All we can hope for is that as tax revenues grow and as people are better educated and more involved we can take back the state from our evolving plutocracy. The question of whether we become an America or a Europe is what lies before us. Either is way better than our starting point.