By Fareed Zakaria
Is China heading for the middle-income trap? The answer to that question could lay in inequality, research highlighted by Peter Orszag on Bloomberg suggests.
The middle-income trap, which Orszag notes typically occurs at two income levels –$10,000 per capita and around $15,000 – is the point where rapid growth in developing countries slows to more sluggish expansion. Based on current projections, China could reach that first figure as early as 2015.
“One thing that can help determine whether a country escapes the middle-income trap and continues to grow rapidly is its level of inequality, a recent study by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Stanford University showed. More unequal societies, with less-inclusive institutions, have greater difficulty sustaining growth.”
In India, meanwhile, disparities between the countryside and urban areas have traditionally created a situation under which “the countryside is where the vote is; the city is where the money is,” according to political scientist Ashutosh Varshney.
“The countryside, where 68 per cent of India currently lives, is not where most of national income is generated,” Varshney noted in a piece a while back in the Indian Express. “Over two-thirds, perhaps as much as three-fourths, of the nation’s GDP is generated in cities where less than a third of the country lives; whereas less than a third, perhaps as little as a fourth, of the country’s GDP is produced in the countryside, where over two-thirds of the national population resides.”
But sometime in the next two decades, India will have an urban majority, he adds. “The urban middle class should use the new political moment to return to electoral politics.”
And as President Obama announces a package of gun control measures, the debate continues over the reasons for America’s soaring gun homicide rate. But according to a piece last week in Nature, “demands to analyze the Connecticut school shooter’s DNA are misguided and could lead to dangerous stigmatization, or worse.”
“Many healthy people carry mutations associated with disease; many people with mental illness carry no known risk factors. Mass shooters are often young white men, yet very few young white men become mass shooters. There is no one-to-one relationship between genetics and mental health or between mental health and violence. Something as simple as a DNA sequence cannot explain anything as complex as behavior.”