Growth vs. Participatory Growth

[BOOKS] Growth vs. Participatory Growth

An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions
By Jean Drèze, Amartya Sen | Princeton University Press | 2013

Two of India’s leading economists, Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen bring to light the neglected, dismal side of India that is not only overlooked in the media, but in public discourse.

An Uncertain Glory shows that even though India may be climbing up the ladder of per capita income through rapid economic growth, it is slipping and falling behind in terms of social indicators such as education, health care, poverty, etc. India’s negligence of the essential needs of the people, especially of the poor and women is one of its leading problems. While economic growth and human development have been pursued simultaneously in other Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea and China, the underdevelopment of social and physical infrastructure and human capacities may become a threat to India’s economic growth. In contrast to the India known as a nation full of talented engineers, many elementary school children are not able to write a simple sentence or do basic arithmetic. India also lags behind many of its neighbors such as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal in areas such as literacy, child malnutrition and immunizations and access to toilets. India’s central government spends four times more on petroleum and fertilizer subsidies than on health care, which has made up a mere 1 per cent of the GDP for the last 20 years.

As proponents of social welfare, Drèze and Sen have been criticized for their approach in fear that too much social welfare will hurt economic growth. Their challengers may right in the fact that in many emerging economies such as China and Brazil today and Europe-before, economic growth triggered big public interventions aimed at lifting health, education and other standards. However, this resulted in rapid social gains. In the case of India, its lagging social problems are pulling down the economy.

The poor have been kept out of public discourse. India has been too obsessed with chasing “growth” rather than “participatory growth.” The media is in part to blame as it celebrates only the rich and powerful rather than engage with the “diagnosis of significant injustices and inefficiencies.”

Despite ineffectiveness and corruption plaguing India’s public sector, the authors are hopeful that with its democratic system, significant reform of policies in the government can take place to address the extreme inequalities. Also, increase of public awareness of the abysmal economic and social deprivations is needed.

Drèze and Sen present a powerful analysis on these inequalities and how they can be overcome through a democratic process. Not only can we learn about the Indian case in this book, but also how progress in a poor country should be like.

Crossing the Bay of Bengal
The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants

By Sunil S. Amrith | Harvard University Press | 2013

The countries bordering the Bay of Bengal- India, Bangladesh, Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Malaysia- make up one fourth of the world’s population. Sunil Amrith gives a stirring new account of the Bay of Bengal and its various roles from maritime highway between India and China, battleground for European empires, and human migration. However, in the 1930s, economic, social and environmental pressures caused a cessation in their interconnectedness. Amrith suggests that the shores of the Bay of Bengal are vulnerable to climate change and could become central to struggles in Asia’s future.

The New Middle East
The World After the Arab Spring

By Paul Danahar | Bloomsbury Press | 2013

For the past forty years, the Middle East was perceived as a region with dictators who ruled hundreds of millions of people with an iron fist, provoking anger and outrage within the international community. Now, a handful of dictators are locked up, exiled and fighting for their lives. The West is said to have propped up these dictators out of fear of states falling under the influence of the communist block or radical Islam. Paul Danahar describes another side of the Middle East in which we can listen to the thoughts and stories of the people as they make their journey from dictatorship to democracies.

Tide Players
The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China

By Jianying Zha | New Press | 2013

Tide Players portrays a new generation of movers and shakers that are transforming China today. Jiaying Zha describes a wide range of characters from entrepreneurs to intellectuals. These characters include a talented chameleon who transformed himself to be Mao’s favorite “barefoot doctor,” an unlikely couple who become successful real estate moguls, a former culture minister turned prolific writer, and Zha’s own brother, a dissident who spent 9 years in prison for helping found the China Democracy Party. Zha’s depiction of characters gives a portrait of China otherwise hard to come across.

The Pioneers of Korean Modern Mathematics

By Lee Sang-gu | Human design | 2013

This book looks into Korean mathematicians who especially stand out in the process of developing and pioneering the field of mathematics after Western mathematics was introduced to Korea in the late period of Chosun. Lee Sang-gu, professor of mathematics at Sungkyunkwan University, has researched and analyzed arithmetic traditions and describes figures central to the development of modern mathematics in Korea. Lee provides deep insight into an area of studies often neglected by explaining the history, flow and how korean mathematics came to develop to today’s state.

Two Rivers

By Carolyn Drake and Elif Batuman | Self-published | 2013

Two Rivers is a masterpiece of photographer Carolyn Drake’s six-year journey from the Aral Sea to western China as she follows and captures sites along the two Central Asian rivers: the Amu Darya and Syr Darya. In this project she travels through the often-overlooked countries of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan. During her journey, she finds many stories about the diversity of Islam, intersecting languages, legendary empires, warlords, and poets; about contested borders, smuggling, energy surpluses and shortages, and political oppression.

The Man with Compound Eyes

By Wu Ming-Yi | Harvill Secker | 2013

Set in the coast of Taiwan, this novel of environmental literature tells the story of an apocalyptic aboriginal encounter with modernity. In Woenesia, there is a custom of requiring second sons to row away due to the island’s limited resources. In this way Atre leaves Woenesia and lands on another island made out of a trash vortex in the middle of the Pacific. The trash island later smashes into Taiwan’s east coast, but the Taiwanese people are too busy developing the east to care and Atre must fend for himself. This novel, which blends fact and fantasy, explores our increasing distance with the natural world.