Seems to me like we in the US are busy with downward mobility, as the money party does it's best to squeeze the middle class dry and send us into the underclass.

tla

Nevertheless both India and China are huge countries. India is especially an amalgam of many different cultures with a myriad of different spoken languages.

For instance there is a matrifocal ethnicity is Southern India. When first I heard about them I was told that this area of India that is matrifocal also enjoys the highest literacy rate. Arguably the role of women will be much better in that particular corner of India.

Generalizations are useful and sometimes necessary but given their sheer size and diversity I'd still be careful with sweeping statements about China and India.

infrastructure in Calcutta, but was impressed by other regions.

It's a big country, still a developing nation, that remains at a low level on the UN Trade and Development Index. (USA 854, Malaysia 631, China 505, Vietnam 355, India 306, Pakistan 275 for comparisons)

Yet is in the top 5 military power rankings and one of the largest importer of arms.

A complex issue...

a short piece on Female Infanticide and Sex-Selective Abortion worth reading.

http://www.gendercide.org/case_infanticide.html

not much to chose between them, I would say- though the Chinese government has tried harder to turn this around.

_{I feel the American worker has been sacrificed to the capitalist idols in the ancient Mayan fashion. - Sue Lamb, NYT reader}

From BoingBoing:

You think you got problems, huh? Air India got real problems. One of them being rats on a plane. You know what I say? Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherfucking rats on this motherfucking plane!

The struggling government-owned carrier's already uneven reputation has been further tarnished in recent months by rats on a plane, a strike by senior pilots and a midair fistfight between pilots and flight attendants. In September, a flight to Riyadh was grounded after a passenger saw sparks coming from an engine.

Hey, sounds like a party to me. At Air India, Losses, Rats and a Brawl in the Sky

Is the undoing of both china and India. Added to the fact that there is no solid legal underpinning for property ownership based on laws and precedent. Ever try and run a business where you don't have clear ownership?

India is barely a "country" and more like a federation of very different cultural groups lightly sharing a philosophical/religious social framework. Mobilizing "India" couldn't be done in the way Rove soundbitted the U.S. elite classes to war in 2002. There are many other reasons too many to list here. Many of the roads are more pothole than not.

substitute for all the travel I will spend my life never having been able to afford. That's okay. I've found so many treasures over the years.

One odd and chilling book I discovered long ago is a thing called Mother India. It is put together from accounts of India written by British and American doctors sometime around the 1900s.

It is one of the most ghastly things I've ever read. The part about those arranged marriages that I've never seen mentioned anywhere else, is how many of them are with girls much too young to be anyone's bride. I got the impression this was very commonplace in India at the time.

After finishing that book, the muslims of that era with their burkas and honor killings seemed clean and civilized by comparison.

Like property ownership rights. The countries with this you can just about count on your hands.

Like a middle class, and equal rights. Like public education to some standardized level. Like laws that apply equivalently and with a system of courts based on precedent. Like contract rights. Like a society that mostly knows and respects the laws and mores(even including traffic lights, shoplifting, and waiting in lines).

India has just about none of these things. China has just about none of these things. The Middle Eastern Countries are off the charts in terms of having none of the foundation for a modern economy. Africa barely has the familial structures for a modern economy, in that you have to have a family unit, or individual unit, structure to fit into a legal system. Not even Brazil or Mexico retains good property rights. Russia is basically a mafia.

Truly you can count on one hand all these pieces. Add to it a creative and creative/destructive culture and one can see why the US retains 30% of global economic activity.

Further as to the myth of home ownership. In colonial America home ownership brought with it the means of production, i.e. land on which you could grow your own food, cut your own timber, tan your leather etc. That was, in contrast to Europe where this was well nigh unto impossible a great source of real wealth.

Now take your suburban tract home the value of which is tied to ponzi markets over which you have so very much control. A truly liberating sort of wealth. Or is it not, much more a new type of servitude.