I dont know if what I'm about to say is already represented in economics, but my sense is it isnt.
Productivity comes at the cost of something or the other. Green revolution might have increased crop yields and given everyone more food to eat, but it came at the cost of the loss of heirloom yields that are suited to local conditions, and the diversity in the indian diet went down. Soil depleted more as well.
If you want to unlock even more productivity out of more female labor force representation, that will come at the cost of children's health and all the unpaid care work that falls on women and which keeps systems running.
My feeling on hearing the stories of those who ended up homeless and crazy in the US is the reason this isn't so much the case in india is due to women keeping social connections alive and paying attention to their families.
In trying to unlock productivity on axes we can measure, we shouldn't lose out on impact that isn't measured in this regard. I used to think our low crime rate and low rates of substance abuse were a lack of data, but now I'm convinced our culture is what keeps it so, and we ought to have metrics for these things as well so we don't destroy them in the pursuit of metrics we do measure.
Specifically for agriculture, from purely an economic perspective, I truly don't have a preference for heirloom vs green revolution seeds. What I'm saying is that don't have inefficient subsidies for one or the other. For example, high electricity subsidies will incentivise farmers to grow rice/wheat that deplete the soil and lessen the biodiversity. Those electricity subsidies are then recovered from industrial/commercial consumers. Which is overall a loss to the entire economy (because it will make manufacturing uncompetitive). This also causes environmental damage by depleting the water table.
If farmers could become more productive and become rich, then some of them might turn to heirloom seeds as a way to have a high margin product on their farms.
In this case, productivity won't come at a cost to something.
I want to come to the example of the female labor force you mentioned. I get the sense that you're imagining productivity as something the employer wrings out of an employee and forces the employee to put their nose to the grindstone. Am I correct here?
In the strict economic sense of the word, productivity simply means how much output can you produce out of the same inputs. So if a female employee works 8 hours, more productivity doesn't mean that she'll work 9 or 10 hours. The increased output here is being caused due to an increase in the labor input.
Productivity would mean that maybe she's given a subscription to ChatGPT to help her generate more lines of code in the same 8 hours. Or maybe she's given more productive tools that allow her to generate more output *without* spending more time in the workplace.
So I don't think you need to worry about more productivity having a bad impact. This is purely a policy discussion.
I'll give you one last real world example.
Above 300 workers, firms need to seek government permission for layoffs. Which firms grow to more than 300 workers? Those that are the most productive and efficient. If you put obstacles to having more than 300 workers, then you'll have a ton of firms that could use labor efficiently that will artificially restrict themselves to 300 workers.
Would you agree that this isn't desirable? Large companies enjoy economies of scale and if the government comes down hard on such companies, then its a loss, right? There won't be manufacturing giants in India.
Let me know what you think. I hope I was able to alleviate at least some of your concerns.
I see many Indian farmers selling off their productive agricultural land giving way to endless concrete sprawlings which just half a decade ago was farming land.
While Idk about how it addresses the housing sector, but it's intensions are quite dissatisfactory
as they do because of the unproductivity of our farming (due to it's lack of Liberalisation & scaling) so land which could've been productive & scaled is now being permanently lost to concrete, thus it can give pathetic outcomes too from future food shortages (as the productivity isn't increasing ; the same reason for which considering it unproductive is being sold) to lack of employment generation.
Excellent deep dive into India's productivity challenge! The Hsieh-Klenow finding about 30-50% potential TFP gains from better resource allocation is striking. What's particularly interesting is how Priority Sector Lending creates this perverse "growth ceiling" - firms optimize for staying small rather than scaling up. I'd add that the land title issue you mentioned compounds this problem beyond agriculture. When 66% of civil cases involve land disputes, you're essentially taxing every productive investment with legal uncertainty. The comparison with Mexico's similar struggles suggests this isn't just an Indian phenomenon but a broader middle-income trap mechanism. Would be curious to hear your thoughts on whether state-level policy experimentation (like Hyderabad's FAR reforms you mentioned) could provide a politically feasible path forward, given the difficulty of national-level reform.
I dont know if what I'm about to say is already represented in economics, but my sense is it isnt.
Productivity comes at the cost of something or the other. Green revolution might have increased crop yields and given everyone more food to eat, but it came at the cost of the loss of heirloom yields that are suited to local conditions, and the diversity in the indian diet went down. Soil depleted more as well.
If you want to unlock even more productivity out of more female labor force representation, that will come at the cost of children's health and all the unpaid care work that falls on women and which keeps systems running.
My feeling on hearing the stories of those who ended up homeless and crazy in the US is the reason this isn't so much the case in india is due to women keeping social connections alive and paying attention to their families.
In trying to unlock productivity on axes we can measure, we shouldn't lose out on impact that isn't measured in this regard. I used to think our low crime rate and low rates of substance abuse were a lack of data, but now I'm convinced our culture is what keeps it so, and we ought to have metrics for these things as well so we don't destroy them in the pursuit of metrics we do measure.
So few things here.
Specifically for agriculture, from purely an economic perspective, I truly don't have a preference for heirloom vs green revolution seeds. What I'm saying is that don't have inefficient subsidies for one or the other. For example, high electricity subsidies will incentivise farmers to grow rice/wheat that deplete the soil and lessen the biodiversity. Those electricity subsidies are then recovered from industrial/commercial consumers. Which is overall a loss to the entire economy (because it will make manufacturing uncompetitive). This also causes environmental damage by depleting the water table.
If farmers could become more productive and become rich, then some of them might turn to heirloom seeds as a way to have a high margin product on their farms.
In this case, productivity won't come at a cost to something.
I want to come to the example of the female labor force you mentioned. I get the sense that you're imagining productivity as something the employer wrings out of an employee and forces the employee to put their nose to the grindstone. Am I correct here?
In the strict economic sense of the word, productivity simply means how much output can you produce out of the same inputs. So if a female employee works 8 hours, more productivity doesn't mean that she'll work 9 or 10 hours. The increased output here is being caused due to an increase in the labor input.
Productivity would mean that maybe she's given a subscription to ChatGPT to help her generate more lines of code in the same 8 hours. Or maybe she's given more productive tools that allow her to generate more output *without* spending more time in the workplace.
So I don't think you need to worry about more productivity having a bad impact. This is purely a policy discussion.
I'll give you one last real world example.
Above 300 workers, firms need to seek government permission for layoffs. Which firms grow to more than 300 workers? Those that are the most productive and efficient. If you put obstacles to having more than 300 workers, then you'll have a ton of firms that could use labor efficiently that will artificially restrict themselves to 300 workers.
Would you agree that this isn't desirable? Large companies enjoy economies of scale and if the government comes down hard on such companies, then its a loss, right? There won't be manufacturing giants in India.
Let me know what you think. I hope I was able to alleviate at least some of your concerns.
I see many Indian farmers selling off their productive agricultural land giving way to endless concrete sprawlings which just half a decade ago was farming land.
While Idk about how it addresses the housing sector, but it's intensions are quite dissatisfactory
as they do because of the unproductivity of our farming (due to it's lack of Liberalisation & scaling) so land which could've been productive & scaled is now being permanently lost to concrete, thus it can give pathetic outcomes too from future food shortages (as the productivity isn't increasing ; the same reason for which considering it unproductive is being sold) to lack of employment generation.
Excellent deep dive into India's productivity challenge! The Hsieh-Klenow finding about 30-50% potential TFP gains from better resource allocation is striking. What's particularly interesting is how Priority Sector Lending creates this perverse "growth ceiling" - firms optimize for staying small rather than scaling up. I'd add that the land title issue you mentioned compounds this problem beyond agriculture. When 66% of civil cases involve land disputes, you're essentially taxing every productive investment with legal uncertainty. The comparison with Mexico's similar struggles suggests this isn't just an Indian phenomenon but a broader middle-income trap mechanism. Would be curious to hear your thoughts on whether state-level policy experimentation (like Hyderabad's FAR reforms you mentioned) could provide a politically feasible path forward, given the difficulty of national-level reform.