Book Review: In Spite of the Gods

This is the fourth of a nine part series on the Patterson School Summer Reading List.

1. China’s Trapped Transition, Minxin Pei
2. The End of Poverty, Jeffrey Sachs
3. Illicit, Moises Naim
4. In Spite of the Gods, Edward Luce

Edward Luce, formerly the South Asian bureau chief for the Financial Times and currently the Washington bureau chief, has written a book on his experiences in India and his expectations about India’s future economic and social development. It is, unsurprisingly, a journalistic account, full of interesting observations but somewhat lacking in coherent structure. We included it on this year’s list because we wanted a book on India (we have one on China), and this seemed a solid introduction to the subject matter. The book pretty much fulfills that expectation, as Luce is a good writer with a lot to say about the subject.

Luce doesn’t hold to the notion of a “Hindu rate of growth” but he’s not exactly pleased about what he believes to be the impact of cultural factors on Indian economic productivity. He argues, for example, that caste consciousness has served to poison the political system such that the formation of sensible policy, including economic policy, is seriously impeded. He also argues that what he sees as the Indian focus on spirituality and the village over material and the urban has had detrimental policy effects. There’s an interesting cultural-structural argument to be made here, although Luce doesn’t really pursue it very far or with very much sophistication. On its face, the argument that caste consciousness leads to policy deficiencies seems reasonable, but I’m not sure that the effects are any more notable than the variety of cleavages that other democracies suffer from. In part because of his attitude regarding Indian culture, he utterly loathes the BJP. This doesn’t seem like such a bad thing, as he paints a picture of the BJP that is, indeed, quite loathsome.

Luce’s account of widespread corruption in the Indian government reminds me of the argument that Minxin Pei made about autocracy and Chinese economic growth. Pei argued, more or less, that autocracy would breed a predatory state that, being corrupt and unaccountable, would eventually sap Chinese economic growth. China’s transition was thus, without democratic reform, trapped. Having read what Luce has to say about the apparently amazingly corrupt Indian bureaucracy, I have to wonder whether how democratic government provides an answer to that particular problem. The Indian bureaucratic state, in no small part because of the decisions about how the educational system should be organized, seems to be a prime example of how a predatory states can limit economic productivity and general economic growth. Fifty years of democracy may or may not have exacerbated the corruption problem, but they certainly haven’t solved it.

In his conclusion, Luce focuses on the problems of HIV and environmental degradation, and the threat that these pose to future economic development. This is kind of odd, since he doesn’t discuss them anywhere else in the book. He also talks more generally of the problems associated with a country that has both a thriving middle class and a tremendous and extremely poor underclass. Luce draws a interesting contrast between educational policy in India and China to explain, in part, this development. In China, educational funding focused very heavily on elementary and secondary schooling, with the result that most Chinese are now literate and have at least some education. In India, the government allotted equal attention to elementary and post-secondary schooling, resulting in a large educated class and a very large class with no education at all. As noted above, this may have fed the existence of the large, bureaucratic predatory state that seems to sit on top of India today.

In a chapter about Bollywood, Luce relates the plot of what must be considered the best idea for a movie ever:

A lesbian, who spends her spare time beating up men in amateur kick-boxing sessions, seduces her drunken and unsuspecting best friend. The latter’s wholesome fiance cottons on to the former’s preferences and, in confronting her, is almost killed in a furious, muscular assault before he finally prevails. The final scene shows the conventional Hindu couple paying their respects at the lesbian’s Christian gravestone.

Convincing scripts are not Bollywood’s strongpoint.

Okay, I see Hillary Swank as the lesbian pugilist, Clint Eastwood as her ornery trainer, Ed Norton, or maybe Leo, as the boyfriend… this casts itself!

Luce has produced an interesting, but ultimately unsatisfying, book on India. Unlike a lot of academics, I tend to quite like good journalistic accounts, and to think that they have a lot of value. Luce’s book, though, is a bit disordered even for me, jumping from one spot to another and providing a lot of small stories, but not enough large insights. The book was valuable enough for our purposes, but I put it down wanting more.