The essence of a society is better understood in its small towns, isolated communities, workshops, farms, churches, diners, and ordinary households—in the behavior of people whose names will never appear in a newspaper. Creative, entrepreneurial—and indeed crooked—people do not exist in a vacuum. They emerge from, or find their way into, a much larger ecology that can either nourish or suffocate creativity, openness, fairness, loyalty, honor, trust, and responsibility. The general population is the reservoir of values, supplying the moral nutrients from which enterprise, trust, responsibility, and the entrepreneurial spirit grow.
In backward societies, it is not always easy to distinguish success produced by competence from that produced by corruption, connections, or political patronage. Nor can such societies be understood by attending conferences, mixing with the rich and famous, staying in expensive hotels, and going to fancy parties. These experiences may leave you with a euphoric but badly distorted impression of the country. Geopolitical analysts and investors make this mistake all the time.
If India, comprising nearly a fifth of humanity, produces a handful of CEOs of major American companies, what exactly does that prove? The same applies when the relatively high incomes of Indians in the United States are cited as evidence of what Indians as a whole are capable of. Many of India’s most capable, educated, and ambitious people have left the country and operate inside Western institutions that are themselves products of Western culture. This is hardly a like-for-like comparison. Does their success demonstrate the competence of Indian society—or the openness, hospitality, and institutional quality of American society? Yet people routinely extrapolate from the cream of India to what Indians in general would supposedly achieve if transplanted to America.
What interests me is the ordinary person.
How does the mechanic repair a machine? How does a clerk deal with someone who has no influence? What happens when an employee makes a mistake? Does he conceal it, argue about it, blame someone else—or correct it? Does anyone take ownership of a problem? Does a promise mean anything?
One should walk the streets, sit in coffee shops, take a bus to a nearby village for a meal, and watch how the taxi driver conducts himself. Do locals see a foreigner and try to extract whatever they can from him, or do they extend a helping hand? How do people behave when there is no reward for behaving well and no punishment for behaving badly?
These mundane encounters reveal the habits, assumptions, and moral emotions on which institutions ultimately rest. Most travelers pay little attention to them. They should.
And this is where the difference between India and China becomes enormous....
China did not generate most of the philosophical and technological foundations of modern civilization. Much of that came from the West. But importing something is only the beginning. A society must be capable of absorbing it. China possessed enough of the necessary habits—discipline, shame, order, practical seriousness, pride in workmanship, and respect for competence—to absorb what worked, maintain it, refine it, and eventually improve upon it.
India imported many of the same technologies and institutional forms without acquiring the habits that make them work. A deadline matters only if a promise means something. Quality control works only if a defect is recognized as a defect. Accountability requires an internal discomfort with failure. Rules work only when people respect their purpose even when nobody is watching.
In today’s world, technology and technical knowledge move across borders almost frictionlessly. Machinery can be bought, software downloaded, procedures copied, consultants hired, and institutions reproduced on paper. What cannot be imported so easily is the human substrate on which all of this depends.
This is why India is not merely twenty or thirty years behind China. That description assumes that both societies are traveling along the same road, with one simply farther ahead. They are not. The gap is civilizational, not technological.
India can acquire ever more advanced technology and still reproduce the same dysfunction around it. Closing that gap would require a transformation in the moral and cultural foundations of everyday life—a process measured, if it happens at all, not in development plans or election cycles but across generations, perhaps centuries.
Technology can be transferred in an afternoon.
Civilization cannot.
