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Looks like this is one sided political propaganda article. Googling shows real picture.

Unemployment is at 40%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_in_Kerala

Kerala is in the grip of a surging drug crisis https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/india/kerala-is-in...

Kerala rooting on central govt to solve state's Rs 26,000 crore monthly expenditure crisis https://keralakaumudi.com/en/news/news.php?id=1498119&u=kera...



Yep. I lived there for the first two decades, and outside Kerala for the next two and a bit. The only thing Kerala exports is the workforce, since it's impossible to start anything in Kerala thanks to politics and high costs. I know because I've tried. Kerala had historical ties with the Middle East thanks in part to a substantial Muslim population, and the migrant labour force was able to funnel some of Middle Eastern prosperity during the oil boom years back into the state. That is in a nutshell, Kerala's economic story.

Speaking of the left, I remember being next to a protest circa 1990 against ... computers!


It's not clear what you tried to start and absent any other information your personal failure at it isn't a compelling alternative picture of the region's development to me.

I'm sure there are valid other views than the one presented in the article, I'm not saying there aren't. But as someone who doesn't know much about the region, you aren't really giving me more information about it, or giving me any reasons to take your view more seriously than the one presented in the article.


You can completely ignore what I said about my personal experience. The rest of it is still valid, and please read the child comment I posted on the same sub-thread.

Basically, Kerala exports a workforce because it can't produce or export anything else. At roughly a third of the GDP (in 2012 according to Wikipedia), it's a remittance based economy. Someone commented that remittances are a smaller part of the economy of late (and that might well be true), but in the last decade or so Kerala is also heavily in debt.


I think the main point of the opposition argument is that it's Kerala's religious demographics that led the state to be dependent on Middle Eastern remmitence. If you did a demographic survey of South Asians in the Middle East, the vast majority of them would be Muslim. It's a good way to reach a lower middle income level, but it's not achieving the type of growth needed to build industry and service.


You aren’t keeping up then. Remittances is a much smaller % of economy these days.


Ten years back remittance was 31% of the GDP [1] - a massive number. It might have declined, but the tiny state accounts for 20% of India's inward remittance while holding a mere 3% of the nation's population. Wikipedia says that 3 million people are working abroad (mostly in the middle East), which is like 10 percent of the population (what percentage of the youth will that be?). Also, a very significant number of Malayalees work in neighbouring states - again due to Kerala having no industries.

I don't have numbers for the last ten years, but if remittance has gone down, it is also neck deep in debt. I am in Kerala quite frequently, and can confirm that there are no industries there - except for tourism, and some IT which is relatively miniscule compared to neighbouring states.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Kerala


Remittances for 2023 made up 23% of state GDP.

Table 5.2, pg 51 of https://iimad.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/KMS-2023-Report...


You’re reading the youth unemployment rate. Overall is only 9% (still not great, but much better).


The article is a classic submarine[0] for Kerala.

"The state has one of the highest concentrations of startups". I laughed out loud at this one. Of all the half-truths peddled in that article, this was easily the most hilarious and egregious.

[0] - https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html


Perhaps they mean small business entrepreneurship, not tech startups?


Whatever it is I am not buying it. Kerala is notoriously an incredibly hard place to do business in, so a line like this needs some real hard stats to back it up.


yup, a definitive “neoliberal”/“neoclassical” economic theory puff piece.


Crime statistics are because Kerala Police isn’t as corrupt and registers more crimes compared to rest of India. It’s a good thing as most crimes goes unreported in India as police are corrupted in rest of India.


a neoliberal neoclassical puff piece on the only region in india ruled by the communist party? that's fresh


The region has remnants of socialist ideas. The article, however, is indeed a puff piece on the vastly dominant economic theory, which is, as it turns out, not "fresh" at all.

I will say however that I think it's unfair to call professor Roy a neoliberal. Being a neoliberal is merely the expectation for most economic "theorists", but his vocal apologetics for imperalism and colonialism is not.

> Indian Marxists viciously attacked the CEHI, arguing the imperial state's aim was to extract surplus from India, that it withheld the capacity to do good in famines, and deployed the capacity to cause harm at all other times.

> In this void, blog and trade-book writers moved in with a leftist-nationalist political agenda posing as economic history. Most of their claims can be dismissed by subjecting them to the 1980s test: Can economic change be read as an effect of the Empire? The answer remains: No.

This is indeed a very powerful purity test, "Do your claim go against my utterly ahistorical narrative? If not, then I can comfortably dismiss them without addressing them."

> That India's trade surplus meant Britain looted India is bad logic because the surplus did not mean theft but the purchase of services. “Millions of Indians died of policy-induced famines” (Hickel) is bad logic by assuming infinite state capacity was deliberately withheld.

This one is quite rich aswell, it's just blunt unapologetic imperalism denial. It's bad logic because the logic bothers me.

I mean it just goes on and that's just his most recent tweets.




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