
There’s an increasing consensus that for the United States and other rich countries, the double whammy of technological change, which favors the educated and skilled, and globalization, which has led to the loss of blue-collar and lower-end white-collar jobs, has taken a heavy toll on the incomes and life prospects of the poor and the lower middle class.
In India, there’s heated debate among scholars about whether India’s increasing integration into the global economy since the economic liberalization of 1991 has amplified inequality or attenuated it. The impossibility of observing what economists call the counterfactual scenario, that is, what would have happened without globalization, makes it possible for partisans on both the right and the left to stick to their guns.
The truth is surely more nuanced than either ideological extreme would suggest: while some have wildly benefited from the opportunities that participation in the global economy presents, others are, as yet, left out.
For every Jay Gatsby that the “new India” has produced, there are many others for whom the dream is elusive, if not illusory.