I Challenge Franklin Foer to a Battle of Wits: Fishwrap at Ten Paces...

Franklin Foer rides to the defense of "important institutions... The New York TImes and The Washington Post."

The Plank: But the reckless, sweeping assault on important institutions--especially The New York Times and The Washington Post--that emanates from large swaths of the liberal blogosphere will have a devastating long-term effect. These are irreplaceable institutions. As Massing points out:

Even the bloggers who so hate the "mainstream media" get much of their raw material from it. If the leading newspapers lose their capacity to report and conduct inquiries, the American public will become even more susceptible to the manipulations and deceptions of those in power.

I just wish that more of the MSB had a modicum of awareness of this fact.

Is that really true? I would say that Joshua Micah Marshall gets some but not much of his raw material from the "mainstream media." Ditto for Pandagon and Andrew Sullivan. Wonkette, Crooked Timber, Billmon, Orcinus, OxBlog, Volokh Conspiracy, and Outside the Beltway get material from the "mainstream media," but in the sense that it is their lawful prey. Daniel Drezner, Marginal Revolution, and ThinkProgress are much more likely to be sources that the mainstream media draw on than otherwise. Baghdad Burning owes nothing to the mainstream media.

Among those I read most regularly, I would say that Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias are the ones that get "much of their raw material" from the mainstream media.

And the quality of the "mainstream media" is low, quite low.... Let's surf on over to http://nytimes.com/ and look at the articles it regards as the most important and puts on the home page. They are:

1. http://nytimes.com/2005/12/05/politics/05cnd-delay.html?ei=5094&en=7a8d29dd736ac712&hp=&ex=1133845200&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print Judge Upholds Most Serious Charges Against DeLay. By DAVID STOUT.
2. http://nytimes.com/2005/12/05/international/middleeast/05cnd-saddam.html?hp&ex=1133845200&en=75afe8c0f4752111&ei=5094&partner=homepage Hussein Is Fiery Again in Unruly Court Session. By ROBERT F. WORTH.
3. http://nytimes.com/2005/12/05/politics/05cnd-rice.html?ei=5094&en=e5ada7f574851bfc&hp=&ex=1133845200&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print Rice Chides Europeans on Detention Center Complaints. By JOEL BRINKLEY.
4. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/05/business/media/05cnd-abc.html?hp=&pagewanted=print ABC Names Anchors of 'World News Tonight'. By JACQUES STEINBERG.
5. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/05/international/asia/05highway.html?pagewanted=print In Today's India, Status Comes With Four Wheels. By AMY WALDMAN.
6. http://nytimes.com/2005/12/05/business/05cnd-guidant.html?ei=5094&en=585e4d423ba26c7d&hp=&ex=1133845200&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print Troubled Maker of Heart Devices Gains New Suitor. By VIKAS BAJAJ and BARNABY FEDER.
7. http://nytimes.com/2005/12/05/international/middleeast/05cnd-mideast.html?ei=5094&en=7fb486cebe501b3e&hp=&ex=1133845200&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print Bomber Kills 5 Outside Shopping Mall in Israel. By GREG MYRE.
8. http://nytimes.com/2005/12/05/politics/05cnd-panel.html?ei=5094&en=f0e33be2a4ff9caa&hp=&ex=1133845200&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print 9/11 Panel Calls U.S. Response 'Disappointing'. By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS.

There we have a sample of 8. Let's pick one at random. I pick 5....

Oh my God.

This is far worse than I expected to find.

Story number 5 begins:

On the dark highway, the car showroom glowed in the night like an American drive-in. Inside, it looked more like a game-show set: bright lights, white floors, huge windows, high ceilings and ad posters of beaming consumers far paler than most Indians. For 36-year-old Ram Reddy, the price was right enough to make a down payment on his fifth family car.

He and his brother already had one car "for the children," two "for the ladies," and so on. Now they were buying the Toyota Innova, a big-as-a-boat luxury van that retails for a minimum of $23,000, 46 times India's per capita income of about $500.

The Innova is a new plaything of the moneyed here, one being peddled, like so many products in India today, by a Bollywood star. It is yet another symbol of the kid-in-a-candy-store psyche that has seized India's growing consuming class, once denied capitalism's choices and now flooded with them.

Fifteen years after India began its transition from a state-run to a free-market economy, a new culture of money - making it, and even more, spending it - is afoot.

This domestic hunger for goods has become an important engine for an economy that still lags in exports. So intense is the advertising onslaught, so giddy the media coverage of the new affluence, that it is almost easy to forget that India remains home to the world's largest number of poor people, according to the World Bank.

Still, India's middle class has grown to an estimated 250 million in the past decade, and the number of super-rich has grown sharply as well.

And, after more decades of socialist deprivation, when consumer goods were so limited that refrigerators were given pride of place in living rooms, they have ever more wares to spend it on: cellphones, air-conditioners and washing machines; Botox, sushi and Louis Vuitton bags; and, perhaps the biggest status symbol of all, cars.

India has become one of the world's fastest-growing car markets, with about a million being sold each year. It once had only two kinds, Fiats and Ambassadors. Now dozens of models ride the roads, from the humble, Indian-made Maruti to the Rolls-Royce, which has re-entered India's market some 50 years after leaving in the British wake....

One million cars sold a year.... That means that at most one out of 200 Indian families buys a car. Only one in 40 families in India has anything we would call a car.

India's "superrich".... At current exchange rate, the income of the 20,000th richest Indian family is roughly $250,000 a year. Maybe 3000 Indian families are "superrich" in the sense of making more than $1,000,000 a year.

India's "250 million strong middle class."... The income of the family that contains the 250 millionth richest Indian is about $2,500 a year at the current exchange rate--and about $15,000 a year at purchasing power parity. The PPP estimate is probably more relevant, because what most of India's "250 million strong middle class" buy are the necessities that are so very cheap in India because the wages of unskilled labor are so very low. India's "250 million strong middle class" has a material standard of living that we in the United States associate with the working poor.

Average hourly wages in India? Perhaps $0.50 measured at current exchange rates. It is not easy to forget that India remains the country that is home to the world's largest number of poor people. It is not easy to forget that at all.

I receive mammoth value added from the Financial Times, Reuters, and Bloomberg. I receive substantial value added from Knight-Ridder, from the (increasingly uneven) Economist, from the inside-baseball-political news (but not the substantive policy analysis) of the National Journal, and from the news (but definitely not the editorial) pages of the Wall Street Journal.

But value added from the New York Times? A few reporters are good. Others are liars--the kind of people who would agree to claim that a senior administration official is an ex-Capitol Hill staffer. Most don't know enough about substance to write the stories they are tasked with writing.

So let me ask Franklin Foer a question: in the New York Times of December 5, 2005, where does he see any value added? I see value added (but not to me) in Paul Krugman's musings about the strange shape of the current economic recovery. Where else?

Comments

[nate]

bloggers get a lot of material from discussion and redistributing material from newspapers. i do not see many bloggers as substitutes for the newspaper at this point. there are some blogs that break news faster than the newspapers, and with more knowledge and skill. These seem to be the exception.

blogging seems like a strategic complement to the newspaper. it makes reading hte newspaper mroe fun when you can find a discussion on-line that is related to articles of interest to you. it also makes the newspapers more accurate and faster. letters to the editor a day later are becoming more obsolete or not-quite-the-same.

yeah, krugman's column on the joyless recovery was interesting.

[Barry]

Methinks I spy a little defensiveness on the part of the New Republican. Consider that rag - it does nothing that liberal magazines do better, or that right-wing magazines do far worse.

[Howard]

i started reading the nytimes when i was a wee little precocious 5-year-old (ok, it was the sports page, but still) quite a few decades back now, and i use the nytimes as my homepage.

and even so, when i read them earlier today, i thought that foer's comments were offensively obtuse for someone i generally regard as a fairly sharp observer. thanx, prof, for putting it into words.

[otto]

Sadly, FT is behind firewall. If they could sieze the change of NYTSelect to make Martin Wolf and gang available to the masses, they would gain much influence.

[John Emerson]

The Times does cover lots of stories, often thoroughly. The quality varies, and the paper as a whole has been a disaster on political coverage for at least 7-10 years. (The Post, likewise).

I'll just repeat my image of young Sulzberger and young Graham as the bloodless, lifeless heirs in Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher" -- the last feeble remnants of a once-great family whose house is about to collapse into ruins.

[Colin Danby]

It's possible the India car series is unusually bad, but still... The first piece was one cliche after another, and the whole thing consists of a predictable narrative spun out of the journalist's preconceptions, flavored with unctuous condescension. No analysis, no context. It's not journalism. It's a matter of telling a certain kind of reader what they want to hear about the rest of the world.

I'm delighted that the blogosphere allows a little bit of backtalk.

[Delicious Pundit]

It is all very well for you to link arms with Mickey Kaus and hate on the Times, but a Tory such as myself distrusts such crowing about how you've seen the future and it works. All that is solid (such as the Greenland ice sheet) may melt into air, but that doesn't mean we have to root for the melting.

I myself stay true to the institution even in its dark days (and the Times is having dark days), because when the institution is destroyed the valuable function it *might* serve is destroyed too. And there are too many malefactors who need that function destroyed. Besides, as all good Tories know,

Always keep a hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse.

[Charles]

If the WaPo and NYT were beamed to Alpha Centauri by advanced space aliens today, tomorrow morning, bloggers would get most of their news from the London Independent and The Guardian.

Now, if we could get the obliging aliens to ship off FOX and Rush, too (I'd pay the postage), the 30% who still believe there were WMD in Iraq would have to listen to an alternate opinion and might learn something.

No guarantees, of course.

The dirty truth is that almost everything in the NYT and WaPo is rip and read off of AP. There's a little original reporting and plenty of styling of the news to give it that chic edge, but anyone who is interested in the facts watches the wire.

Of course, AP is producing manure, too.

The real genius in journalism is understanding what is important and what is baloney. The reason I blog is not to report the news but to make predictions. Here are three news stories. Decide what will happen and why:

1. Assassination of Rafik Hariri will/will not be determined to be planned by Syrian government.

2. Environmental and social problems in China will/will not substantially affect growth rate over the next three years.

3. Venezuela will/will not experience popular rejection of Hugo Chavez over the next three years.

Correct predictions mean that one can make money on investments. Incorrect predictions mean that one is likely lose money.

If media can't accurately predict events, they are not worth the money people spend on them.

[Movie Guy]

Brad - "So let me ask Franklin Foer a question: in the New York Times of December 5, 2005, where does he see any value added? I see value added (but not to me) in Paul Krugman's musings about the strange shape of the current economic recovery. Where else?"

You missed the best sections...

Movie and theater reviews
Home and Garden
Travel
Dining and Wine - recipes
Comics - Doonesbury (color panels)

[Michael Kevane]

I stopped reading NYT for news when they had their ridiculous article on the 55 mph speed limit and gasoline consumption, accompanied by a graph that showed exactly the reverse of what the reporters were arguing (55mph limit reduced gas consumption) and the reporters weren't, apparently, graph literate enough to see it.
MK

[Abi]

If your critique is that she has presented only one side of the India story, one can (and I certainly would!) criticise this post as well on similar grounds. The one story by Amy Waldman you have picked happens to be the second of a four part series, that has not just Toyota Innovas, but also grinding poverty, AIDS bomb waiting to explode, grim statistics and moving pictures.

[So it's OK that she gets the size and consumption patterns of India's "middle class" wrong today, because she'll get something right tomorrow? I don't get it.]

Do please read the other parts as well, and see if she has done justice to her assignment: covering India.

You may still think that her reporting is bad, but that judgement will be based on a body of work.

[wkwillis]

What happened to the newspapers is that they fired all their reporters and most of their editors. The people they call reporters replaced some of their fired copyeditors and just rewrite ap stuff put out by governments like ours.
There was a funny article in sfgate 12/05/05 blaming craigslist for stealing ad revenues from the newspapers and thereby forcing the newspapers to fire their reporters. What's funny is that this process has been going on for two generations and craigslist has been financially significant for five years. The free papers have been stealing ad revenues from the newspapers for a generation, though.

[Ari]

The New York Times is a national treasure which fortunately is in front of almost every house in Cambridge. The articles are in depth, cover a vast range of material, are precisely edited, and the writing is superb. Paul Krugman is excellent, but Bob Herbert is as fine. Show me another columnist who has written on Iraq as Bob Herbert. Maureen Dowd of course is also excellent, and men need to get it as women do. Science, health, art (painting, music, dance, film, theater), fashion, food, gardening.

The Indian series is also excellent, several Indian colleagues who sent around the columns noted.

[Really. Amy Waldman's December 5 article is "excellent"? You really think so?]

[SqueakyRat]

Just read the AIDS part of Waldman's India series. Seems really good to me.

[And the "cars" part? Does that seem really good to you too?]

[nate]

joyless

aka

termination
elimination
knocked-down

[aretino]

Sales of 1 million cars a year is a big deal. It's an even bigger deal given that India is one of the world's fastest growing markets.

The growing economic segregation of upper income Indians is a very big deal socially and politically. The boom in car sales is making this possible. A new suburban culture of office parks, malls, and bedroom communities keeps the poor out of sight. It is increasingly possible to *live* in India without reckoning with the world's largest population of poor people. (Television is significant in this, too -- you aren't too likely to see the poor there, either. There was an excellent Financial Times article on that early this year.)

I felt the article was pretty clear that the car boom not changing life for most Indians. But it showed the boom is changing life for better off Indians, and that in particular it is feeding the trend of social segregation.

Sure, I could do without the article's breathless tone and unfocused style. But the topic is significant, and even in this treatment I found it worth reading about.

[Mike the Mad Biologist]

"Most don't know enough about substance to write the stories they are tasked with writing."

That's it in a nutshell (e.g., the entire evolution 'controversy').

[sm]

"It's a matter of telling a certain kind of reader what they want to hear about the rest of the world."

About Iraq, for instance.

It takes a lot of good reporting to make up for that much catastrophic spinelessness (or dishonesty, take your pick).

Forget about WMD claims (if you can) and just consider the badness of coverage of Iraq in April 2004. That alone should make the defenders of the Times pause.

The role of the Times would be a valuable role, if the Times reliably filled it. If it's not reliable, what is its claim to our regard?

[bakho]

Much of what appears in MSM is transcripted from speeches and press conferences or stenography of press releases issued by politicians and their organizations. A lot of info is rewritten from the wire services. These same press releases are available in raw form on the web sites of politicians as in senate.gov sites. The web has made available the raw unfilitered information that was previously only available to the MSM. We can get the same economic info directly from BLS that used to be filtered by the MSM. Now that the raw material is available, we have bloggers and others who are challenging the narratives developed by the MSM. Bloggers are less dependent on the MSM than some might think.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/06/international/asia/06highway.html?ex=1291525200&en=99e7beb7b6a59b4d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

December 6, 2005

On India's Roads, Cargo and a Deadly Passenger
By AMY WALDMAN

NELAMANGALA, India - Hot water: 10 rupees. Cold water: 8 rupees. Toilet: 5 rupees.

Sex: no price specified on the bathhouse wall, but, as the condom painted there suggests, safe.

Sangeetha Hamam, a bathhouse, sits on the national highway near this gritty truck stop about nine miles north of Bangalore. Its mistress is Ranjeetha, a 28-year-old eunuch who lives as a woman. Her lipstick and black dress provide a touch of glamour in the small dark shack.

Her clients are not only truckers, but also Bangalore college students and other city residents. They know to look for sex at highway establishments geared toward truckers. Her customers - as many as 100 on Sundays for her and five other eunuchs - come for a "massage" and the anal sex that follows, but also for the anonymity the location confers.

Ranjeetha knows men will pay more for unprotected sex, but she calculates that the extra money is not worth the risk to her livelihood and life. She knows they can go elsewhere; there are some 45 bathhouses doubling as brothels near this truck stop. She also knows several eunuchs who have died of AIDS.

India has at least 5.1 million people living with H.I.V., the second highest number after South Africa. It is, by all accounts, at a critical stage: it can either prevent the further spread of infection, or watch a more generalized epidemic take hold. Global experts worry that India is both underspending on AIDS and undercounting its H.I.V. cases.

Its national highways are a conduit for the virus, passed by prostitutes and the truckers, migrants and locals who pay them, and brought home to unsuspecting wives in towns or villages. In its largest infrastructure project since independence, India is in the process of widening and upgrading those highways into a true interstate system. The effort will allow the roads to carry more traffic and freight than ever before. But some things are better left uncarried.

The national highways between New Delhi, Calcutta, Chennai, formerly Madras, and Mumbai run through at least six districts where H.I.V. prevalence is above 2.5 percent. Earlier this year, a New York Times reporter and a photographer drove the route, which has been nicknamed the Golden Quadrilateral.

To drive it is to peel back a nation's secret, or not so secret, sex life, and the potent mix of desire, denial and stigma that is helping spread the disease....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/international/asia/04highway.html?ex=1291352400&en=d77dd2ca4f760ef0&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

December 4, 2005

Mile by Mile, India Paves a Smoother Road to Its Future
By AMY WALDMAN

NEW DELHI, India - In the middle of the old Grand Trunk Road a temple sits under a peepul tree. The surrounding highway is being widened to four lanes, and vehicles barrel along either side. But the temple and tree thwart even greater speed, and a passing contractor says they soon will be removed.

Kali, Hindu goddess of destruction, thinks otherwise. She is angry, say the colorfully garbed women massing in the holy tree's dappled shade. As evidence, they point to one woman's newly pockmarked face and other mysterious ailments recently visited on their nearby village, Jagdishrai. They have tried to convince Kali that the tree and temple devoted to her must go, but they have failed. Now they have no choice but to oppose the removal, too, even if they must block the road to do it.

Goddess versus man, superstition versus progress, the people versus the state - mile by mile, India is struggling to modernize its national highway system, and in the process, itself.

The Indian government has begun a 15-year project to widen and pave some 40,000 miles of narrow, decrepit national highways, with the first leg, budgeted at $6.25 billion, to be largely complete by next year. It amounts to the most ambitious infrastructure project since independence in 1947 and the British building of the subcontinent's railway network the century before.

The effort echoes the United States' construction of its national highway system in the 1920's and 1950's. The arteries paved across America fueled commerce and development, fed a nation's auto obsession and created suburbs. They also displaced communities and helped sap mass transit and deplete inner cities.

For India, already one of the world's fastest-growing economies and most rapidly evolving societies, the results may be as radical. At its heart, the redone highway is about grafting Western notions of speed and efficiency onto a civilization that has always taken the long view.

Aryan migration, Mogul conquest, British colonialism - all shaped India's civilization over centuries. Now, in a span of less than 15 years, capitalism and globalization have convulsed India at an unprecedented rate of change.

The real start came in 1991, when India began dismantling its state-run economy and opening its markets to foreign imports and investment. While that reform process has been fitful, leaving the country trailing its neighbor and rival, China, India has turned a corner. Its economy grew 6.9 percent in the fiscal year ending in March. India has a new identity, thanks to outsourcing, as back office to the world.

The new highway is certain to jump-start India's competitiveness, given that its dismal infrastructure helped keep it behind the economic success stories of the Asian Tigers....

[Abhijit]

Brad

Sorry, but your comments on that NYTimes article are totally wrong.

1) In the first place, this article is one of a series of 4 covering India. The first article was about India's highways, the next ones are about poverty. It should be considered part of a series covering India, rather than the whole.

[So it's OK to say things that are wrong in one article because?... Help me out here... What did you learn from the "cars" article?]

2) Even more importantly, how many American papers even bother to cover India at all ? TV (other than the BBC) will hardly ever cover it. The fact that the NYTimes has correspondents in India reflects very well on the times, not poorly.

[Ah. The soft bigotry of low expectations...]

3) The story covered here is actually very important. I'm aware of the consumer boom in India since I read Indian magazines and papers and visit there (being of Indian origin). Most Americans are not aware of it. The NyTimes has added to most Americans pool of knowledge in this regard.

Like I said before, Indian papers and magazines have covered the consumer explosion in India. Easy credit, the desire for status (which makes American status seeking pale in comparison) has led to an explosion in upper middle class lifestyles. These have already had a major impact on the Indian economy. The impact on the world economy in this century could be considerable.

The article, while slightly unfocused, does expose how a significant chunk of India is becoming more American in consumer attitudes. My parents in India never took a loan out for anything, buying everything (house, cars etc.) with cash. But the current generation is vastly different.

India's poverty, its urban slums, its grinding rural poverty, are all very important topics for discussion. But they are not the only topic, and given that most Americans still retain stereotypes of Indian poverty (not inaccurate, but not the whole story either), I would argue that such articles are even more important.

Incidentally, I think your statistics on Indian wealth are very likely wrong. Even if they're based on official statistics (which don't count the underground economy). For instance, the idea that only 3000 Indians make more than $1M a year. I personally doubt that too. Also, it doesn't take into account wealth from the booming stock market, from Real Estate (million dollar houses and apartments are extremely common in India's major cities).

Bottom Line: Your whole argument on the NYTimes may be correct, but not about that article.

[dilbert dogbert]

My take on the alternate news sources vis the MSM is that the alts are the wolves/vultures of the newspaper ecosystem. Maybe the alts will trim the weak and therefore strengthen the herd.

[Charles]

Ari, are you sure you haven't confused The New York Times with some other publication?

I have just started blogging an editorial on The New York Times titled "It is almost impossible to be reckless in criticizing the NYT or the Post".

You might want to look at it.

Click on the URL listed above and scroll down or use this one: phoenixwoman.blogspot.com/2005/12/editorial-it-is-almost-impossible-to.html

[Brad DeLong]

When I read Waldman's:

"India's middle class has grown to an estimated 250 million in the past decade, and the number of super-rich has grown sharply as well.

"And, after more decades of socialist deprivation, when consumer goods were so limited that refrigerators were given pride of place in living rooms, they have ever more wares to spend it on: cellphones, air-conditioners and washing machines; Botox, sushi and Louis Vuitton bags; and, perhaps the biggest status symbol of all, cars."

I read her as saying that it's India's 250 million strong middle class that are buying the "cellphones, air-conditioners and washing machines; Botox, sushi and Louis Vuitton bags; and, perhaps the biggest status symbol of all, cars." Am I wrong?

[anne]

During winter vacation a year ago I was in Paris, and noticed store after store has displays meant to attract Chinese shoppers. There were Chinese visitors everywhere, and I suddenly realized there should be no surprise that large numbers of Chinese families can vacation from Singapore to Stockholm. The Chinese and Indians save amply, and save as families, and can enjoy vacations and food and fashion as anyone can.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/29/international/asia/29letter.html?ex=1272427200&en=1a046af549bfcc2c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

April 29, 2005

Mystery of India's Poverty: Can the State Break Its Grip?
By AMY WALDMAN

BARADPUR, India - In torn clothes, the boys, mostly low-caste children of laborers, held out their plates to be served from a steaming vat of gruel. The image was Dickensian, but it represented not 19th-century England's abdication of responsibility toward the poor but 21st-century India's seeming embrace of it.

The children are beneficiaries of an acclaimed program mandated in 2001 by India's Supreme Court to provide cooked lunches to all primary schoolchildren. The program is the signature success of a movement in India that is working to create for the poor an entitlements-based social welfare system much like Europe's.

But this is India, home to the world's largest concentration of poor, where some 350 million people still live on less than a dollar a day. So the effort has inevitably raised questions as enormous as the challenge: not least, can poor nations have a social safety net, too?

Such questions have divided economists, policymakers and advocates here in recent months, reflecting the uncertain science of poverty reduction, the political and financial pressures tugging at this democracy of more than a billion people, and an India conflicted about the face it wants to present to the world.

Welfare and workfare programs are today taken for granted to assist the needy in otherwise prosperous Western industrialized societies. But they took centuries of effort and upheaval to take shape.

How much more staggering the task, then, for India. The country ranks 127th out of 177 countries on the United Nations Human Development Index, which measures life span, education and living standard. Nearly half its children are undernourished, a level worse than sub-Saharan Africa.

As the social welfare movement expands its goals, debate is expanding, too, over the obligations of the state toward the poor, what India's government can do, and whether betterment can or should be left to economic growth alone.

For example, the movement's latest effort - to get a law guaranteeing the rural poor jobs on public works projects - has proved deeply controversial....

[Abhijit]

Brad

"I read her as saying that it's India's 250 million strong middle class that are buying the "cellphones, air-conditioners and washing machines; Botox, sushi and Louis Vuitton bags; and, perhaps the biggest status symbol of all, cars." Am I wrong?"

I read it somewhat differently. I read it as saying that a fairly large group of Indians has embraced the consumer culture. The ones buying the particular items mentioned here may be smaller than 250 million, but its not just a few super rich people.

Take cellphones for instance -- there are over 50 million cellphone users in India and the number grows by 20% each year. Not 250 million, but not just a few super rich.

[ On the other hand, the number of Indians who eat sushi are probably very small, since the vast majority of Indians would never ever eat uncooked fish]

I think you're be amazed by how many consumer items even poorer Indians can afford. The last time I went to India, the guy who drove me around made between $100-$150 per month, yet he had TV and cable at home.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/20/dining/20indi.html?ex=1271649600&en=6a7c1c6a8f47e15e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

April 20, 2005

As Cash Flows In, India Goes Out to Eat
By MONICA BHIDE

BANGALORE, India

Rashmi Uday Singh, Mumbai's best-known food critic, said the restaurant terrain has been transformed since she began writing reviews 23 years ago.

"For instance," she said, "Mumbai has recently seen the opening of a spate of new Japanese sushi bars like Tiffin at the Oberoi hotel, a lounge that serves sushi and Indian side by side. Sushi was virtually unheard of in the past." Restaurants serving Korean, Moroccan, Malaysian, Indonesian, Italian, Lebanese, Burmese and Mongolian food have also opened recently in Mumbai.

"The growing middle-class double-income families have more disposable income," Ms. Singh said. "They travel, have access to cable television and the Internet. All this has led to more exposure of the palate to the outside world." ...

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/20/dining/20indi.html?ex=1271649600&en=6a7c1c6a8f47e15e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

As Cash Flows In, India Goes Out to Eat
By MONICA BHIDE

BANGALORE, India

YOGURT hasn't traditionally been a source of family tension among the Indian middle class. But things have changed in this most traditionbound of countries.

"Much to my mother's chagrin I use store-bought yogurt," said Rujuta Jog, 24, a recently married office worker. "And my mother-in-law was upset when she saw that I use Pillsbury flour to make rotis. She still prefers to buy wheat and grind it fresh."

Ms. Jog's mother, like most Indian women of her generation, has always cooked everything from scratch. But unlike her mother, Ms. Jog works 40 hours a week outside the home. She and her husband often just order from restaurants, which are more varied and widespread than ever before in cities like Bangalore. Millions of others are doing the same. The amount spent nationally on meals outside the home has more than doubled in the past decade, to about $5 billion a year, and is expected to double again in about half that time, according to Euromonitor International, a market research company.

As India has opened its doors to foreign trade, millions of its people have found themselves with more lucrative jobs, less free time and greater exposure to foreign influences. In the process, what they eat and the way they eat have changed.

Prepared food is a sliver of the overall market in India, still a developing rural country. But its sales have increased more than 70 percent since 1998, by Euromonitor's figures.

"I love shopping at the new-style grocery store where I can get ready-to-drink packaged Nestlé buttermilk, prepared ginger-garlic paste and even frozen chickens I don't have to clean," Ms. Jog said. "They are not even very expensive and save me so much time." Formerly exotic vegetables are now more commonplace in urban areas. The legendary Crawford Market in Mumbai, formerly Bombay, sells broccoli, iceberg lettuce, thyme, basil, rosemary, bell peppers and other non-Indian vegetables. Pasta in bulk is available alongside basmati rice. Neighborhood butchers in Delhi now sell marinated meats and precut, cleaned poultry and meat.

Once the groceries are taken home and supper is prepared, even the dinner table may look different.

"In the old days, since only the men worked outside the home, they were served first," said Sathya Saran, a senior executive at Worldwide Media, one of India's largest publishing companies. "Now everyone eats together, and the entire family dynamic has begun to shift."

The shift is not always smooth....

[Abhijit]

"[So it's OK to say things that are wrong in one article because?... Help me out here... What did you learn from the "cars" article?]"

I didn't learn that much. But people who aren't of Indian origin, don't read Indian magazines and papers and haven't spent their life in India (a group that I dare to say accounts for the majority of NYTimes readers) could definitely learn something.

[OK. What will they learn? That it's not that unusual for an Indian family to be buying its fifth car? That it's easy to forget that India remains home to the greatest number of poor people in the world? That India's 250-million strong middle class is buying cellphones, air-conditioners and washing machines; Botox, sushi and Louis Vuitton bags; and cars?]

I didn't see anything grossly wrong either.

As I see it, your ire seems to be largely at the "250 million middle class" statement. An Indian middle class member is emphatically not at the same socioeconomic level as an American middle class member. But that doesn't mean the statistic is inaccurate. People in that socio-economic level in India are consuming far more than before as a result of the credit boom. Maybe they can't afford a car, then they'll go for a scooter.

[anne]

In Vietnam there are motor scooters everywhere, nice shiny scooters wind about. Honda makes scotters in Vietnam, but look closely at the name on a scooter and often you will find "Honka." Honka is a Honda imitation made in China. Honkas cost less, and have less cache, but they do ride, and that is a means to a more middle class life in Vietnam.

[anne]

With Ari, I find the New York Times wonderful, a treasure, though I do not mind Brad DeLong asking for more. I think the current series on India excellent and have happily followed Amy Waldman's writing from India since she began coverage.

[Jason]

Questions for economists. Has anyone talked about blogging as an information market vs. the market the MSM operates in? I am not an economist, but isn't it safe to say that the MSM doesn't operate in a market, that the MSM has become institutionalized? How many cities have multiple papers and how many networks make a market? On the other hand, with blogging I can take it or leave it. If I want local news coverage, there is one newspaper or local TV news. There is no choice there is no competition. For that matter, does the NYT have competition? Does the competitve marketplace of the blogosphere lead to higher quality? Is there a competative labor market for journalists? How many people interviewed for Elisabeth Bumiller's job?

[Ari]

Any blogger, an journalist, who can gain a position at the New York Times will do so in a flash. The New York Times has all sorts of competition, but there is a reason every person I know in Cambridge reads the paper even though it is not our local paper. The reason is superb quality. Simply look to the culture sections, from arts to books and you will understand how fine the paper is. Can the Times improve? Always. As Anne wrote, Brad should push for more. But, there is no other paper like the Times.

[SqueakyRat]

Brad --
With all respect, because I've learned a lot from you, I don't really understand the vehemence about Waldman's "cars" article. It was impressionistic, not analytical, so for many of us maybe that's not much "value added." But it didn't paper over the fact that India remains a poor country, and it didn't celebrate the passion for shiny toys of the newly moneyed, however many or few of them there actually are. It described a real change in Indian society, one that has some importance even if it is still relatively small scale. It didn't even ignore the smallness of the scale: Waldman remarks that India still has fewer cars on the road than the US did in the 1920s.

Also, it seems to me the NYTimes has been doing a little better recently -- roughly since the expectoration of Judith Miller.

[Mark Thoma]

The loss of materials from the MSM would make it more difficult to disseminate information on important political and policy topics and comment on its quality, relevance, etc. But it wouldn't shut bloggers down. There would still be sources such as the NBER and other places that aggregate economic research to summarize, post, and comment on, keeping up with and commenting all the information the Fed puts out is a job in itself, various government agencies put out reports, research, etc. most of which the blogs pick up and provide commentary, then contrast it to the MSM. There are more sources as well outside of the MSM, including things bloggers do on their own, and econ blogs certainly do some original content.

I see blogs, at least the economics ones, in a watch dog role for the MSM. One reason I started blogging was frustration over what the media was reporting around the last presidential election and I wanted a way to provide alternative interpretations (or in many cases correct false statements, particularly on Social Security). So I am less concerned with who gets what material from whom (i.e. the blog/MSM information trade balance) than with the role blogs play in helping people decide what information is valid, and what is not. As I talk to non-economist friends, I don’t see people starved for information, they simply do no know what to believe from the MSM anymore. If blogs can help with that, great.

[ent lord]

After what seems like years of talk radio and conservative bloggers railing against the liberal bias of the Main Stream Media, it is the liberal blogs who are killing the Main Stream Media?

As far as the NYT, I judge any publication in terms of information it gives me that I cannot get anywhere else. The Web now gives access to publications not usually found at the local newstand, which raises the bar.

Sadly, it seems most of the information in the NYT is readily available in several other places in English, except for those articles by Judith Miller and such. Those stories are exclusives for a reason.

[Jason]

Ari, what about the quality of Judith Miller or Jayson Blair and all things not in the culture sections? Let's ask Wen Ho Lee about the NYT's quality. As for taking a position at the NYT, I am sure there are many who, on principle, wouldn't take the job. We don't all have an ear for the middlebrow house organ.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/05/business/worldbusiness/05india.html?ex=1278216000&en=d90a00fbe261dd82&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

July 5, 2005

In India, Economic Prosperity Is Spreading Slowly
By SARITHA RAI

BANGALORE, India - It has been a little more than a year since the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh came into power promising to embrace those excluded from the country's new economic prosperity.

While the impact of his government's efforts to help the poor - like increasing credit to the country's many farmers and pumping in money for infrastructure, especially in rural areas - will not show for another few years, experts say, the bounty from the expansion in manufacturing and services that has been putting money in the hands of millions of Indians is now noticeably trickling down.

"What is happening is amazing," said Joe Paul, the founder and chairman of the Uthsaha Society, a networking group that encourages slum dwellers in Bangalore to become financially independent. "It is a ripple effect."

For now, though, the ripple is largely an urban phenomenon, and seen mostly in the country's more developed regions. Elsewhere, especially in rural India, millions of poor people continue to eke out a living on less than $1 a day.

"Though India's villages desperately want to join in the growth, the changes are not yet enough to wipe out social inequities," said Chiranjib Sen, an economics professor at the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore, the country's premier business school.

Still, where the new prosperity is percolating, it spans a broad spectrum and reflects much more than an occasional, isolated success story. A big catalyst is the construction boom in high-tech cities like Bangalore and Madras. Besides the demand for construction workers, workers at factories supplying the building materials, and drivers to transport those products, there is a demand for housekeepers, cooks and drivers to cater to the double-income families who live in the new residential complexes and high-rises. Caterers are needed to supply food to the office workers. Security guards are also in demand. Trained nurses are needed to tend to aging parents of workers traveling overseas or living in other cities....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/05/business/worldbusiness/05india.html?ex=1278216000&en=d90a00fbe261dd82&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

In India, Economic Prosperity Is Spreading Slowly
By SARITHA RAI

After last year's 8.5 percent growth, growth in the year ended in March 2005 was 6.9 percent.

That should mean more stories like that of Shobha Shankar. Three years ago, Ms. Shankar, now 28, was a stay-at-home mother of two in Bangalore. With her husband's sari business foundering, she was forced to seek a career. She wanted to learn to ride a scooter so she could market the saris, to supplement her husband's meager monthly income of 3,000 rupees ($69). Instead, at the driving school where she enrolled, she found herself learning to drive a car. She was so good that her instructors roped her in to teach others.

Ms. Shankar's new teaching skills coincided with a surge of first-time car owners in the city - other beneficiaries of the ripple. She was soon able to buy herself a used car and set up a branch of a driving school. She now earns about 15,000 rupees ($344) a month and business is expanding fast. "Three years ago, we didn't have a phone connection at home and I coveted a cellphone," said Ms. Shankar, who now owns two cellphones, regularly takes her family out to dine, and has bought a refrigerator and a washing machine. Her husband cares for their two daughters and tends to the house.

Though India's progress in poverty reduction can slow, a continuing study, Rethinking India's Future, by the Strategic Foresight Group, a research organization based in Mumbai, has tracked upward mobility for an increasing number of Indians, at all economic levels.

According to a recent update of the study, the top level, the country's so-called business-class economy - covering those who can afford things like air travel and Internet connections - grew from 20 million Indians in mid-2002 to 24 million this year, or from 2 percent of the population to 2.2 percent. The "bike economy," including those who own a motorized two-wheeler and a phone, and can afford to travel by train, increased from 15 percent of the population to 16.8 percent, while the "bullock cart category," or those without even basic amenities and who can afford only to ride a cart pulled by a bull or go barefoot, had contracted 2 percentage points, to 81 percent.

"Opportunities are expanding for the lower classes, whether vendors, domestic workers or garment factory workers," said Santosh Vaz, chairwoman of Janodaya, a Bangalore-based nongovernmental organization that helps place domestic help and factory workers. Ms. Vaz has even been able to negotiate minimum wages of up to three times a worker's previous salary, and standard labor benefits, something unheard-of for domestic labor even a few years ago....

[Aidan]

Brad,

I'm surprised at the amount of vitriol that you've directed at an interesting series of articles about the current social change and upheaval happening in India. The NYTs certainly has its faults, but might not that level of ire be directed at some of the more egregious offenders out there (Murdoch? TV news?)?

RE cars: Amy Waldman uses the "Golden Quadrilateral" as the thematic underpinning for a series on infrastructure and social change in India. It seems highly appropriate to include an article on the emerging middle class's increasing consumption of cars

[It's not India's 250 million strong middle class that's buying the cars, is it?

A question: how many Indian families are buying their fifth car this year?]

in a series about a new national highway. This is an anecdotal snapshot on increasing consumption and the obstacles to infrastructure development after a long period of near autarky. To many people, there is significant value-add from a snapshot of people's lives (do more people remember 1830's mean real wages for child laborers or do they remember Oliver Twist?). Sometimes these social snapshots are more rewarding and informative than a bevy of cold statistics.

Your concern then might be that Waldman's "anecdotal snapshot" is not an accurate reflection of living standards of the middle class. A fair criticism, but it falls a little bit short. While PPP-adjusted per capital income for India's middle class may be ~$15,000, that figure alone misses the value that we get from observing both upper middle class consumption (Waldman article) and the high income growth rate for the rest of the middle class. Those two pieces of information allow us to form an expectation of India in the near future and assess the impact of the economic liberalization.

The relative social position (and associate utility) of all of the emerging middle class, even at PPP $15k per-capita income, is much higher than their own past and that of their rural counterparts. What may be an absolute income level corresponding to "working class" in the US is not the same for India -- the PPP adjustment doesn't capture the information of recent change and the relative positional standing nor the expectations of improvement. This information, presented as a social snapshot and in a memorable form, is a value-add to many people who want to learn more about India and the impact of its continuing economic liberalization.

Perhaps Waldman's writing is sloppy in allowing for some readers to believe that all of the middle class is buying cars, but I certainly didn't get that impression from reading the article.

*For more info on South Asia's emerging middle class (including a definition that goes beyond PPP adjusted per capita income), you might check out UCSC econ's Singh (2005), "The Idea of South Asia and the Role of the Middle Class".

http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1053&context=ucscecon

[Ari]

Aidan:

"This is an anecdotal snapshot on increasing consumption and the obstacles to infrastructure development after a long period of near autarky. To many people, there is significant value-add from a snapshot of people's lives (do more people remember 1830's mean real wages for child laborers or do they remember 'Oliver Twist?'). Sometimes these social snapshots are more rewarding and informative than a bevy of cold statistics."

Terrific comment :)

[nate]

Professor Delong

is this an intentional NYT evangelist routine?

[Zach]

You know its weird, Barry Riholtz over at Big Picture actually has a list of NYTimes links he liked in the 5 Dec 5 issue.

I don't think of Barry as a media cheerleader nor an easy dupe.

http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2005/12/special_nyt_edi.html

[Abhjit]

"[OK. What will they learn? That it's not that unusual for an Indian family to be buying its fifth car? That it's easy to forget that India remains home to the greatest number of poor people in the world? That India's 250-million strong middle class is buying cellphones, air-conditioners and washing machines; Botox, sushi and Louis Vuitton bags; and cars?]"

Brad -- sorry, you're just being obstinate here. You'll learn from reading the article that there is a very vibrant consumer class in India that is using credit to fuel a consumer boom partly driven by status. I don't see how anyone could possibly get the impression that buying your 5th car is remotely a common experience. The article itself covers some of the downsides of easy credit, including the repo man.

Your earlier claim was that the writer got something "wrong". Now you're saying that anyone reading this wouldn't learn about India's poor. But the author is going to cover this in a later article. In any case, American audiences have been told for decades about India's crushing poverty, so I hardly consider it a serious moral failure that she didn't focus on that here.

And I think the author has it completely right in the article -- Indian status seeking makes America look like a classless society and cars are indeed one of the prime status symbols. My parents back in India continue to exhort me to buy more expensive cars here in the US !! I think you'll find that most Indians in the US (and I'm sure you have plenty of Indian colleagues at Berkeley) liked this article. I'm equally sure very few will be pleased by her article about AIDS ..

[Charles]

Ari claims: "Any blogger, an journalist, who can gain a position at the New York Times will do so in a flash."

I can guarantee that Ari has not read my rapidly expanding post on 70 years of malfeasance by the New York Times. If he had, he would be d--n sure there is one blogger who wouldn't work for the New York Times for nuts.

[robert waldmann]

stop picking on us waldmannns

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/07/international/asia/07highway.html?ex=1291611600&en=dfc796600f94f9db&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

December 7, 2005

All Roads Lead to Cities, Transforming India
By AMY WALDMAN

SURAT, India - This western city has at least 300 slum pockets, grimy industry, factory-fouled air and a spiraling crime rate. A 1994 epidemic - reported as pneumonic plague - that originated here caused national panic. It is the kind of place where the body of a woman killed by a passing truck is left in the street because no one knows her.

The city hardly seems like a beacon, yet for young men across India it shines like one.

In his central Indian village, B. P. Pandey heard that Surat was a "big industrial town" and made his way here to work. Rinku Gupta, 18, one of Mr. Pandey's five roommates, came from the north. Hundreds of thousands more have traveled from Orissa, in the east, and from Maharashtra, to the south.

In the rural mind, Surat, in Gujarat state, looms with outsized allure, and its girth is growing to match. In less than 15 years, its population has more than doubled, to an estimated 3.5 million, making it India's ninth largest city. A majority of Surat's residents are migrants, drawn by its two main industries, diamonds and textiles.

Surat's growth spurt is being replicated across India. At least 28 percent of its population now lives in cities and many more of its citizens move in and out of them for temporary work. In some southern states, nearly half the population is in cities. In 1991, India had 23 cities with one million or more people. A decade later it had 35.

As the people shift, so does the very nature of India. This is a nation of 600,000 villages, each of them a unit that has ordered life for centuries, from the strata of caste to the cycles of harvest. In this century, cities' pull and influence - not only financial but also psychic - are remaking society. Less visible than the heated consumerism or western sexual habits changing India, this slow churning may be more profound and, for a country weaned on the virtues of village life, more wrenching.

"From all over India, they are coming," said Kailash Pandey, a milk seller, of the migrants pouring into Kanpur, one of the million-plus cities.

Kanpur, Surat and 17 of the other biggest cities sit along the so-called Golden Quadrilateral - 3,625 miles of national highways that circle the country and are being modernized in an epic infrastructure project. Earlier this year, a New York Times reporter and photographer drove that route, looping through India's megalopolises - New Delhi, Calcutta, Chennai, formerly Madras, and Mumbai.

The highway brings in and out almost everything cities need, including much of the cheap labor that men like B. P. Pandey supply. So with the road's improvement, Surat and other cities are surging anew, spreading toward the highway as if toward their life source.

The redone highway is also shrinking the distance between villages and cities. In the countryside through which the route passed, the buzz was about places like Surat, and the sense of a nation on the move.

"This is rural India - people don't stay," said Anil Kumar, a shopkeeper in the village of Kaushambi. "The highway has made it easier."

Compared with China, whose rural population is also moving, India's urbanization has been a saunter, not a sprint - slower, looser and more haphazard. That is partly because some of India's economic policies have served to constrict its cities' possibilities. Decisions made during and even after four decades of quasi socialism have crimped the kind of manufacturing that has spurred China's urban growth.

Good jobs or not, India's migrants still come. Their presence is creating new challenges: battles for land, competition for jobs, strained resources and religious and political tensions. So diverse is Surat's population that the municipal corporation now runs schools in eight languages.

And when the migrants return home, they bring new views and aspirations with them. Their perspectives are combining with the improved highways to open up, and out, the closed worlds of India's villages.

Waiting for a bus at the station in Jaipur, Surender Yadav offered his own village as an example. Bypassed by development, it sat down a wretched road off the highway between Jaipur and New Delhi. There was no medical dispensary, and perhaps more galling to Mr. Yadav, a 26-year-old doctoral candidate in Hindi, no newspaper delivery.

But the highway's widening and resurfacing meant villagers were no longer waiting for development to come to them. Every morning, Mr. Yadav said, 20 or so people rode their motorbikes to the highway, parked and hopped on a bus. They went to New Delhi, two and a half hours away, or Gurgaon, even closer, and worked as police officers, low-level clerks or customer care representatives in call centers. India, ever absorptive, had absorbed the highway, and turned out something new: the commuter village.

The village is becoming less a way of life than a place to live, a stop on the journey to the metropolis....

[anne]

Amy Waldman's India series, as he older articles, strike me as excellent glimpses of the country of a billion people that is growing at a sustained rate that would have seemed far too much to hope for little more than a decade ago. Article after article in the New York Times has examined India's continuing challenges and failures, but here is a proud truly emerging India for us to attend to. Evidently, from students, the series has been most welcome.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/05/international/asia/05highway.html?ex=1291438800&en=5361526dacb544cd&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

December 5, 2005

In Today's India, Status Comes With Four Wheels
By AMY WALDMAN

A Shifting Value System

India's state-run rail network may have been built by the British, but it came to represent a certain egalitarianism. Powerful and voiceless, rich and poor - all navigated the same chaotic, crowded stations and rode the same jam-packed trains, if not in the same class.

Cars, in contrast, reflect the atomization prosperity brings.

This is a far bigger change for Indian society than it was for America, which in many ways was founded around the notion of the individual. Indian society has always been more about duty, or dharma, than drive, more about responsibility to others than the realization of individual desire.

That ethos is changing. "Twenty years back one car was an achievement," said Maj. Gen. B. C. Khanduri, who as minister of roads from 2000 to 2004 helped shepherd the new highway into being. "Now every child needs their own car."

To him and others who grew up in a different society, that change bespeaks a larger, and troubling, shift. "The value system is finishing now," he said. "We are gradually increasing everyone for himself."

Luxuries are now necessities, he said, and children are focused more on earning for themselves than on caring for their parents. Indians have always been critical of what they see as American selfishness, the way children relegate parents to retirement homes so they can pursue their own lives. Now, suddenly, they are hearing such stories among themselves.

Spreading affluence also has brought new competitive anxiety. Where once everyone in a neighborhood had an Ambassador or a Fiat, the hierarchy of livelihoods, of success, now can be parsed easily through cars.

P. V. J. Mohanrao, 48, an assistant college professor, who came to the Toyota showroom to look at the Innova, could afford only cheaper cars: the Indian-made Maruti and Tata Sumo.

A neighbor who was with him, P. Srinivas, 41, a businessman dealing in glass, could afford larger monthly installments, and thus the more luxurious Chevrolet Tavera.

Another neighbor, a software entrepreneur who, Mr. Mohanrao pointed out, had "spent time in the United States," outclassed them both: at any given time, he had three or four cars, none of them cheap.

"He has booked this car, I heard," Mr. Mohanrao said of his neighbor and the Innova.

The car fever here is in part a triumph of marketing to people who did not grow up being marketed to. Advertising in India has succeeded in making, as Mr. Khanduri said, luxuries into necessities, in portraying persuasion as knowledge.

The Toyota salesmen here market aggressively, singling out beach walkers and mall shoppers. They aim at people who bought cars in 2002 and convince them they already need an upgrade. Helped by record-low car-loan rates, they have learned to manufacture desire. "If that fellow has a burning zeal we will add to the fire, we will tempt him," said Mr. Prakky, the sales manager....