India preserves small shops, like these in Dehli, in part by restricting foreign investment in retail grocers. Photo: Villie Miettinen (Flickr)

Killing jobs: underrated.

Amid warnings that megaretailers drive small shops and farms out of business, India is backing off from a plan to let WalMart, Tesco and other foreign firms open domestic grocery stores.

Today, American economist Alex Tabarrok mounts a simple, fearless response: Yes, the plan would replace many poorly-paid jobs with fewer poorly-paid jobs. And that, he says, is exactly what India needs.

What India needs is fewer jobs; fewer jobs in retail, fewer jobs in apparel and, most of all, fewer jobs in farming. India cannot become even a middle income country if most of its workers, for example, are farmers. To improve its standard of living, India must use fewer people to produce more agricultural output.

Fewer workers in farming (or retail) means more workers producing more goods in other industries. The same basic lesson holds throughout an economy, it is the declining sectors that allow other sectors to advance.

Tabarrok's case is deeply optimistic: Idle humans don't stay idle. If megaretailers drive out their competition by helping hundreds of millions of Indians save a little money on groceries, the economy will have that much more to create the middle-class jobs of tomorrow: fixing computers, building bicycles, assisting childbirths.

In the long run, Tabarrok suggests, killing an inefficient job only frees a worker to find a better one.

Rural residents who stay in the countryside must stand center stage in the next phase of Indian development. Photo: mckaysavage (flickr)

At long last, the rural poor are stepping into the spotlight of Indian economic development.

There is increasing consensus that rural participation will be central to the continuation of the country’s prodigious growth, says Time Magazine. This dawning realization is inspiring a rush of schemes to boost incomes in the countryside — producing a new base of rural consumers.

Traditional development schemes often focus on urbanization, industrialization and increasing standards of living for wealthier city-dwellers. Government subsidies are frequently viewed as the only option for stimulating rural economies. But in India, the paradigm is shifting. What if farmers were to stay put? What if infrastructure that would allow them to turn a profit without leaving the countryside were established and accessible to them? A burgeoning community of development experts, public officials, and business owners are asking these questions.

Samriddhi, a three-year-old start-up in Bihar, India, exemplifies the kind of project produced by this innovative thinking. The company sells produce from more than 5,000 farmers in some of the state’s more lucrative urban markets. Samriddhi focuses on higher wages, trainings for better productivity, fewer middlemen, and more efficient, direct and just supply chains. One of its suppliers, Gulabchand Singh, has seen his income jump by almost 50 percent since he began working with Samriddhi.

Walmart is also tapping into the countryside’s human and natural resources. They’re recruiting more farmers, discounting agricultural products, and bringing in simple but effective techniques and technologies to increase yields and reduce operating costs. Walmart’s goal is to raise farmers’ incomes by 20 percent in five years. "If incomes rise, farmers will sell their produce to Walmart first; if incomes rise enough, they will also become its customers," says Time.

This is the gist of the emerging Indian perspective on development. Samriddhi and Walmart are just two of many companies that have caught on.

In the countryside, “the income gap between Rising India and the Other India is most pronounced.” And it’s there that “hyperlocal, market-based solutions” have the most power to break and reshape corrupt, exploitative, inefficient supply chains; to burst open monopolies; and to rearrange “old power structures and traditions,” says Time. Such changes could place India’s 840 million ruralites at the forefront of the effort to elevate the Other India into Rising India’s ranks.

“India's economic epic has reached the end of Act I," according to Time. Integrating and empowering the country’s rural poor within the larger economy will be key to opening the curtain for Indian Development: Act II.

Jared Diamond praises Chevron's environmental stewardship in Papua New Guinea. Photo: Arthur Chapman (flickr)

From Michael Moore to Jonathan Safran Foer, American liberals love to criticize corporations for violations on everything from the environment to human rights to animal rights.

But in some cases they're dead wrong, writes Jared Diamond — an American liberal himself. In a recent New York Times Op-Ed, he argues that big corporations can be a force for good in the fight against climate change, simply because they also stand to benefit by preserving the resources they depend on and reducing their costs through lower consumption.

Diamond draws on examples from three companies: Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, and Chevron. All three are working to protect the environment in different ways for their own reasons. Coca-Cola depends heavily on water resources and is working to make its plants water-neutral, while Wal-Mart is making its operations more energy-efficient and reducing packaging waste. Chevron, on the other hand, practices a degree of environmental stewardship on the land it owns overseas that Diamond believes is superior to government stewardship of many national parks.

Why would these companies take on such projects? Diamond explains:

Lower consumption of environmental resources saves money in the short run. Maintaining sustainable resource levels and not polluting saves money in the long run. And a clean image — one attained by, say, avoiding oil spills and other environmental disasters — reduces criticism from employees, consumers and government. [...] [I]n the long run (and often in the short run as well) it is much more expensive and difficult to try to fix problems, environmental or otherwise, than to avoid them at the outset.

Diamond readily admits that not all big businesses are so admirable. But he maintains that when working to stop climate change, activists should focus less on working against corporations, and more on working with them to help them realize how much their own economic interests can be aligned with environmentalists' goals.