Richard Epstein goes to India

Richard Epstein, a law professor at NYU takes a really brief trip to India describing both the squandered potential but hope for its economic future (Hoover) - read the whole thing:

The overall picture that emerges from countless episodes of this sort is not one of the idle poor. Quite the opposite: it is one of ceaseless labor undertaken at high skill levels by men and women who face what in the United States would be regarded as intolerable conditions. Indeed, many of these workers are not regarded as poor in India, but as members of the lowest strata of the middle class, where the median income is about $1,219 per year, which puts India at 142nd in the world. In terms of purchasing power parity, that works out to about US$3,608. The obvious question is what can be done to improve conditions in India.