Timothy Taylor has a nice summary of a very long article on India. (Another article in this issue of the Journal of Economic Literature, on labor supply elasticity, clocked in at over 100 pages. If you are looking for an easy journal to read, look elsewhere.)

The ironic outcome is that India is typically referred to as a development success story, while at the same time the country has a larger number of the world’s poor than any other. Indeed, there are concerns that India is not educating much of its population nearly well enough for it to have any hope of participating in this form of economic growth. In a phrase I once heard, India is part southern California, and part sub-Saharan Africa.

I wonder about this uneducated population. Are these people who are too cognitively impaired to be educated, or is India’s notoriously bad primary education system the problem? If the latter is the issue, could American entrepreneurs help? The Internet does go both ways, you know.

Incidentally, Taylor seems a bit concerned that his page views are not higher. I never go to his page–I use an RSS reader to view his blog. I think it is pretty hard to start a blog these days and get people to read it other than through RSS. In any case, I consider his blog to be right up there with Mark Thoma’s and Marginal Revolution as the most valuable economics blogs out there.