A year or two back, I started using the city of Bangalore as an all-purpose shorthand for emerging economies. If you’ve heard me on air or in person, you’ll know the kind of thing: “Chip in Berkeley doesn’t work as hard or create as much wealth as Rajiv in Bangalore, who gets up early every morning and heads off to put in a full shift making the latest electronic toys that Chip loves. But Chip assumes he will always live better than Rajiv simply because he’s American and Rajiv isn’t. He’s wrong. Eventually, economic reality will assert itself.” Whenever I use my little riff on radio or TV, I get a flurry of e-mails asking what was that goofy, foreign-sounding city I mentioned. That would be Bangalore, a burg whose name I have found mellifluously exotic since my childhood but which over the last three decades has become known as “the Silicon Valley of India.” Even Americans who’ve never heard of the joint would feel instantly at home if suddenly dropped in one of its many IT parks to stroll past the likes of Dell, Nokia, Hewlett-Packard.
Bangalore is also home to the Indian Institute of Management, wherein resides Professor R. Vaidyanathan. The professor has an arresting phrase he likes to use: “the nationalization of the family.” I would doubt he’s the chap responsible for the coinage, but he applies it brilliantly, as the defining fact about the decline of the West. He has a certain post-imperial chippiness and he’s nobody’s idea of a right-winger, but I think he’s on to something. Once upon a time, in Britain, Europe, and beyond, ambitious leftists nationalized industries — steel, coal, planes, cars, banks — but it was such a self-evident disaster that it’s been more or less abandoned, at least by those who wish to remain electorally viable. On the other hand, the nationalization of the family proceeds apace. “The West has nationalised families over the last 60 years,” writes Vaidyanathan. “Old age, ill health, single motherhood — everything is the responsibility of the state.”
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