The economic cost of caste (and racism) #1

A few days ago I had hypothesised that the Hindu caste system imposes a very significant economic cost on India.

If, without caste, India can become 10 times richer with the right policies, it will only be able to become 6 times richer with caste. Caste cuts India’s potential (relative to, say, China) by FOUR TIMES.

This, of course, is pure guess work, but it is based mainly on the convergence hypothesis which suggests that poorer nations will quickly catch up with the wealthier ones because all they need to do is to copy the latest technology instead of inventing it. This is teh assumption of UNIFORM INTELLIGENCE. Unfortunately, if you don’t have the MENTAL ABILITY TO COPY then you can’t achieve this convergence.

By destroying the IQs of Dalits and lower castes, the caste system has effectively eliminated their capacity to copy technology. 

No one in the economics literature seems to have looked at this FUNDAMENTAL issue. I would request economists to spend time in exploring this further.

I’ll separately make a list of other existing literature on this subject, but that material doesn’t get into the guts of the issue, as I will separately show.

Note that I’m only discussing the economic cost of caste, as opposed to the social, political or religious cost.