Booms ride global cheap money
The author argues that a developing country's boom is not purely homegrown. India's surge in the early 2000s depended on low world interest rates, and on foreign investors pouring cash into emerging markets.
Investing
James Crabtree reports from India's new billionaire class to examine aspiration, inequality, corruption and the political bargains behind rapid growth.
Count billionaires against national wealth
The raw number of billionaires and their share of a nation's wealth tell different stories. India ranks third in billionaire count, behind only the US and China. Measured as a share of national wealth, Russia's oligarchs come out on top.
Public assets flow to insiders
When politics bends to serve the rich, they can walk off with public property: state bank loans, rights to mine coal, or shares of the airwaves. Many ordinary people come to believe the wealthy also enjoy impunity, so scandals do not stop them from prospering.
Inequality built into the growth
The author argues that luxury living beside slums is not a surface oddity. It comes from the shape of the growth model itself. In the author's account, the economy grew faster than China's while the top 1% came to hold nearly 60% of the wealth, and half of the biggest city lives in slums.
Gilded ages can prompt reform
The author compares today's new rich to the tycoons of America's late-1800s boom, who were followed by a reform era that broke up monopolies. He hopes for a similar turn, treating crony wealth as a passing phase before a fairer, more inclusive economy.
Crony tycoons as cautious men
The tycoons who profit from a crony system are not necessarily cartoon villains. In person, many come across as relatively conservative men. The problem the book describes lies in the system that rewards closeness to power, more than in the personal wickedness of those who gain from it.
Fortunes made through proximity
The author argues that, after the 1991 opening of India's economy, a new tycoon class grew rich by working closely with political friends in the capital, not only by building better businesses. Access to the people who hand out licences, loans and resources became a source of wealth in itself.
Unequal capitalism may undermine itself
The author cites an economist's argument that this inequality, the highest since 1921, could make capitalism itself unsustainable unless more wealth is redistributed. The danger is that a system's public support erodes when its gains go to so few.
Cronies against reformers
The author frames the country's direction as a contest between businessmen who profit from political favours and reformers who want open, rule-based markets. Class and caste tensions run underneath this contest. Its outcome decides whether the country becomes a prosperous democracy or a corrupt, authoritarian state.
Closing borders breaks old openness
A society can be an early pioneer of global trade for centuries and then cut itself off by policy choice. In the author's account, India's long history of trading by sea gave way to a deliberate turn inward after independence in 1947, which lasted until the economy was reopened.