Just Want to Ride on My Motorcycle

Tata Nano. Worse than owning a motorcycle?

Why is Tata's Nano not a great success? It is the world's cheapest car, built in a huge market, India, now emerging into the middle income range and so surely craving wheels. After all, it follows a tried and true formula that has worked and worked before. It is the same formula, of a “people's car,” that worked for Henry Ford and the “Model T.” It worked again for Volkswagen in Germany and in many parts of the Third World with the VW “beetle.” It worked in England for the Austin Mini. It worked for Datsun in Japan. It worked again in Korea for Hyundai. So why not in India? 

Henry Ford's better idea.

The common theory is that Indians prefer to drive motorcycles. Does not sound terribly likely.

I have another idea, inspired by my Filipina wife's complaints about her home country. She complains that Filipinos are ridiculously pretentious—too many Filipinos will lie to pretend they are richer than they are. This is also, I think, a common tendency in India. Everywhere, really, but in our experience Filipinos and Indians really stand out in this regard, in world terms. 

Still on the road in the Philippines.

Is it pure coincidence that they also stand out in their relative failure to develop economically? The Philippines has oddly lagged behind all its Southeast Asian neighbours, besides many obvious advantages. India has lagged well behind its neighbour China, despite many obvious advantages.

The problem may be that this tendency to social pretension prevents people from making the most intelligent economic decisions. Given the chance to buy a cheap car, relatively poor Americans, Germans, and Koreans jumped at the chance to improve their lives. And on and up they went. Given the chance to buy a cheap car, it may be that many Indians thought they were too ashamed to have their neighbours see them in a cheap car. Better to look down their noses and scorn it, even though they themselves could afford nothing better. Better prestige and better self-image to own a middle of the line motorcycle than a bottom of the line car. And so they remain no better off economically and practically; they have other priorities. 

Austin  Mini: send in the clowns.

It can easily be the same with jobs—better to remain unemployed or to take a lower-paying job than to take a job with duties they consider beneath them, or beneath their caste. And so they remain in poverty. And so the economy in turn does not grow as it might, and does, in less pretentious, more egalitarian-thinking countries like the US, Germany, or Korea.

I wonder if this principle could be applied more universally?