Zach Carter: belief

Transcript context

…But he wants the British to rule them. He never entertains democracy for India, which was not that radical an idea then. I agree with that. Look, throughout his career, he views the British Empire as this sort of force of benevolence throughout the world. He thinks that being part of the British Empire is a way for people, from wherever they are, to participate in democracy and prosperity, and that is very much part of the liberal-imperialist conception of the time. The idea that it’s not egalitarian — that’s where I think he’s confused about that. He’s just wrong, but he believes the way that he thinks about joining the British Empire. He believes that is an egalitarian thing to do, which imperialists across time have believed when they come from a progressive perspective. Of course, that’s often not true, and I think in the case of Britain and India, it’s not. In Indian Currency and Finance, Keynes shows this remarkable knowledge of numbers and statistics from India, which he had a phenomenal grasp on. So, he must have known the Indian growth rates under British rule were quite low, which has been confirmed by later research as one of the big problems with colonialism — not the only one. My implicit mental model of Keynes, consistent with his interest in eugenics, is that he thought that India, on its own, was just intrinsically a slow-growth nation. They’d have a slow growth rate under the British, but they would do worse on their own. Do you think that’s the wrong implied mental model of how Keynes viewed this?…

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