Raghuram Rajan: belief

Transcript context

…Why does China have such a bad record at cultivating allies? Maybe Cambodia, maybe North Korea, Pakistan perhaps. But China has remarkably few allies relative to its GDP. Some of that may have to do with the nature of the government, that it is a one-party system. There isn’t an enormous scope for internal dialogue and debate. I would suspect that one of the reasons people felt more comfortable with the United States’ postwar hegemony was the internal debate in the United States. Not so much that everybody trusted the US government, but they realized that there were checks and balances internally, and that every once in a while — especially in the ’70s and the ’80s and the ’90s — the public would start pointing at some of the actions of the US government and restrain some of the worst actions. So I think there was greater confidence, I would say right from Jimmy Carter. Carter’s not a popular president in the United States, but the kind of introspection that he did in public, I think, was useful for the rest of the world to know that the United States was actually morally on the right path. If we look at Spain today, many Catalonians wish to leave. To outsiders, the difference between a Spaniard and a Catalonian appears relatively small compared to, say, the differences in India. I see no serious signs of India breaking up whatsoever. What is it that accounts for this extreme stability of India that maybe is not so visible to outsiders?…

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