India Fact of the Day

Tata Indica 1

Kentaro Toyama:

When you rent a car in India, the car comes with a driver, partly because their wages — as low as $2-3 a day — are negligible compared to the cost of the rental. I traveled a lot within India, so I met a lot of drivers.

I saw an episode of No Reservations once where Anthony Bourdain was eating some super-cheap street food and went off on some thing about how much better it was in India where you had these hand-prepared meals instead of Burger King. And for a western tourist, that does sound nice, just as it must be nice to rent a car that comes with a driver. But in both cases what you're looking at is low living standards in action. Average productivity in the US is much higher than average productivity in India, so wages are much higher in the US. But American drivers are no more productive than Indian ones, so chauffeurs are unaffordable here and affordable prepared food needs to economize on labor with fast food techniques.