— or so said the Man from Trier. Me, I’m not so sure. And Bruce Sterling, commenting on a piece called “Here comes the Indian consumer” by Morgan Stanley’s Stephen Roach, thinks Karl (and Mr. Roach) may have had it exactly backward . . .

I kinda derive the exact opposite conclusion out of this piece that the author himself derives; [Roach] thinks that booming economies in, say, Mumbai can drag the whole Indian population out of poverty, while, to me, this suggests that certain high-tech areas in the USA could cheerily continue to thrive even while desperate internal migrants from New Orleans and Florida are sleeping on our pavements, a vast and utterly bereft American underclass pillowing their heads on the curbstones in their very millions. Yep, India may really be tomorrow’s developmental model; you gotta watch what you ask for, ’cause you may well get it.