接上文：
《经济学人》精读28：India’s missing middle class（part 1）
《经济学人》精读29：India’s missing middle class（part 2）
The rich get richer
Some have doubts about Mr Piketty’s methodology. But other surveys suggest pretty similar distribution patterns.Looking at wealth as opposed to income, Credit Suisse established in 2015 that only 25.5m Indians had a net worth over $13,700, equating roughly to $50,000 in America. And two-thirds of that cohort’s wealth was held by just 1.5m upper-class savers with at least $137,000 in net assets.
India’s middle class may be far from wealthy but the rich are truly rich. There are over 200,000 millionaires in India. Forbes counts 101 billionaires and adds one more to the list roughly every two months. It shows. The Hermès shop next door to the Honda dealership frequented by Mr Srinath sells scarves and handbags that cost far more than his scooter. Flats in posh developments start at $1m. In other emerging economies, there are fewer very rich and a wider base of potential spenders for marketers to tap.
印度的富人是真的非常富，有超过二十万百万富翁。 福布斯榜上有101位亿万富豪，每两个月就会新增一位。
其他经济正在起飞的国家中，会比较少超级富豪，但会有更多的有能力的消费者（贫富差距没那么大）
In absolute terms, India has wealth roughly comparable to Switzerland (population 8m) or South Korea (51m).Although India’s population is almost the size of China’s, it is central Europe, with a population about the size of India’s top 10% and boasting roughly the same spending power, that is a better comparison. Global companies pay attention to markets the size of Switzerland or central Europe. But they do not look to them to redefine their fortunes.
Confronted by this analysis, India bulls concede the middle class is comparatively small, but insist that bumper growth is coming. The assumptions behind that, though, are not convincing. For a start, the growth of the overall economy is good—the annual rate is currently 6.3%—but not great. From 2002 China grew at above 8% for 27 quarters in a row. Only three of the past 26 quarters have seen India growing at that sort of pace.
concede: to say that you accept or do not deny the truth or existence of something: to admit something usually in an unwilling way
bull: a person who tries to make money by buying stocks and selling them after their price has gone up: a person who expects the price of stocks to go up
在数据分析面前，那些炒股的就承认印度中产人数确实少，但预测很快就会有爆发性增长，这种立场也是站不住脚的，印度经济年增长也就6.3%
Another assumption is that past patterns will no longer hold and that the spoils of growth will be distributed to a class earning decent wages and not to the very rich or the very poor. Yet the sorts of job that have conventionally provided middle-class incomes are drying up.Goldman Sachs, another bank, estimates that at most 27m households make over $11,000 a year—just 2% of the population. Of those, 10m are government employees and managers at state-owned firms, where jobs have been disappearing at the rate of about 100,000 a year since 2000, in part as those state-owned enterprises lose ground to private rivals.
The remaining 17m are white-collar professionals, a lot of whom work in the information-technology sector, which is retrenching amid technological upheaval and threats of protectionism. In general, salaries at large companies have been stagnant for years and recruitment is dropping, according to CLSA, a brokerage.
stagnant: 这个词在讲新西兰的那篇文章里出现过
The Economist 《经济学人》- 新西兰大选37岁阿登姐登台！
retrenching: to change the way things are done in order to spend less money
retrenchment: the company is going through a retrenchment
Might those below the current white-collar professional layer graduate to membership of the middle class?This happened in China, where hordes migrated from the countryside to relatively high-paying jobs in factories in coastal areas. But such opportunities are thin on the ground in India. It has a lower urbanisation rate than its neighbours, and a bigger urban-rural wage gap, with little sign of change. It is not providing jobs to its young people: around a third of under-25s are not in employment, education or training.
There are other structural issues. Over 90% of workers are employed in the informal sector; most firms are not large or productive enough to pay anything approaching middle-class wages. “Most people in the middle class across the world have a payslip. They have a regular wage that comes with a job,” points out Nancy Birdsall of the Centre for Global Development, a think-tank. And women’s participation in the workforce is low, at 27%; worse, it has fallen by around ten percentage points since 2005, as households seem to have used increases in income to keep women at home. Households that might be able to afford luxuries if both partners worked cannot when only the man does.
horde: a large group of people
有没有那些不是白领的人进入中产阶级？ 像中国，很多农村的就离开家乡去更发达的沿海城市谋生，工资更高一点，但印度这种迹象几乎不可能，因为城市化没有中国多
Spent force
Across the income spectrum, households that do make more money tend to spend it not on consumer goods but on better education and healthcare, public provision of which is abysmal. The education system is possibly India’s most intractable problem, preventing it becoming a consumer powerhouse. Attaining middle-class spending power requires a middle-class income, which in turn requires productive ability. Yet most children get fewer than six years of schooling and one in nine is illiterate.Poor diets mean that 38% of children under the age of five are so underfed as to damage their physical and mental capacity irreversibly, according to the Global Nutrition Report. “What hope is there for them to earn a decent income?” one senior business figure asks.
None of this leaves India as an irrelevancy for the world’s biggest companies. Whether India’s consumer class numbers 24m or 80m, that is more than enough to allow some businesses to thrive—plenty of fortunes have been made catering to far smaller places. But businesses assuming the consumer pivot in India is the next unstoppable force in global economics need to ask themselves why it already looks to have run out of puff—and whether it is likely to get a second wind any time soon.
abysmal: extremely poor or bad
intractable: not easily managed, controlled, or solved
印度的教育问题是一个比较棘手的问题，很多小孩连饭都吃不饱，身体和精神都跟不上经济发展需要的能力
总结：印度经济和中产能不能起飞，只能交给历史来给出答案了
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Results
Lexile®Measure: 1100L - 1200L
Mean Sentence Length: 17.40
Mean Log Word Frequency: 3.25
Word Count: 870
这篇文章的蓝思值是在1100-1200L， 适合英语专业大二的水平学习，是经济学人里普通难度
使用kindle断断续续地读《经济学人》三年，发现从一开始磕磕碰碰到现在比较顺畅地读完，进步很大，推荐购买！点击这里可以去亚马逊官网购买~
