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I'm gonna ask you a question and I want you to tell me the answer. There's a country with a population of 1.4 billion people. It produces talent in the disciplines that will define the future. Propelled by rapid economic growth, it has become a vital part of the global economy.

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It's led by a controversial leader who's making it more assertive, some would say aggressive, on

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the world stage. And its future will have a huge bearing on the shape of the 21st century.

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Our Indian audience is just absurd. So it's like our audience is America than India.

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This century may end up as being China versus Indians.

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India to me at the margin seems the most important center of talent for new talent.

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Why do they believe that India is poised to emerge as a world superpower in the 21st century? Today, I'll lay out 4 reasons why. Let's dive in.

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I mean, YouTube gets more views per month from India than they do America. Like India is YouTube's largest audience.

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That's Mr. Beast, the world's biggest YouTuber, talking about the size of his audience in India. Now, he might not know it,

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but

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on April 14th, 2023, something very special is going to happen. It'll be the first time that this has happened in centuries, maybe even millennia. This is the date when, according to the UN, China will lose its title as the world's most populous country, and it will lose it to India.

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India will surpass China to become the world's most populous nation as early as next year or

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2023. China has been the world's most populous country for a long time. Its population in 1750 was 225 million. That was about 28 percent of the world's total.

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Today, China's population tops 1, 453, 000, 000 people and accounts for 18% of the world's total. But its population growth has reached a plateau. In fact, according to some experts, China's population is actually falling. India's, meanwhile, is still growing.

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On average, every Indian woman is having 2.18 babies. Compare that to China, where the total fertility rate is just 1.7. It's true that India's rate of population growth is slowing, but if current trends hold, it won't hit its peak population for another 40 years. And as long as China's population continues flatlining or even declining, India will hold the title for most populous country for a long time.

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And when it comes to population, it's not just size that matters. Population distribution is really important. India's median age is 28. That's 10 years younger than China.

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Hundreds of millions of Indians are in their prime working years when they're the most productive. Between now and 2050, India's slice of the world's working-age population will grow even more quickly. That means it'll be Indians coming up with new ideas, developing new technologies, and making their country better. And this isn't just data and math.

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This represents a changing of the guard from China to India in the halls of power. Being the world's most populous country confers legitimacy. When India stands up and speaks at the United Nations In trade negotiations, their words will carry a lot of weight. Additionally, people bet on winners.

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The more India's population grows and the more China's shrinks, the more investment India will earn from the world's biggest companies.

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Where would you build your training facility? Where would you open up an additional office? And the more it becomes a magnet for the best talent from neighboring countries, the more India will feel like the future.

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More Indians means more ideas, more entrepreneurs, more innovations, more solutions to the country's and the world's most urgent problems. That equation leads me directly to India's second major structural advantage. The single most important question in the world is how to reliably create and maintain economic growth.

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Economic growth is the single largest determinant of long-term living standards And the ability of a country's economy and its governments to create and maintain those conditions is the number 1 factor that differentiates rich countries from poor ones. When talking about development, economists often talk about the importance of institutions. By institutions, they mean things like laws and regulations, property rights, trustworthy courts, and political stability. Many analysts also use the term institutions to refer to the important but intangible bundle of traits that most people call culture.

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Here we mean things such as societal norms around things like honesty, truth, and cooperation, which themselves have downstream effects on things like corruption. A country's institutions are strongly correlated with the pace and quality of a country's economic growth. They guide a country's choices, which paths to follow, which actions to take, which signals to listen to, and which ones to ignore. The 20th century provided us with a natural experiment that fully demonstrates the role of institutions in determining economic growth.

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Until war split them apart, North and South Korea were 1 country. They shared the same history and culture. South Korea

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had no intrinsic advantages over North Korea.

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If anything, North Korea was the more industrialized of the 2. But once they adopted different ideologies, they embarked on very different trajectories. In South Korea, the imposition of capitalism and the eventual adoption of democracy allowed people to start businesses and create goods and services relatively safe in the knowledge that economic markets would function and that rule of law would be honored.

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In the North, things were very different. A totalitarian regime assumed complete control over every facet of life and society. Today, South Korea is a modern affluent country, while North Korea tragically is 1 of the poorest. Now the story is slightly more complicated than how it's often portrayed, but it's still the closest that we've had to a real life demonstration of the importance of institutions.

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All of which brings me to the main point. India's strong institutions serve as the ideal springboard for its economic development. To in particular, separate India from its competitors

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for geopolitical influence and investment dollars.

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The first is its historical commitment to democracy. India's government is modeled on the Westminster system created by its colonizers, the British. 3 independent and nominally equal branches of government collide against each other like giant tectonic plates.

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There's an executive headed by a prime minister. Every 5 years, the world's biggest elections nominate representatives to the country's bicameral parliament. While India's judicial system consists of 672 district courts, 25 high courts, and a single Supreme Court. Rule of law is overseen by the world's longest-standing

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national constitution. Its

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145, 000 words reflect the difficulty of effectively governing such a large and diverse nation. And its 105 amendments reflect the raucous and contested nature of Indian politics. India's democracy was hard-earned, and respect for it runs deep.

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Mahatma Gandhi, who championed the causes of religious pluralism and non-violent resistance to British colonialism, remains the most admired person in the country. India's democratic institutions have been a key factor in its economic development. How well they cope under the pressure being applied to them by Narendra Modi will go a long way in determining India's position in the 21st century. India's other big cultural advantage is another carefully maintained inheritance from its former colonial masters.

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The country's widespread comprehension of the language of globalization. English. India has the second largest English-speaking population of any country in the world. Some put this down to a lingering colonial mindset, which has persisted among Indian people.

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I don't agree. I think the true answer is, long after independence, English remains the language of aspiration. It's the bridge to the world, a passport that unlocks more opportunities and a key that unlocks higher incomes. More than 128 million Indians already speak it while countless more have the opportunity to learn it there if they want to.

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Speaking English is good for Indians,

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and it's also good for India.

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Research shows a direct correlation between the English skills of a population and the economic performance of the country. India's huge English-speaking population has helped it develop a presence in major service industries. It affects Indian companies' ability to access capital markets.

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And it creates stronger political alliances in

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the world's most affluent countries. We can debate the historical origins of why so many Indians speak English. But we can't deny the wealth it's helped create and the doors of opportunity it will continue to open.

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Speaking English and having a deeply rooted democratic culture are 2 of India's key structural advantages.

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And they are closely linked to the third reason India will win the 21st century. Harshad Bhogle is 1 of the most insightful analysts of India's true national obsession, cricket. For him, cricket offers a useful analogy for how India is changing.

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I've said this before, but we lived in a very socialist state-controlled economy, where you didn't, your salary was all you had, we were a very saving survival-driven society, so you hit the ball in the air that's another way of getting out not way of clearing the fielder. Batting for us was not getting out not scoring runs not getting out and so you had test matches scored played at 1.8 runs and over. The new generation says yeah I'll get out but if I don't get out I'll win.

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When we were at school we were always, not us but so many around us were put in coaching classes subjects we were weak in. Today's parents are putting kids into classes where the children are good at. So the Rishabh Pants of this world will say, if I go over the fielder and I get it, I've got a 4. My generation would say, but if I don't go over, I'll get caught.

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So That's the difference. They see what is possible. We were scared of what might happen.

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Rishabh Pant is 1 of the new breed of Indian cricket players. He plays the game differently from most of his contemporaries and very differently from the older generations. Sometimes it doesn't work, but when it does, it yields spectacular results.

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A special player, Rishabh Pant take a bow. That will do nicely. That is just brilliance from Rishabh Pant.

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Thumbs up to all of India. They love the young 24 year old. He is a superstar in the making, he really is.

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Rishabh Pant represents India in international cricket. He's also a major part of the competition that best represents how the game of cricket is changing. The original form of cricket can last as long as 5 days.

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So unsurprisingly, there's a lot of interest in shorter, more exciting versions of the game. 1 of these, 20-20, was developed in the mid-2000s. The people who run cricket quickly realized the appeal that a three-hour version of the game could hold for a wider audience. A mid-ranking official working for the national governing body of Indian cricket suggested that his employers should leverage excitement about the new format by starting a new competition.

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He persuaded members of India's business and entertainment elite to invest 723 million for the ownership of the original 8 franchises of what became known as the Indian Premier League. The IPL, as it's better known today, became an immediate hit. 15 years later, it's the most widely googled sporting league in the world, and the second most lucrative on a per game basis. Indians were used to watching the world's best cricket, but they weren't used to watching it like this.

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The IPL is fast-paced, dynamic. It has swagger. In other words, it's a perfect fit for the new NBA. Buoyed by this success, a franchise-based 2020 cricket event is even coming to the United States.

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Major League Cricket will make its debut in July 2023. It won't compete with the biggest sports leagues in the country, but a closer look at who's putting up the money tells us a lot about the growing influence of the Indian diaspora in the United States. Shantanu Narayan, CEO of Adobe, is a major investor. So is Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, who wrote in his memoir that his dream as a young man was to attend a small college, play cricket for Hyderabad, and eventually work for a bank.

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These Indian Americans are perhaps unique in their deep love of cricket, but they represent a growing population in the United States, Indian-born business leaders. I've already mentioned Shantanu Narayan and Saiga Nadella. Other big companies like Alphabet, IBM, Deloitte, and Vimeo also all have Indian-born CEOs. Whereas people like Balaji Srinivasan and Sriram Krishna are widely admired thought leaders.

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A recent Stanford University study found that 90 out of 178 founders of the top 500 American unicorns were born in India. So how are people of Indian heritage so massively overrepresented in the most technologically advanced sectors of the economy?

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According to

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Ramabhadran Gobbalakrishna, the former executive director of Tata Sons, parent company of the massive Tata Group conglomerate. No other nation in the world trains its citizens in such a gladiatorial manner as India. The people who succeed are the products of a bruising educational and societal system which encourages competition and prizes excellence in technical disciplines.

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As the saying goes, pressure creates diamonds. Tyler Cowen is increasingly focusing his time on identifying and developing brilliant individuals. Here's what he said about the Indian diaspora in a recent podcast discussion.

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I'm strongly of the view that right now is a kind of golden age for the Indian diaspora and also India. So if you look, say, at Florence during the Renaissance, or you look at Central Europe in the early decades of the 20th century, you see remarkable, truly remarkable levels of achievement that don't happen before, don't happen after. You know, it's not some kind of genetic thing, but somehow everything is coming together just right.

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Indian Americans are the highest earning ethnic group in the entire United States. More than 70% of all H-1B visas that are issued are given to Indian software engineers. In 2019, the average annual household income of Indian American families was $119, 000, almost double the national average.

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It should also be said that the Indian diaspora succeeds in thousands of ways that are invisible compared to the people who lead the world's biggest businesses. They toil in demanding jobs, work hard to integrate themselves in their new homes, and overcome significant challenges along the way. But everywhere you look, from the family running your local Indian restaurant, to the players succeeding on the pitch in the Indian Premier League, to the CEO of Microsoft. Indians are succeeding.

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And that helps the people back home. It's showing the world a new side of India, but it's also sending back billions in remittances to family that are still in the homeland. And there's reasons to hope that this success abroad will champion Indians transition to a more dynamic free market economy. There's reasons to believe that India's government and businesses are heeding the message.

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When Narendra Modi became Prime Minister in 2014, India was the world's 10th largest economy. Over the next 7 years, it grew by 40%. This growth

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has been led by modernizing the state, growing the middle class, harnessing India's strengths, and by an active industrial policy.

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India's leaders have pledged to achieve net 0 emissions by

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2070.

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In order to achieve that, they've committed to 2 highly ambitious targets. To cut their current emissions by more than a billion tons from its current trajectory and to more than triple the amount of power that it generates from non-fossil fuel sources. Renewables are growing fast in India.

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Helped by low costs and a

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sunny climate, solar generation capacity in India has increased 50-fold in the last decade. And the capacity of new solar, wind, and hydro plants constructed in the last year was nearly double that of new coal-fired plants. For India, reducing emissions is a strategic play.

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Prime Minister Modi realizes that cutting carbon emissions is the right thing to do, but he also knows that doing so will help improve India's international standing, grow the domestic manufacturing sector, and reduce energy costs. Meeting their 2030 targets will require adding the equivalent of a second national grid composed entirely of green energy in just 8 years.

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It's a difficult target, but the fact that Indian leaders are even considering something so bold tells you a lot about the national mindset. Infrastructure is also a key part of the Indian government's growth strategy. The national highway system is over 50% longer than in 2014.

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The number of domestic air passengers has doubled over the same time period. This has been enabled by rising incomes, which have enabled more Indians to buy cars and plane tickets. Today, 750 million Indians use the Internet, enabled by some of the cheapest broadband anywhere in the world. This rapid growth in internet users has inspired the Modi government to modernize the state in the form of the India Stack, a single

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national digital infrastructure. The India Stack includes Adhar, a biometric identity system for all Indians, and a national payment system known as the Unified Payments Interface,

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or UPI. The government has also replaced hundreds of local taxes

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with a single nationwide goods and services tax in order to encourage more trading between Indian states and to help modernize local businesses. Indian companies, new and established, are stepping up too. The city of Bangalore has established itself as a local magnet for the country's best engineering talent and a pipeline for thousands of new startups every year.

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Reliance Industries, 1 of India's biggest companies, is investing $80 billion into solar panels, batteries, and devices that use green hydrogen. Not to be outdone, India's richest man, Gautam Adani of the Adani Group,

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is planning a $70 billion investment in green technologies by 2030. The skills base and cultural foundations that helped India become 1 of the world's leaders in IT should also help it scale up its capacity in green energy. And the country's ambitions go well beyond becoming a green energy superpower.

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There's no better lens to view these ambitions than through the Tata Group, India's largest company. Across the next 5 years, the Tata Group

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is planning to spend $90 billion

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on a series of investments which are designed to onshore its operations. It'll invest close to $10 billion in renewables, $5 billion to build gigafactories in India and Europe, which will supply components for its own cars, weighing up a further $5 billion for a fully-fledged semiconductor fab. It's investing in a super app aimed at Indian consumers.

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And in what might be its highest profile play, it bought Air India, which it plans to turn from a

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perennial underperformer into a source of national pride. Together, these investments would push Tata's annual capital investment budget to $18 billion, making it the nation's largest investor. While just 1 company, the symbolism is unmistakable.

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The Tata Group is betting on India. It's betting on the Indian consumer. It's betting on successfully moving up the value chain.

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And it's betting on Indian dynamism.

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Thanks to these investments, India,

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just like its new generation of cricket players,

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is swinging for the fences and achieving impressive results.

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But it still possesses 1 more important structural advantage that we haven't yet directly discussed. Let's jump into it. India's fourth structural advantage can be summed up relatively easily.

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It's not China. What's more, it's China's adversary. This fact alone is contributing to greater influence on the world stage. Despite a long history of non-alignment and a reluctance to join into alliances, India is drawing closer to the United States and positioning itself as a valuable ally for other countries in the Indo-Pacific who want to reduce their dependence on China.

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The best example of India's newfound confidence and influence is a simple four-sided shape, the Quad. Originally established in 2007 and then revived in 2017, the Quad brings together the United States, Australia, Japan, and India

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to discuss a shared vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific region underpinned by a rules-based maritime order.

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The other 3 member nations are all prosperous countries accustomed to taking a leading role in the Indo-Pacific region. However, India has succeeded at subtly shaping the quad in accordance with its own preferences. The first obvious way is China.

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It's well known that China and India don't get along. This is partly due to competition between the world's 2 largest nations. It's partly due to a disputed Himalayan border. And it's partly due to India's irritation at China's closeness with Pakistan,

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India's other great rival. But as much as India may regard China with suspicion, its leaders understand that the risks of escalation are too great to contemplate. So India has always been very careful to not give China or other neutral countries in the region reasons to see the Quad as a threat to their own security.

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It doesn't talk about the Quad being a security alliance. Instead, it talks about the Quad as an open forum for countries to come together and discuss security beyond the bounds of hard military power. The second way in which India is shaping the Quad is when it comes to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. All other member states issued very strongly worded bilateral statements condemning the invasion.

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The Quad's joint statement was much more toned down, instead referring to the situation in Ukraine as a tragic humanitarian crisis. India's historic closeness with Russia dates back to the Cold War. But a statement such as this is also clearly a product of India's longstanding preference for multilateral institutions.

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The biggest and most influential multilateral institution of them all is the United Nations.

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Arguably the most important part of the UN is the Security Council.

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This body is responsible for all international peace and security matters, approving changes to the UN Charter, and admitting new members. The most notorious feature of the Security Council is the Permanent 5, a group of 5 permanent member states that can unilaterally veto a resolution. The Permanent 5 consists of the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China.

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There has been growing pressure for change in international organizations.

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There is a growing belief, especially among members of the developing world, that the permanent 5 no longer reflect the realities of the modern world. India agrees. Addressing the council in 2014, Narendra Modi said,

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We must reform the United Nations, including the Security Council, and make it more democratic and participative. Institutions that reflect the imperatives of the 20th century won't be effective in the Ikki Stone. It would face the risk of irrelevance and we will face the risk of continuing turbulence with no 1 capable of addressing it.

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India will soon be the world's most populous country. More than 100, 000 Indian troops have served UN missions over the last half century. India has more peacekeepers in the field right now than the permanent 5 members of the Security Council do combined.

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And it's a nuclear state. But it's not a permanent member of the Security Council

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yet. That needs addressing. Each member of the Permanent 5, except for China, supports India's candidacy.

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As recently as November, France, a long-time security partner, reiterated its desire for India to join the Permanent 5.

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When India finally does join, it won't simply be righting a wrong. It'll reflect India's growing stature in the international halls of power. That geopolitical stature, especially counter to China, will have economic implications.

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In a world that's growing increasingly skeptical of globalization, large economies like the United States are increasingly making decisions about global trade, not on the basis purely of dollars, but on the basis of national security. Being a big developing country, not to mention 1 with such expertise in science and technology that Isn't China is a strategic advantage for India. And it's 1 that will continue working to India's advantage economically. I've laid out

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the bull case for India, but what about the bear case? Well, India certainly has its challenges. I believe that there are 4 that loom largest.

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The first comes from Narendra Modi's attempts to remake India into a Hindu state. The second challenge lies in the formidable health and security challenges posed by climate change.

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The third is an education system which does not deliver enough outcomes for enough of its people. And finally, India must address its leakage of elite technical talent. The size of India's global impact in the 21st century will hinge on how successfully overcomes these challenges and harnesses its strengths.

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So many things excite me about India. It combines a population that will soon surpass even China with the demographic profile of a West African nation, along with the dynamism and love of technology of the United States and the democratic tradition of the United Kingdom. But when it really gets down to it, the thing that excites me most is that Despite the huge strides that this country has already taken, the incredible talent of its people, the demographic dividend that it's already enjoying, and its growing influence on the world stage, there is still so much potential yet to fulfill. It's impossible to predict the future, but I believe that India is laying the foundations for it to become a truly prosperous nation, and 1 that makes even more positive contributions to humanity.

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Like every other country, India faces its challenges. But its strengths make it uniquely well positioned to meet them. As the century unfolds, I fully expect India to emerge as 1 of its biggest winners. Minutes.

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You