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#citizens — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #citizens, aggregated by home.social.

  1. Why India Will Not Overtake China

    There is a thought I have been sitting with for a while, and I want to put it out without dressing it up.

    India is not going to overtake China. People hate hearing this. They will quote our GDP growth, our young population, our rising number of unicorns, the size of our talent pool. None of that is the real story. The real story is harder to fix because it does not sit inside policy or money. It sits inside the way Indians treat each other.

    India is a low trust society trying to behave like a high trust one. Until that gap closes, real scale will keep slipping out of our hands.

    I know this sounds like opinion, so let me show you the research, because the work on this question is actually quite settled.

    In 1997, two economists named Stephen Knack and Philip Keefer published a paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. They studied 29 countries and found a clear link between how much people in a country trust strangers and how well that country performs economically. More trust meant stronger growth, better institutions and lower corruption. They never claimed trust was the only thing that mattered. But they showed it mattered a lot. That paper is now one of the most cited works in development economics.

    Around the same time, the political thinker Francis Fukuyama wrote a full book called Trust. His argument was simple. Countries that build large, well run institutions almost always sit on top of high social trust. When trust is missing, what you usually see is small family run businesses that struggle to grow past one or two generations.

    When you actually look at the numbers, the gap between countries is huge. The Integrated Values Surveys, which collect this data through 2022, show that around seventy four percent of people in Denmark say most people can be trusted. Norway is at about seventy two. Finland at sixty eight. China comes in fourth in the world at around sixty three percent. It is the only country outside the West in the top group. India does not appear anywhere near these numbers. Researchers from IZA and other peer reviewed journals openly call India a low trust country, often using exactly that phrase in the very first line of their paper.

    Corruption follows the same pattern, because trust and corruption are basically two sides of the same coin. In Transparency International’s 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index, India is ranked 96 out of 180 countries, with a score of 38 out of 100. China sits at 76. Denmark, Finland and Singapore are at the very top. These rankings are not random. The same countries that score high on trust also score low on corruption. Both numbers come from the same habit, the habit of strangers behaving honestly even when no one is watching them.

    The Indian version of this problem actually has a name in academic literature. We have just not started using it.

    In 1958, an American political scientist called Edward Banfield went to live for nine months in a poor village in southern Italy called Chiaromonte. He was trying to understand why the village stayed poor for generations even though the people there were perfectly capable. The book he wrote afterwards, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, gave us a concept called amoral familism. Banfield described it as a community where everyone tries to maximize benefits for their own immediate family, and assumes everyone else is doing the same. The result was a village that could not act together for any common goal. Nobody trusted their neighbours or the institutions around them. Anything outside the household was treated as either a threat or something to quietly take from. Years later, the political scientist Robert Putnam expanded this work across all of Italy and showed that the more trusting north of Italy consistently performed better than the south on almost every measure of governance and prosperity.

    Read Banfield’s description today, replace the word village with India, and the fit is uncomfortably close.

    We trust our family fully. We trust our caste, region and community a little. Beyond that small circle, we are always on guard. We feel that someone is trying to use us, replace us, take credit for our work, or take our seat the moment we stand up. And the painful part is that this fear is not really paranoia. It is mostly an honest reading of how things work around us. So people protect themselves first, and stop sharing what they know. When a billion people behave this way every day, the loss to the country is huge, even if no one can see it directly.

    You can feel this in daily Indian life. The senior who refuses to truly invest in juniors, because a junior who grows is a junior who might one day take their place. The manager who hides information from the team, because letting them learn feels like a personal risk. The bureaucrat who refuses to move a file unless something is in it for him. The politician who treats public money like personal property. The friend quietly happy when you slow down, because your stagnation makes their position look stronger. The cousin who quietly damages the family business from inside, because grabbing a small piece feels safer than working together to grow the whole.

    This is what failure to coordinate looks like at the level of a country.

    China is not a clean society. Anyone who follows even basic Chinese politics knows the place has heavy corruption. The Xi government has been running an anti corruption campaign for over ten years and has prosecuted more than a million officials. The political system itself is closed, full of internal rivalry and favouritism. Yet despite all of that, China still manages to execute at a scale we cannot match. They built one of the largest fast rail networks in the world in around two decades. They built industries that made them the world leader in solar panels, electric vehicles, lithium batteries and now AI hardware. Their Belt and Road projects now reach more than a hundred countries. You can disagree with their political system, but the execution is real and visible.

    India has stronger democratic freedoms and arguably better human capital. Yet we keep failing to turn these advantages into coordinated national outcomes. The bottleneck is not intelligence. It is the ability to coordinate. And the ability to coordinate, when you really break it down, is just trust wearing institutional clothes.

    The Nordic countries make this point even more clearly.

    Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland together have a population smaller than greater Mumbai. Apart from Norway’s oil, they have almost no natural resources. They are cold, sparsely populated and were historically poor. And yet today they sit at the top of almost every global ranking that matters in the modern world. Innovation. Healthcare. Governance. Ease of doing business. Life expectancy. Happiness.

    The OECD and the World Happiness Report keep pointing to one main reason. Their generalized trust is extremely high. Citizens trust each other and trust their institutions. So contracts work. Taxes actually reach the people they were meant for. Rules get followed even without surveillance. Society does not get jammed by its own friction. Their citizens are not smarter than ours. Their cooperation between strangers is just much denser.

    Researchers describe two kinds of trust. Particularized trust is what you give to people you already know. Generalized trust is what you extend to strangers. India is rich in the first and very poor in the second. This one gap explains the strange paradox we live in every day. We send world class individuals to top companies and boardrooms abroad, while our own institutions back home keep struggling. The individual rises because the family invested in that one person. The system stays broken because almost nobody truly invests in the system.

    I want to be careful here, because this argument is easy to misread.

    I am not saying Indians are bad people. That framing is lazy and wrong. The argument is about the cultural operating system we have inherited. That operating system was shaped over centuries of foreign rule, scarcity and a long history where trusting outsiders often ended badly for the trusting side. Once upon a time, this software helped us survive. The price we pay for it today is that we cannot bring our brilliance together the way countries with stronger social capital can. A billion careful, guarded individuals do not add up to a coordinated nation. They cancel each other out at the edges, and the noise becomes louder than the progress.

    If India ever truly wants to challenge China, the real work has to go much deeper than infrastructure spending or new policies. The real work is internal. It is about widening the trust circle outward from family to strangers. It is about senior people mentoring others without fearing being overtaken. It is about backing talent that does not share our caste, our region or our background. It is about believing that the collective will eventually protect us, and then actually showing up for someone else when their moment comes.

    Until that quiet inner shift happens, India will keep producing brilliant individuals who win alone, while the operating system underneath us keeps failing as a whole. And that, more than any economic chart anyone can show me, is the real reason the China gap is going to stay wider than we are willing to admit.

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    #Citizens #Colonialism #Corruption #Economy #Fear #Freedom #Government #India #Policy #Politics #Society #Trust
  2. I want to live in a progressive #IndependentScotland...

    With no #foodbanks...

    With no #homelessness...

    With no #childpoverty...

    With no #trident...

    With no #westminster policies...

    With free #healthcare for all...

    With a respect for #all our peoples ...

    As a #member of the families of the EU...🇪🇺

    Where people are #citizens not #subjects ...

    As a country that #protects and #supports the most #vulnerable

    All the above and more is possible...

    A #ScottishRepublic... #YouYesYet...🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

  3. CW: IndoPol

    The unbearable price hike of #LPG and the impending price hike of auto #fuels are Govt of #India's wanton displays of unbridled #insensitivity, #cruelty, #greed and #deceit against #citizens and #MSME. These #robbers grab the benefits of #CrudeOil price drops for themselves and transfer the burden of the rises to us. These #crooks also waited for this round of #elections to be over to deliver us this blow!

    What good is a #government that rules all for itself? #GoI #misanthropes

  4. CW: IndoPol

    The unbearable price hike of and the impending price hike of auto are Govt of 's wanton displays of unbridled , , and against and . These grab the benefits of price drops for themselves and transfer the burden of the rises to us. These also waited for this round of to be over to deliver us this blow!

    What good is a that rules all for itself?

  5. CW: IndoPol

    The unbearable price hike of #LPG and the impending price hike of auto #fuels are Govt of #India's wanton displays of unbridled #insensitivity, #cruelty, #greed and #deceit against #citizens and #MSME. These #robbers grab the benefits of #CrudeOil price drops for themselves and transfer the burden of the rises to us. These #crooks also waited for this round of #elections to be over to deliver us this blow!

    What good is a #government that rules all for itself? #GoI #misanthropes

  6. CW: IndoPol

    The unbearable price hike of #LPG and the impending price hike of auto #fuels are Govt of #India's wanton displays of unbridled #insensitivity, #cruelty, #greed and #deceit against #citizens and #MSME. These #robbers grab the benefits of #CrudeOil price drops for themselves and transfer the burden of the rises to us. These #crooks also waited for this round of #elections to be over to deliver us this blow!

    What good is a #government that rules all for itself? #GoI #misanthropes

  7. CW: IndoPol

    The unbearable price hike of #LPG and the impending price hike of auto #fuels are Govt of #India's wanton displays of unbridled #insensitivity, #cruelty, #greed and #deceit against #citizens and #MSME. These #robbers grab the benefits of #CrudeOil price drops for themselves and transfer the burden of the rises to us. These #crooks also waited for this round of #elections to be over to deliver us this blow!

    What good is a #government that rules all for itself? #GoI #misanthropes

  8. @sister_ratched
    Totally agree. #AlboPM ‘s reticence is political. I also agree that where these so-called #ISISBrides are #Australian #Citizens they should be repatriated and face the #justice system if indictable in accordance with Australian #Law. End of story.

    This miserable saga ought to weight heavily on every citizen and their constitutional rights.

  9. @sister_ratched
    Totally agree. #AlboPM ‘s reticence is political. I also agree that where these so-called #ISISBrides are #Australian #Citizens they should be repatriated and face the #justice system if indictable in accordance with Australian #Law. End of story.

    This miserable saga ought to weight heavily on every citizen and their constitutional rights.

  10. @sister_ratched
    Totally agree. #AlboPM ‘s reticence is political. I also agree that where these so-called #ISISBrides are #Australian #Citizens they should be repatriated and face the #justice system if indictable in accordance with Australian #Law. End of story.

    This miserable saga ought to weight heavily on every citizen and their constitutional rights.

  11. @sister_ratched
    Totally agree. #AlboPM ‘s reticence is political. I also agree that where these so-called #ISISBrides are #Australian #Citizens they should be repatriated and face the #justice system if indictable in accordance with Australian #Law. End of story.

    This miserable saga ought to weight heavily on every citizen and their constitutional rights.

  12. @sister_ratched
    Totally agree. #AlboPM ‘s reticence is political. I also agree that where these so-called #ISISBrides are #Australian #Citizens they should be repatriated and face the #justice system if indictable in accordance with Australian #Law. End of story.

    This miserable saga ought to weight heavily on every citizen and their constitutional rights.

  13. @DjityDjity [2/?]
    I think #Truth from those who #heckle are because of there main things (not necessarily all):

    ⏺️ People have nowhere to# talk or #express themselves properly.

    ⏺️ Nothing we do has much effect / it feels like it doesn't ANY effect.
    (#powerless]

    ⏺️ Nobody #cares what we think / it's totally not built into #systems.

    ⏺️ #Citizens are totally unorgranised even if we don't expect any #system to #care or love them (!) not #hate them / economically #war / control them for $🇦🇺 💰 etc.

  14. #DOJ Targets Hundreds of #Citizens in New Push for #Denaturalization

    The #Trump admin is assigning denaturalization cases to regular prosecutors, which could lead to a surge of people stripped of US citizenship.

    The DOJ has identified 384 foreign-born Americans whose #citizenship it wants to revoke, part of a push to increase the pace of denaturalizations by assigning the cases to prosecutors in dozens of #USattorney’s offices across the country.

    #law #immigration
    nytimes.com/2026/04/23/us/poli

  15. #DigitalInfrastructure 🏗️ Comprehensive, fast #Internet and a stable #cloud infrastructure remain fundamental prerequisites for #competitiveness.

    #DataProtection 🔒 #DigitalPolitics must simultaneously enable #innovation without neglecting the protection of #personaldata.

    #Education and #Skills 🧑‍🏫 #Digitaleducation is key to enabling #citizens to confidently use #newtechnologies and continuously grow in terms of these #technologies.

    👉 DigitalPolitics.EU
    👉 @gerrit #eicker

  16. #Trump signs #ExecutiveOrder on #mail #ballots, escalating #election overhaul push

    Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday aimed at tightening mail-in voting rules nationwide, including by ​directing his admin to create a list of confirmed #US #citizens eligible to #vote in each state, & said he did not see how the measure could be challenged.

    #law #ElectionLaw #ElectionInterference #Constitution #states #federalism #WhiteSupremacy #WhiteChristianNationalism #privacy
    reuters.com/world/us/trump-sig

  17. #WhiteHouse announces #ExecutiveOdor creator #Drumpf to sign sweeping #ExecutiveOrder to bar and complicate mail-in #voting. Despite using mail in voting himself, #DJT joined #RWNJ efforts to restrict #votingaccess and hopes to affect likely dire #GOP results expected in 2026 midterms.

    New executive order will create an #ExecBranch controlled list of confirmed #citizens who are eligible and #mandates that any #absentee #ballots only be sent to those on #DrumpfAdmin approved list.

    newsnationnow.com/us-news/ltru

  18. #WhiteHouse announces #ExecutiveOdor creator #Drumpf to sign sweeping #ExecutiveOrder to bar and complicate mail-in #voting. Despite using mail in voting himself, #DJT joined #RWNJ efforts to restrict #votingaccess and hopes to affect likely dire #GOP results expected in 2026 midterms.

    New executive order will create an #ExecBranch controlled list of confirmed #citizens who are eligible and #mandates that any #absentee #ballots only be sent to those on #DrumpfAdmin approved list.

    newsnationnow.com/us-news/ltru

  19. #WhiteHouse announces #ExecutiveOdor creator #Drumpf to sign sweeping #ExecutiveOrder to bar and complicate mail-in #voting. Despite using mail in voting himself, #DJT joined #RWNJ efforts to restrict #votingaccess and hopes to affect likely dire #GOP results expected in 2026 midterms.

    New executive order will create an #ExecBranch controlled list of confirmed #citizens who are eligible and #mandates that any #absentee #ballots only be sent to those on #DrumpfAdmin approved list.

    newsnationnow.com/us-news/ltru

  20. #WhiteHouse announces #ExecutiveOdor creator #Drumpf to sign sweeping #ExecutiveOrder to bar and complicate mail-in #voting. Despite using mail in voting himself, #DJT joined #RWNJ efforts to restrict #votingaccess and hopes to affect likely dire #GOP results expected in 2026 midterms.

    New executive order will create an #ExecBranch controlled list of confirmed #citizens who are eligible and #mandates that any #absentee #ballots only be sent to those on #DrumpfAdmin approved list.

    newsnationnow.com/us-news/ltru

  21. #WhiteHouse announces #ExecutiveOdor creator #Drumpf to sign sweeping #ExecutiveOrder to bar and complicate mail-in #voting. Despite using mail in voting himself, #DJT joined #RWNJ efforts to restrict #votingaccess and hopes to affect likely dire #GOP results expected in 2026 midterms.

    New executive order will create an #ExecBranch controlled list of confirmed #citizens who are eligible and #mandates that any #absentee #ballots only be sent to those on #DrumpfAdmin approved list.

    newsnationnow.com/us-news/ltru

  22. The lawsuit said the #federal government is not permitted to “withhold investigative evidence for the purpose of shielding law enforcement officers from scrutiny where a #State is investigating serious potential violations of its #criminal laws, targeting its #citizens, within its borders.”

    #Trump #StateSponsoredTerrorism #law #immigration #murder #ExtraJudicialKillings #Constitution #CivilRights #RightToProtest #UseOfForce #ExcessiveForce #AbuseOfPower #ICE #CBP #Sturmabteilung

  23. Sunday, March 15, 2026

    Ukraine successful strike on 2 Russian ships ferrying weapons, equipment through Kerch Strait -- Trump's latest move hands Putin 'jackpot' as US eases Russian oil sanctions -- Absurd: Kyiv responds to Iranian politician who called Ukraine legitimate target -- Russia confiscating homes in Mariupol, continuing forced passportization, restriction of reproductive rights ... and more

    activitypub.writeworks.uk/2026

  24. #ICE is keeping tabs on American #citizens
    The NPR Politics #Podcast

    #Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been using a variety of tools to keep tabs on not just #immigrants the agency intends to #deport but also U.S. citizens who publicly oppose the agency’s tactics. We discuss what that #surveillance looks like and what the impact is for people whose activity the agency has tracked.
    #privacy #security

    Listen on Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/

  25. Tankers Vacate Al Udeid Air Base As U.S. Citizens Are Urged To Leave Israel Immediately (Updated)

    misryoum.com/us/trending/tanke

    The TWZ Newsletter Weekly insights and analysis on the latest developments in military technology, strategy, and foreign policy. Amid the apparent movement of U.S. Air Force refueling aircraft from an airbase in Qatar, the United States has urged its...

    #Tankers #Vacate #Udeid #Air #Base #Citizens #Are #Urged #Leave #Israel #Immediately #Updated #US_News_Hub #misryoum_com

  26. I've hinted at this (below) before, as we've watched the #USA slide into #fascism. But with #ICE and the #DoJ now routinely ignoring court orders, or engaging in malicious compliance, and offering obviously bad-faith arguments about how their actions didn't actually violate court orders, it's become pretty apparent that the #immigration issue is the one driving this #lawless #government.

    Did I say immigration? Sorry, I meant the #racist issue. The administration has been very clear and very explicit about their actual goals - bragging about how they're going to "restore" #America with 100,000,000 #deportations. That's basically the number of non-white people in the #country, most of whom were born in the USA and are lawful, #inalienable #citizens. Then there are the slogans and mottos stolen directly from the #Nazis, talking about #purifying Germany and all the rest. They are not being subtle about this.

    Building #concentration camps is a pretty solid clue, too. The death #camps in #WWII started out like this, trying to #deport people. But when you can't move fast enough, well, you gotta do something, right? So #gas chambers and #crematoriums... ICE isn't meeting its #deportation quotas, so they're letting people die of neglect and abuse. It'll get there.

    So, the point: if (big IF) #USAnians can recover their #country, it won't really be over until #Stephen #Miller meets his end after a short #drop and sudden stop at the #Hague.

    #USPol #AmeriKKKa #StephenMiller

  27. theguardian.com/politics/2026/. This is absolutely appalling. The fact that these #dual #nationality #rules have been introduced by a #Labour #Government seeking to pander to the #xenophobia of the #ReformUK vote is utterly DISGUSTING - & it will do them no good at all! The good #citizens of the Gorton & Denton constituency should show what THEY think, & vote for #HannahSpencer of @thegreenparty.

  28. #ICE and CBP’s #FaceRecognition App Can’t Actually Verify Who People Are

    ICE has used #MobileFortify to identify #immigrants and #citizens alike over 100,000 times, by one estimate. It wasn't built to work like that—and only got approved after #DHS abandoned its own #privacy rules.
    #cbp #biometrics

    wired.com/story/cbp-ice-dhs-mo