Tarun

Cheap Chindian Cars and High Priced Oil Don't Mix

"@jduke
Doesn't matter if it's 2000 or 20000 miles no reasonable person can believe that fuel consumption will continue to rise in Chindia at over $4 a gallon when salaries are so low.
I visited Mumbai back when it was still Bombay."

The switch occured in 1995 (CIA Factbook, Wikipedia), before the major companies began offshoring (go look at ISP pervasiveness figures). I've gone to India once a year, every year in my life and like d_sat said, India's Middle Class (which is defined by various metrics depending on who you talk too) is very widespread. The Americanized view of the world believes that a middle class must exist under the exact same conditions that are found in America; however, in India, you can find an auto driver, a store clerk and a store owner who all will tell you they are in the middle class - yet the Auto Driver makes $2,000, the Clerk makes $10,000 and the Store Owner makes $50,000. The reason for this (I suspect) is the rather large aristocracy that India has; similar to Russia (and of late, China), India has an enormous amount of wealth poured into it's (relatively) large upper class...so much so that it severely (in an uneasily correlative way) skews any simple metrics on a continuous real probability space (i.e. the statistics you are using). You'd need some better weighted figures to account for this huge discrepancy; think of it as using modern American class standards on pre-WWI Europe...it just wouldn't work because of the cultural/class differences. Unlike America, where we have a rather uniform (and normal) distribution of income, India has a very uninterpretable income distribution due to society and cultural differences. Your analysis was a good try (I'm sure many other culturally-unaware people would easily agree with your analysis), but it disregards some of the cultural aspects of India that really make it a different economy than America.