Explaining Why India Looks Poor

Well, of course, by our standards, India actually is poor. But Jeff Randall looks at it and sees something much poorer than the economic statistics would have us believe:

I could not have been more wrong. The most astonishing thing about Delhi is just how little it has changed. Yes, there are a few more five-star hotels, some glitzy shopping malls and a greater number of foreign limousines, but the overwhelming impression is of a city that continues to choke on squalor. Rubbish is everywhere and rabies is endemic. Children as young as six or seven "panhandle" on street corners, while carrying tiny babies. Millions live close to the gutter. If this is boomtown, then these wretched people are the Boomtown Rats.

True, and yet there is an explanation for why it looks the way it does. Felix Salmon:

Why would people think that Cuba is doing better than northern Mexico, when the opposite is true? And more broadly, why do rich countries like Iceland and Korea feel much poorer than they are, while the opposite is true in countries like the Czech Republic?
...
In other words, becaues Argentina used to be incredibly wealthy, back at the turn of the century, it still felt wealthy at the end of the century. Which sowed the seeds of the disastrous crash of 2001-2.

Another way of putting this is that there's a diference between income and wealth. One is a flow, the other is a stock. India's income is increasing, yes, and that's all to the good. But it doesn't have (unlike some other places at similar levels of GDP per capita) the inherited stock of wealth. So it looks a lot poorer than it is.