A few years ago I heard this related idea.

If you have a rich American who already has a first world lifestyle, giving them a liter of gasoline barely moves the needle. Using their house, transportation choices, lifestyle, supply chains and so on the gasoline barely has any effect.

However, if you give a bicycle riding person in India a liter of gasoline, they can run a scooter to go 75 miles. This is a huge increase in their mobility and productivity.

Its like the diminishing returns are such that the rich western nations really cannot progress much using the resources compared to the gains in the developing world. Also, a small amount of resources is game changing in certain places.

What he saw is India mad maxing its way through hard times, characterized by manual labor and muscle power rather than energy-intensive machinery.

But hasn’t this always been India? I remember reading about an Indian salvage yard cutting up a huge ship with manual labor 30 years ago. People were plentiful and fuel was scarce. So they used the cheap impoverished labor.

The west doesn’t have India’s billions of poor willing to do dangerous work by hand for starvation wages.

After reading the article, all I really have is a low opinion of his writing skills. He rambles on forever and says little of value. He really needs to learn to get to the point. It reads like one of those recipe pages that won’t tell you the recipe until you read their life story.

This is indeed an intertextual relationship. Just think: without the West colonization of India, Western colonialism could not have functioned at all. None of the industrial advantages the West enjoys today would be able to function in history.