RBI Overheating India’s Economy: On Materialist Greed Fueling Ceaseless Consumerism

A phenomenon as massive as the global coronavirus pandemic, which ran from 2020 to 2022, is bound to have major economic ripple, or wave, effects in its wake. India’s record high 9.2% growth of GNP in the 2023-2024 fiscal year illustrates the robust thrust of pent-up demand met with increased supply. To the extent that consumption over savings is the norm in any economy, a couple years off can subtly recalibrate economic mentalities to a more prudent economic mindset wherein saving money is not so dwarfed by spending it. Moreover, putting the brakes on a consumerist routine and societal norm can theoretically lead to putting the underlying materialism in a relative rather than an absolute position and thus in perspective. Yet such a “resetting” must overcome the knee-jerk instinct of any habit to restart as if there had been no change. Coming back to college, for example, after a summer away, students tend to pick up their respective routines right away as if the recent summer were a distant memory. India’s astonishing rate of economic growth just after the pandemic demonstrates that the penchant for consumerism and economic growth as a maximizing rather than satisficing variable returned as if the steeds in Socrates’ Symposium—only those horses represent garden-variety eros sublimated to love of eternal moral verities, to which Augustine substituted “God.”

India’s central bank sought to spur economic growth in early June, 2025, by again lowering interest rates so as to increase the supply of money in the economy amid lower economic growth and inflation than anticipated. “The repo rate—the level at which the central bank lends money to commercial banks, influencing borrowing costs for home and car loans—[stood] at 5.5%, the lowest in three years.”[1] Even though India’s economy had grown by only 6.5% in the fiscal year ending in March—enough for India to still have “the world’s fastest expanding major economy”—RBI governor Sanjay Malhotra said the central bankers believes it was “imperative to stimulate domestic consumption and investment.”[2] Imperative? Such urgency and intensity point to a consumption-led approach to economics on steroids.

Although 6.5% is less than 9.2%, the economy was obviously larger in 2025 than it had been in 2022 and 2023 so the comparison is misleading in regard whether the incremental amount of GNP is sufficient cause for worry and a legitimate reason to stimulate the economy by lowering interest rates yet again. I submit that both 9.2% and 6.5% are artificially high as economic growth figures in that both occurred in reaction to the slowdown of the economy during the pandemic. It was unrealistic in 2025 to expect such growth rates to continue through the remainder of the 2020s. Furthermore, stimulating from the 6.5% growth-rate risked overheating the economy, which could easily spark inflation above the central bank’s threshold, especially as inflation was so close to RBI’s 4% target—retail inflation having been 3.16% in April, 2025. The prudence of Titanic’s captain in resisting pressure from the White Star company to light the fourth boiler in order to speed up even at night with iceberg warnings having already been received seems to have eluded the bankers in India in 2025, more than a century after the floundering of the ship that could not sink.

The lack of prudence stemmed in part from a maximizing rather than a homeostatic paradigm regarding an economy. Maximizing consumption rather than holding it steady, such that surplus earnings could go into savings for a rainy day, is bound to run out of steam at some point. Lighting the fourth boiler because economic growth has dropped to a mere 6.5% is ultimately fueled by greed, which, as the desire for more, is inherently maximizing. Government in general, and a central bank in particular, functions in the public interest by channeling or resisting the excesses of greed, rather than by incessantly facilitating it. Managing a soft landing from the effects of pent-up demand from a global pandemic rather than pretending that annual growth rates of 9% are and should be sustainable reveals the great difference that exists between maturity and being oriented to instant gratification. The latter, after all, is responsible for climate change in the age of Man, and overheating an already-growing economy adds appreciably to pollution.

In short, the habit of maximizing consumption established even as a paradigm is in need of transparency and modification, lest our species go extinct from its own socio-economic mentality. Economizing need not pierce the semi-permeable, over-arching net of ecologizing forces that can protect us from ourselves if we will to exercise control over our economizing instinct. Besides doing so ourselves, governmental institutions can do so if they are not populated by the hyperextended mentality that treats increasing consumption as a perpetual end in itself.

---

1, Nikhil Inamdar, “India Central Bank Delivers Sharp Rate Cut as Growth and Inflation Fall,” BBC.com, June 6, 2025.
2. Ibid.

Time Magazine’s Person of the Year: Taylor Swift

Time magazine named the singer Taylor Swift as its person of the year for 2023. Such a force of nature were her stadium-filled concerts during that summer that they triggered economic booms in the respective host cities. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for example, hotel rooms went for as much as $2,500 downtown on the night of the concert. In terms of American culture, the analogy of gravity waves may fit. During an interview for television at her home (or one of her homes), Swift’s savvy business acumen was very evident; her marketing prowess was extraordinary. She even re-released her own songs, resulting in a huge financial windfall for what are really the same songs merely re-sung. It is not as if she had grown a new voice. Swift personifies American culture, whose “movers and shakers” seem “happy go lucky” on stage yet, behind the scenes, they tend to be lazar-focused on the business end. In short, considerable distance may exist between the societal image and the private business practitioner, and the ethical element can get lost in the shuffle and excitement.

To be sure, economics was evident in the “Swiftie” phenomenon during the summer of 2023. According to Time, Swift “achieved a kind of nuclear fusion: shooting art and commerce together to release an energy of historic force.”[1] Her Eras concert tour "brought in a whopping $1.04 billion with 4.35 million tickets sold across 60 tour dates."[2] Not just any singer can make such a haul and even trigger municipal economic booms and saturate the media’s attention worldwide simply by going on tour. Also, the magazine is clear that such a gargantuan amount of money brought in is not “something we often chalk up to the alignments of planets and fates,” for “giving too much credit to the stars ignores [Swift’s] skill and her power.”[3] In particular, her intense and sustained focus on every conceivable way, such as by re-recording existing songs and bundling them (admittedly with some songs from her vault) into albums in their own right, attending to merchandise and actively using the media for free publicity, to increase revenue leveraged, or made use of, her tremendous market power that was unrivaled; she dominated the airwaves during the summer of 2023. The “Taylor’s Version” albums provide us with an interesting case study wherein hype, money, and ethics are all in the mix.

According to Time, “Swift began releasing re-recordings of her back catalog in 2021 in an effort to reclaim her original music, after her initial label Big Machine Records sold her masters to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings in 2019. ‘Now Scooter has stripped me of my life’s work, that I wasn’t given an opportunity to buy,’ Swift wrote. . . . ‘Essentially, my musical legacy is about to lie in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it.’”[4] I don’t doubt the authenticity of her emotive motivation here. In the vernacular, she was pissed.  Even so, if she had signed a contract with Big Machine Records giving it the unilateral right to sell the masters of her songs, and the purchaser has the legal right of use, then she had no legal or ethical claim to preempt the sale or be sold the masters outright. Of course, if labels write heavily unfair contracts essentially reflecting the commercial interests of the labels, taking advantage of the lack of bargaining power of new signers, ethical critique is fair game.

By its very nature, a contract is a coming together of (at least) two interests, with consideration (money) given by one party to the other. A residential lease, for instance, should reflect both interests. It should not restrict use of premises to be narrowed down to reflect only how the property owner would use the space or would like the space to be used. A property owner might prefer a “no guest” policy, but such as “policy”—the very word being presumptuous—violates reasonable use of premises. Furthermore, the property owner’s personal religious or moral lifestyle, for instance, should not bind the counterparty as long as the property itself is not damaged. “I don’t believe in eating meat, so you are not allowed to use the kitchen of your apartment to cook meat,” for instance, is presumptuous and dogmatic. More to the point, such a clause would violate or nullify the fact that in receiving rent, the property owner is selling the use of the space (as long as the property is not damaged). The mantra, “It’s my house,” taken as an absolute, is circumscribed when use is being sold for consideration (i.e., rent). Having it both ways is selfish and childish.

Whether or not Taylor Swift originally signed a one-sided contract is beyond my ability to investigate, given the information that I have. Her fans did not know either, and so, because of her emotional claim and her “star power,” her ethical cause resonated. Even so, it can be asked whether it is ethical to have hyped “Taylor’s Version” albums to the extent that buyers were willing to pay the full price of an album even if they had most of the songs already. To be sure, the “Taylor’s Versions” included “vault tracks”—songs not on the original albums. She also updated some lyrics. Even so, it can be asked whether the additional work justifies a full price of a new album. It can also be asked whether customers having receipts for the original albums, such as Fearless, should have been able to buy Taylor’s version at a discount. I submit that such a discount would be reasonable, given both the amount of additional work on Taylor’s part and the substance of the product (i.e., the extent to which it differs from the originals). A few songs from the vault and some new lyrics do not render the albums commensurate with albums filled with previously unreleased songs.

If Swift’s motivation was indeed to gain control of her songs, she should have agreed to a discount. Fearless (Taylor’s Version) had the biggest debut for any album in 2021, with 722.7 million on-demand streams in the U.S. that year.[5] Surely at least some of those customers already possessed the original album. Of course, the irrational exuberance that would cause such a customer to buy the same songs again can also be criticized, but many of her customers were teenagers and thus easily taken in even by orchestrated hype of good feeling seemingly aloft from the earthly taint of business strategizing. My point is that it is no accident that Taylor Swift made a lot of money essentially recycling songs ready for re-singing. She was not merely trying to regain control over her work. I submit that she was acting as a business woman, and a darn good one at that.  Her true identity—her driving financial ambition—was practically hidden under the blinding glitter of the “nuclear fusion” that Time magazine describes. My point is that the resulting sonic boom was orchestrated to coordinate and max out both the hype and the revenue. Behind the moral cause, behind the curtains, Swift’s financial acumen could be said to be a subterranean force of nature.

Such a force tends to be obscured, obfuscated, or, more often, intentionally hidden in the American entertainment industry. Similarly, elected representatives in Congress or the White House keep both their fowl tongues and their raw desire for power far away from the reach of microphones and cameras. In short, the sheer difference between private personas, including agendas, motivations, and even personalities, and the public images on the societal stage is astounding. Especially in politics in a representative democracy, this differential is a real problem that goes beyond the financial harm to young “Swifties” who have been subtly manipulated into buying (mostly recycled) songs at full price.

---

1. Jordan Valinsky, “Taylor Swift Named Time’s ‘Person of the Year,” CNN.com, December 6, 2023.
2. Maria Sherman, "Taylor Swift's Eras Tour Is the First Tour to Gross Over $1 Billion, Pollster Says," APNews.com, December 8, 2023.

3. Valinsky, “Taylor Swift Named Time’s ‘Person of the Year.”
4. Mariah Espada, “Taylor Swift Is Halfway Through Her Rerecording Project. It’s Paid Off Big Time,” Time, July 6, 2023.
5. Ibid.

Google’s Philanthropy: $1 Billion to Tech-Train America’s Unemployed

In October 2017, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, announced that the company would give $1 billion over the next five years to nonprofit organizations that help people “adjust to the changing nature of work.”[1] The digital skills philanthropic venture would essentially help otherwise unemployed Americans get jobs that require high-tech skills. This would also enable more people to use the internet, and thus the company’s products. So a reporter at USA Today can be said to gild the lily a bit in claiming that the initiative “is a tacit acknowledgement from one of the world’s most valuable companies that it bears some responsibility for rapid advances in technology that are radically reshaping industries and eliminating jobs in the U.S. and around the world.”[2] I submit that it is highly unlikely that such an acknowledgement ever took place at Google, given the more likely scenario wherein the company’s management saw an opportunity to enlarge (and hopefully enrich) its labor pool and customer base.

In making the announcement from Pittsburgh, Pichai observed, “One-third of jobs in 2020 will require skills that aren’t common [in 2017]. It’s a big problem.”[3] Indeed. He may in fact have been understating it. Giving $10 million to Goodwill’s Digital Career Accelerator so it could “provide 1 million people with access to digital skills and career opportunities” does not necessarily mean that 1 million people would become proficient at such skills, which after all are not easy to master. There is also the matter of attitude, which can function as a wedge between digital skills and realized and sustained career opportunities. Chronic unemployment itself can test and even twist a person’s attitude, which can also be a factor in a person’s unemployment in the first place.

Generally speaking, funneling a society’s extant labor force and the unemployed through a skills-filter, in this case, digital skills, ignores the innate diversity that exists within any societal labor pool (and society itself). The heterogeneous nature of people vocationally is happily in line with the fact that a diversified economy is more stable than one that privileges a certain sector or even its skill-set.

---

[1] Jessica Lynn, “Google to Give $1 Billion to Nonprofits and Help Americans Get Jobs in the New Economy,” The New York Times, October 12, 2017.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

Efficiency, Corporate Social Responsibility and Full Employment: Squaring a Circle

The New York Times reported that President Obama urged American businesses on February 7, 2011 to “'get in the game' by letting loose trillions of dollars being held in reserves, saying that they can help create a 'virtuous cycle' of more sales, higher demand and greater profits that will put people back to work and turn around the sluggish economy.” Obama continued, “If there is a reason you don’t believe that this is the time to get off the sidelines — to hire and invest — I want to know about it. I want to fix it.” In the speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Mr. Obama said that companies have a responsibility to help the economy recover. The trouble is that responsibility is a rather vague term that can be variously applied. This is one reason why the corporate social responsibility concept could mean providing society with the products and services that are sought via the marketplace (e.g. Milton Friedman of the Chicago school) while meaning for others increasing corporate philanthropy to alleviate a society problem such as poverty. In other words, responsibility can be made concrete in various ways that can accommodate and indeed reflect the ideologies of those applying the term.

It could be predicted, therefore, that the President's application of responsibility might have differed from some of the business managers in the audience. Indeed, Obama’s suggestion that businesses could help the economy recover by spending their reserves was met, according to The New York Times, “with skepticism by some in the audience.” For example, Harold Jackson, a executive at Buffalo Supply Incorporated (a medical supply company), called the President's suggestion naive. “Any business person has to look at the demand to their company for their product and services, and make hiring decisions,” Jackson said. “I think it’s a little outside the bounds to suggest that if we hire people we don’t need, there will be more demand.” In effect, Jackson was defending Friedman's application of corporate social responsibility from that of the President's.

To President Obama's assumption that American businesses were still sitting on the sidelines, it can be asked, in what sense? The President was pointing to what he viewed as excessive retained earnings. Yet John Schoen of MSNBC reported the same day that the American manufacturing sector was “roaring back” after the recession. Schoen reports a sustained rise in factory orders in five of the last six months, which prompted manufacturers to boost hiring. The Commerce Department had reported a few days before Schoen's report on February 7, 2011 that the manufacturing sector had added 49,000 new jobs in January. Yet this is hardly a roaring comeback in terms of new jobs. Schoen reports that businesses have figured out how to make more widgets with the same number of workers, resulting in higher productivity and profits. Investing reserves in automation, for example, raises productivity by making products faster and better. According to Schoen, “Productivity is a pretty simple concept: It’s a measure of how much stuff a worker makes in a given number of hours. . . . Productivity has also risen as American manufacturers have moved to specialize in more valuable products, sending manufacturing of cheaper goods overseas where wages are lower. As the value of American-made products has risen, so too has the average level of output per worker when measured in dollar terms.” Schoen reports that according to the U.S. Labor Department, the level of output per hour worked rose by 2.6 percent in the last three months of 2010. Even if it is not in the interest of labor, such improvement is in line with the logic of business, given how business is designed and how a competitive marketplace works. Spending retained earnings beyond that which can be expected to raise productivity simply does not make sense to a business practitioner.

In general terms, the (nearly) “jobless recovery” can be seen as pointing to a major difference between the interests of business and society—the latter being represented by the President at the Chamber of Commerce. Given the nature of business enterprise in a competitive market, it is only natural for managers (and boards) to work toward (and reward) greater efficiency (i.e. productivity). Business managers thus understand or apply responsibility in this way. As per Harold Jackson's point, to hire labor beyond the optimal efficiency point in order to solve the wider societal problem of unemployment would run against a firm's telos, or goal. Ultimately, such over-hiring would compromise a company's continued viability (which could result in the loss of even more jobs).

One cannot blame a manager for thinking in line with his or her company's logic, or raison d'etre, any more than one can blame a shark for hunting for food and eating like a shark. A shark is a shark, and a business can also be viewed as a feeding machine. To posit or impose responsibilities onto a machine does not make sense either to the machine or to those who operate it (in their functioning as operators). To an operator, responsibility means operating well—which, by the way, is virtue in the ancient Greek sense. The President's use of responsibility extrinsic to a business calculus simply would not register. It would be like trying to get ought out of is. Even within business functionality, responsibility even as in fiduciary duty to the stockholders is simply translated into “try to get as much profit as possible, now or later.” In other words, ought does not compute in a business technical vocabulary. The term is extrinsic, like societal problems and goals. To come from a societal standpoint and impose “be responsible” to a business practitioner is like shouting at a deaf person. The business person is apt to simply look curiously at the person as if wondering why he is speaking in a foreign language while assuming he is being understood nevertheless. “How odd,” is perhaps the most honest response that one could give to such a display.

The difference between the President's application of responsibility and that of Jackson can also be understood as the difference between the interest of a subunit and the system as a whole. It is only natural for a part of a whole to operate in the interest of the part itself rather than necessarily the whole. The interests of the latter can thus fall through the cracks. Government regulation is an attempt to plug such cracks, but regulations, like firms, are particular. On the issue of unemployment, the societal question is whether even a fully-operational economic system can supply full employment. If not, it may be the government's responsibility to supply the surplus employment, directly or indirectly via subcontracting. Crucially, this supply must be designed such that it does not reduce the employment provided by the private sector. The surplus jobs must be functions that the private sector does not and would not address. The President's error in his speech to the Chamber of Commerce could be that he was assuming this surplus is the responsibilities of “parts” of the system (i.e. individual companies) rather than of the system itself (i.e. the government).

In sum, responsibility is a dubious concept to apply to business; the term is too vague to have much traction in discussing such vital matters as affect our economic livelihoods and the related viability of our economy. It seems to me that the priority ought to be that every able-bodied and minded adult has a job (or, otherwise, a means by which he or she can have sufficient economic wherewithal to survive in this interdependent society), whether through business, non-profits or government. Ideologies, including responsibility itself, ought to be relegated as luxuries with which we can play on the margins once full employment has become a fait accompli. That is to say, ideologies might contribute to improving full employment, rather than being depended on to reach it or allowed to keep us from it. Of course, it could be countered that ideologies are part and parcel of this entire discussion and thus cannot be dissected from it. That may well be. Even so, I submit that ideologies such as laissez faire and corporate social responsibility ought not be allowed to thwart us in how we constitute full employment as a societal fact. That is to say, we ought to direct full employment by whatever means necessary then work from there (once attained) to improve it. Simply put, for some reason, we don't treat full employment as necessary.; rather, we treat it as a goal.  "How odd," an alien from another galaxy might say (in its own language, of course), should one visit us and want to study us.

Sources:

Michael D. Shear, “In Speech to Chamber of Commerce, Obama Urges Businesses to ‘Get in the Game,’” The New York Times, February 7, 2011.

John W. Schoen, “Factories Boom, but with Few New Workers,” February 7, 2011, NBCNews.com.