ARTICLE: “Middle Class Drives India: Local-Level Bureaucrats Help Steer Country’s Economic Growth,” by John Larkin, Wall Street Journal, 7 February 2006, p. A6.

The rise of middle classes in both India and China is changing world history, by creating fewer babies, by the accompanying urbanization, by the demands created for domestic service and consumer economies-within-economies, and most of all by the general sense of social entitlements that comes with earning a good living, paying taxes, and expecting something in return. This sense of entitlement is suitably selfish. It gets expressed in the following way: “I work hard. I produce value and wealth. I pay my way. And I expect certain problems to simply be taken care of.”

These demanding middle class types want governments, and by that I mean local governments, to provide certain things, like infrastructure, transportation, networks, public safety, etc. They have stuff to protect and they want it protected. They work hard and they want that effort, and the time it represents, respected. They have created efficiency and order and they expect nothing less from their local governments.

Middle class types are unreasonable compared to the poor, because they expect so much , and because they can’t buy their way out of collective problems on an individual basis—like the rich. They need decent and honest local governments, and they’re willing to not just pay for them, but agitate for them, not in the streets but in meeting rooms and conference rooms and hearing rooms.

This story is a simple one, but a profound one: about local Indian bureaucrats who dramatically upgraded local bus networks because the growing middle class simply demanded such improvements. This is serious “freedom from …” kind of stuff, and the same thing is happening in China.

And it’s changing world history.