Wages
I guess one useful way to measure wealth of a nation is the time into labor versus the amount of utility you get (Related to Big Mac Index ). From my experience of living in India and US here are few observations. Lets compare a software engineer paid about Rs 50k per month as software engineer in Bangalore to someone doing blue collar job like Subway worker in US getting 10$/hour. For the software Engineer working on 40hrs/week x 4 weeks gives 160Hrs. Therefore 50k/160Hrs = 312 Rs/hr. Converting that into $ gives 5.2$/Hr, roughly half of US worker. The minimum wage according to Wikipedia is around 0.4$. Now this might sound less, but the cost of living is way less in India. It's strange that some things are cheap in India, and other things are actually cheaper in US. We can compare some stuff. Food: A Subway sandwich costs about 6$ in US while in India it may cost 2$. So a subway worker has to work 36mins to earn a sandwich while the Indian Software Engine...