It is regrettable how little the British know about the economy of a neighbouring country in which so many chose to have a second home, retire or simply visit before the United Kingdom left the European Union. A common assumption is that the French economy is based on agriculture and industry, unlike the more modern, service-based British economy. With high taxation and an inflexible labour market, it seemed understandable that many young, educated French people should escape the high unemployment in their country to work in Britain, and in London in particular.

In 2014, when the Socialist government of François Hollande was in power, a leading British economist wrote that what he found to be the most interesting question about France was not why it was doing so badly but rather why it was doing so well in spite of operating “some extremely destructive policies”. In fact, before the Covid-19 pandemic struck, the service economy in France made the same contribution to value added as in Britain (about 80 per cent). The two countries also had about the same size of population (around 66 million), and similar levels of GDP and per capita income. Where they differed was that the service sector in France employed about 75 per cent of the active labour force whereas on some counts it employed 85 per cent in the UK. Unemployment in France was for many years much higher than in the UK, but levels of labour productivity were also higher in France. One of the biggest differences between the two countries, however, is that, since the 1980s, the government in France has consistently raised much more in taxation than Britain, in order to redistribute the gains made from closer integration into the European Union to those who did not benefit to the same extent. As a result, France, while not without its problems, has a more equal society than the UK.

When in 2018 I was invited by Agenda Publishing to write a history of the French economy since the Second World War, I happily accepted the challenge. Unlike my previous archive-based work, this book was to be based on published sources.

We began this book by presenting the ideas of great economists that have been unduly neglected. Smith recognized that capitalism works best when people seek to catch those above them on the societal escalator. That requires a sense that they are at least on the escalator – something stressed too by Polanyi, who was well aware of the dangers that could follow if people were to feel themselves to be left out altogether. Keynes wanted the state to smooth out capitalism’s instabilities – notably, persistent unemployment – which often stemmed from the creative destruction that Schumpeter described. Hirschman understood that another way of ensuring that capitalism worked for everyone was to provide voice to all of its stakeholders.

Of the many changes that transformed the French economy after the Second World War, one of the most marked was the new interventionist role played by the state. In contrast to the laissez-faire economic liberalism of the Third Republic, which had responded to the demands of a narrow but sizeable agricultural lobby group, and to the authoritarian management of Vichy that had served the interests of the German occupation forces and the Nazi war economy, the postwar state was to serve the interests of a much wider range of groups in France demanding economic as well as political security. Under a series of reforms enacted between 1944 and 1948, the structures and instruments that would enable this newfound scale of state intervention in the economy were put in place. Some were inherited from the structures introduced by the Vichy state; others reflected the political aspirations of the resistance groups. Together, the reforms included an extension of the nationalization programme begun under the Popular Front government to include coal, electricity, the main deposit banks, the remaining privately owned firms in the aero engine industry, the Renault car and truck maker and all the air transport companies. These nationalizations were in line, in terms of both the type of industries targeted and the method of implementation, with those introduced in other European states. Where the French were different was in creating a system of indicative planning that, unlike the Soviet system, was designed to operate within a parliamentary democracy. The entire apparatus of state intervention that was put in place was designed to make economic policy-making more democratic than had previously been the case.

It was not just the economic liberalism of the Third Republic that was swept away after 1945, but the entire constitution. Although it had been set up in response to French defeat in the war with Prussia and had survived the First World War, the Third Republic was now associated with decline and defeat. That there would be no return to it in any shape was confirmed by the results of a referendum held five months after the end of the war in Europe.

One major implication of the previous two chapters is that the politics of ageing is actually the politics of inequality – not a chimera of intergenerational inequality, but rather the inequalities that scholars of politics, social policy and health have long studied and understood (Lynch, 2020). As chapter two showed, one of the problematic assumptions of the ‘ageing crisis’ narrative is precisely the belief that older populations are homogeneous in their experience and outlook. This ignores the significant health inequalities which exist amongst older populations and overlooks the degree to which the costs of an ageing population are actually rooted in these inequalities. Without this framing, debates about intergenerational inequalities and the ‘ageing crisis’ are a distraction from both the deep social inequalities that exist in terms of gender, geography, race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status and the ways in which these social inequalities produce inequities in health. Intentional or not, to focus on intergenerational inequalities diverts attention from the real inequalities that shape people’s lives and the politics of ageing and health.

In September 2018, a Dalit family in Kuzhumur, a village in the backward district of Ariyalur, built a library housing 2,500 books and computers with online access (TNM 2018). Making a case for the initiative, members of the family said that this will help rural children access educational materials that are normally available only to children from urban elite households. Supported by various political parties, the library was to commemorate the memory of their daughter Anitha, who had committed suicide a year earlier when she failed to get admission into a medical college despite scoring 1,176 marks out of 1,200 in her school final exams. These marks were the sole basis for admission into medical colleges in the state before introduction of the National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (NEET), a national-level eligibility-cum-entrance exam for admissions, overturned the basis for eligibility, and rendered such high marks irrelevant. Anitha's death fuelled large-scale protests all over the state and constituted an important moral axis for subsequent agitations around this issue. Since then, a couple of more teens committed suicide following their failure to clear NEET (Ranjan 2019). This raises important questions about aspirations and access to education in the state: What made such aspirations the norm for many lower-caste youth? When NEET failed to evoke similar resistance in other parts of the country, why did it become a major concern in Tamil Nadu?

Such aspiration, we argue, is rooted in a Dravidian common-sense that made access to modern education a key pathway to mobility and social justice. This chapter explains the forging of this common-sense and such aspirations among lower-caste groups, and the policy response in this domain. We draw upon Arjun Appadurai's (2004) conceptualisation of the ‘capacity to aspire’ to map the constitution of aspirations among subaltern groups in the state. Appadurai defines the ‘capacity to aspire’ as the cultural capacity of the poor to find the resources required to contest and alter or improve the course of their destiny. For him, such a capacity comprises of two domains of freedom. First it requires removal of material deprivation rooted in backwardness in education and poverty. The second involves securing dignity and respect that are denied by low status aspirations vis a vis the elites.

Many scholars have suggested that identity-based mobilisation in the state has ignored class- based issues such as land reform or empowering of labour (Mencher 1975; Thangaraj 1995; Subramanian 1999). In this and the next chapter, we argue for a more nuanced understanding of how the subnational state has negotiated the question of labour welfare even as it sustained capital accumulation. In this chapter, we focus primarily on how mobilisation and policy interventions have improved the terms of work, incomes and status of rural labour including small holders and tenant farmers. As we argued in Chapter 2, ensuring inclusive structural transformation was critical to the Dravidian vision of social justice. Translated into developmental challenges, this implies two sets of processes. First, interventions ought to ensure shifts of people out of agriculture and other traditional occupations into secure livelihoods in the non-agricultural sector to undermine caste hierarchies. Second, while this involves shifts over time, interventions should also secure place-based livelihoods and income security at a given point in time.

We map three policy interventions that have made this possible. First, though land reforms were not pushed through strongly by legislation at one stroke, land transfers from upper-caste landlords to lower-caste tenant farmers did take place through molecular interventions and pressure from collective mobilisation. Second, investments in physical and social infrastructures have enabled diversification of rural livelihoods away from agriculture. Such diversification, accompanied by investments in education, in turn has led to better bargaining power for labouring households within agriculture. Third, an important argument that both this chapter and the next make is that substantial interventions in the labour market have been indirect through economic popular and social popular measures outside the domain of the workplace. Rural welfare interventions primarily through the public distribution system (PDS) and caste mobilisation sought to undermine hierarchical labour relations between the landed and the landless. Availability of food through the PDS weakened the basis of labour control and opened up economic possibilities for labouring households outside the domain of agriculture and the rural milieu. Such mediations outside the workplace have not only transformed rural social relations, but have also helped poorer households diversify into the non-farm sector on relatively better terms.

Social phenomena are the result of multiple causes and conditions. In cultures where mobility is gendered, there are multiple conditions that can influence the mobility of women in social, community, and work spaces. Transformational mobility (TM) is the freedom and ability to move outside the household without constraints from others. It is autonomy in mobility which implies freedom of movement in the real sense, and it is a capability which enhances the potential for flourishing of women workers. The mobility is constrained in many ways among fish vendors and peeling workers, though they move outside the household for work. However, for those women workers who experience TM or have reached a higher level of mobility, the casual pathways may vary. The question is, what are the causal mechanisms or configurational pathways to ‘high and transformational mobility’ in the context of peeling workers and fish vendors in fisheries?

Qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) is a comparative case study method that aims to understand particular social phenomena on a contextual and case-oriented manner. To explore the causal conditions that can result in high mobility and TM (autonomy in mobility) among peeling workers and fish vendors, I have used crisp set qualitative comparative analysis (csQCA) models to analyse the causal conditions or causal pathways to high mobility and TM of informal women workers in fisheries. As the peeling workers and self-employed fish vendors have different types/nature of work and have certain differences in the social background, I have adopted two csQCA models separately for each group of workers to analyse their pathways to high mobility and TM.

Transformational mobility among peeling workers

There are multiple pathways with different combinations of conditions which result in TM. By understanding the cases of informal workers, peeling workers, and fish vendors, the method of QCA has yielded pathways to TM which differ between peeling workers and fish vendors.

Kerala is a unique state in India which presents a paradox of social advancement on the one hand and economic stagnation on the other. Women in Kerala have traditionally enjoyed a higher status and are better educated in comparison to their counterparts in other states of India. The human development indicators of Kerala reflect the progress made by the state in multiple dimensions of human development (see Table 3.1).

Kerala is way ahead of the other states in India in terms of human development and was placed third in the human development index (HDI) ranking of states in India. Despite the positive development indicators for the state of Kerala and for women in Kerala, it is intriguing to find that there are pockets of economic and social backwardness in the post-globalization and post-liberalization phase. As noted in the Human Development Report (2011) (Government of India, 2011), inequalities across social groups can still be observed in Kerala, from the high incidence of poverty for rural Scheduled Tribes (STs) (44 per cent) and Scheduled Castes (SCs) (22 per cent), as compared to the state average of 15 per cent, indicating further room for convergence within social groups (Government of India, 2011: 65).

Historically, the matrilineal system followed by certain communities in Kerala gave pre-eminence to daughters rather than sons with respect to inheritance rights. Having followed matrilineal system (marumakkathayam), women and girls enjoyed freedoms (including sexual freedoms) in certain communities that were unheard of in western society. This conferred on women the access to as well as control over resources which elevated the status and position of women in society. With changes in legislations brought about after independence, there has been a gradual breakdown of the matrilineal system and the emergence of patriarchy.

Commenting on the status of women in Kerala in the post-1990s, Jeffrey (2003) notes that ‘women retained a circumscribed but influential position in social life’. In public spaces, the role of women in Kerala has remained limited, and there are many instances where protests and disapproval from patriarchal authorities are evident wherever women take centre stage of development activities.

Older people are not a homogeneous social group. Their needs and abilities, and the costs associated with providing for their well-being, vary with their socioeconomic status, gender, geographic location and health status, among other relevant dimensions of difference. It should come as no surprise, then, that older adults are not a politically homogeneous bloc, either. In public and policy conversations there is very often a tendency, however, to assume that older people are a singular pressure group that will act through the political system to secure a distribution of societal resources that primarily benefits them – as retirees, health care consumers, people without young children in the house, and the like. If governments fail to invest in policies that can promote well-being across the life-course, and instead focus on maintaining social expenditure on the current generation of older people by squeezing current workers/future retirees, the story goes, it is because most governments are subject to greater pressure from older voters than from younger citizens, because the former vote at higher rates and are represented by powerful lobby groups. This argument was memorably summarized by the late British journalist Henry Fairlie, writing in The New Republic in 1988, as a problem of ‘greedy geezers’ living well at the expense of the young (Fairlie, 1988).

This book has, we hope, destroyed two straw men that are common in debates about intergenerational equity, spending and health. The first is the myth of ‘greedy geezers’ – the stereotype of a pampered pensioner, living off lavish old-age provision including fine health care, while voting against investments in future generations. The second is the myth of unsustainability – of health care costs driven by ageing that make it impossible to finance a welfare state. The two straw men arguments come together in a call for cuts to public health care and other public service provision: the former by demonizing older people, the latter by suggesting that public provision, unlike private finance, is unsustainable. The images of greedy older people and an ineluctably increasing financial burden associated with ageing both strengthen the argument against public provision.

Mobility or freedom to move has multiple domains, especially for women. As peeling workers and fish vendors, women in fisheries in Kerala are comparatively very mobile in terms of moving out of the household for work on a daily basis. I have tried to explore the various domains of mobility as experienced by women workers engaged in informal work1 in fisheries in the cultural context of Kerala. Whether women in different types of informal work in fisheries are able to have similar mobility levels in various domains (spaces) of mobility is a pertinent question to analyse mobility as capability. When there are constraints on mobility, it stifles the well-being freedoms of women, and by measuring the mobility of women and analysing ‘transformational mobility’ (TM), it advances the understanding of mobility, work, and autonomy, and the intersectionality in the context of gender.

The interviews which I had with informal women workers brought me into a complex dilemma where I found myself questioning the extant understanding of ‘mobility’ as a concept. Mobility as a concept is mostly considered as something which is only the ‘visible’ and the ‘explicit’. If a woman is allowed to move outside the household and undertake work, she is considered ‘mobile’ and also having some amount of autonomy as regards her mobility is concerned. She is considered in charge of her movements to various places outside the household since she works outside the household. However, my interviews and survey of informal women workers reveal that in the case of peeling workers and fish vendors, their working outside the households does not guarantee autonomy of mobility in various domains or social/religious/ personal spaces in the society. For instance, Leela, a 46-year-old peeling worker, comments on her inability to move around without permission and her thoughts on gendered mobility were stated thus:

Subnational trajectories of development and sources of divergences increasingly constitute an important dimension of understanding the political economy of global development (Crouch and Streeck 1997; Storper 1997). The literature on subnational variations in the Global South, and institutional sources of their dynamism is, however, recent but expanding (World Bank 2009; Moncada and Snyder 2012; Giraudy, Moncada and Snyder 2019). Given that the fastest growing economies are primarily in the Global South, particularly Asia, an understanding of such processes in the Asian context becomes important at the current conjuncture. In fact, the Asian experience with ‘catching up’ and economic transformation has contributed substantially to the idea of the ‘developmental state’ (Evans and Heller 2018). While the Japanese experience highlighted a strong role for state action, recent successes of the East Asian newly industrialising economies (NIEs) reinforced the importance of the ‘developmental state’ as a conceptual category to understand what makes some countries improve their citizens’ capabilities better than others.

Importantly, the relationship between capital accumulation, state and civil society in the Global South is seen to be distinct from the experience of Western capitalist economies. Chatterjee (2004) and Sanyal (2007) for example, have dealt at length with how governamental imperatives in postcolonial countries do not follow that of advanced capitalist economies even as they significantly shape the global capital accumulation dynamic. Chatterjee in his more recent work (2019) also points to the distinctiveness of politics in these regions, arguing that mobilisation in postcolonial democracies like India often draws upon reworked social identities forged through modern print cultures and governmental imperatives. Further, as Harriss-White (2003) has established, capital accumulation tends to rely on social stratification and actually reinforces social hierarchies based on caste and gender identities. Piketty (2020), in fact, argues that status-based inequalities in such countries, for instance based on caste, not only persist but constitute important sources of inequality as they modernise. Mapping the links between accumulation, state acts, political mobilisation around identities and development trajectories in these regions therefore becomes important.

India and China have been two of the fastest growing economies in the world since the early 2000s, contributing substantially to global wealth creation, given the size of their economies (Bardhan 2008). Talking about China's achievements on the growth front, Evans and Heller (2018) reason that it is impossible to understand the Chinese state as a unitary one despite having a centralised apparatus.