Based on friends Ive met at university, who were from India, it sounds like your school systems are better designed as well.

Also every Indian I've met (at university) has really high math skills compared to an average American college student.

I even was trying to do this optics calculation for a project and couldn't find any professor that was familiar with it but my friend from India who had a background in medical device engineering and psychology was like "oh yeah I've done those types of calculations" and she knew right away what I was trying to do.

She told me that math is incorporated into multiple subjects even at a young grade level. It's not studied isolated like it is in Western schools.

She had learned the optics formula in biology class ! (Calculating depth of field of a human lens , btw).

She also told me that, at least in her school, spoken english was common so pretty much everyone knew how to speak it fluently.

I can't recall what part of India she is from specifically. And I also admit that graduate students like her, often come from more affluent families so maybe her experience isn't average. But she implied that it was.

We talked about a lot of culture things. Some things better over there. Some things not. Or just different.

But the school thing stuck out for me. Reminded me of the German approach when it comes to specializing. Even in high school the school determines what you are best suited for and you start your education then towards that career. Not how it works in the u.s. we have some flexibility of coursework but the school does not choose it for you. And the preparation courses are very limited. They are still mostly general education courses.

India is not a socialist democracy, the working classes do not control the state and private ownership is the principal aspect of the economy, rather than public. Modern socialist states include the PRC, Cuba, DPRK, Vietnam, Laos, and partially Venezuela. Former socialist states include the USSR, and the various Warsaw Pact countries. Thinking about "left vs. right" in terms of single economic policies, rather than the dynamics of class struggle in a given society, is an error.

Any more examples of socialist democracies?

Since you mentioned India, Kerala is does not currently have a socialist mode of production (that's a specific way of saying, their economy isn't socialism) but they have been led by socialist parties (parties which are trying to implement a socialist mode of production), and it shows.

Socialism is defined by "the ownership of the means of production by the working class, in a transition to communism".

There's some debate about whether cooperatives satisfy this criteria.

What you seem to be describing is a social-democracy, where there's still the common capitalist dynamics and class interest contradictions, but with the conflict reduced somewhat by appeasing the majority with a social safety net.

Socialist democracies look like capitalist democracies that fear socialist revolutions.
Even the US was one from 1930 until around 1982.

Great discussion!

First order of business; let's define "socialism", or "Democratic socialism", because as a citizen of the US, this (these) terms have been bastardized beyond recognition.

Second order of business; the term "left" is also muddled (certainly in my country, but also in the global context). Historically it's those who are nationalist (don't want external rule). Modern usage seems less concrete.

I like the idea of MRP for staple goods. Are there any producers that make the cost of products below the MRP?

Is what you describe really socialism though? Western leftists would probably call these policies social democracy. And yes, they make the life of people in that country better! Relatively high minimum wages, limits on prices (or price increases) for certain things (especially housing), mandatory paid sick leave, mandatory unemployment insurance, and so on are all things that some European countries have in some form or another. And yes, that makes most of our lives (I'm German) relatively great.

However, most of the housing, factories and land are still owned by capitalists. They still exploit their workers and tenants, the policies only soften the blows. In recent decades, the concentration of capital in a few families' hands has also skyrocketed here, which gives them political power (sometimes openly, sometimes covertly) and led to the erosion of many of these social democratic benefits. Also, a lot of the high social security in the west in the past century was only possible thanks to exploitation of people and nature in the global south.

That's why many leftists, at least in the west, don't think that social democracy is enough in the long term. Many even see social democrats as stabilizing the fundamentally corrupt capitalist system by covering up that corruption. For most of us, socialism would mean that, at the very least, big corporations are owned and lead by the workers themselves. That could be cooperatives in markets (market socialism) or that could be some kind of planned economy (not only state central planning, there's also proposals for somewhat or even totally distributed/decentralized schemes). The point here is that there are no more owners of productive forces, who don't participate themselves in production, i.e. capitalists. The existence of a separate capitalist class with a lot of power and opposed to the workers is a common denominator for unneccessary misery in this world. Eliminating that class (that doesn't mean eliminating the people, only expropriating them) would not magically solve all problems in the world, but it would make us freer to seek effective measures.

The UK has RRP as an equivalent, but they address the problem differently really. MRP is stop price gauging I think, whereas RRP is there to incentivise retailers to offer discounts to lure more customers.

We also have co-op's that run supermarkets and banks, but they compete against private companies.

I think Europe is fairly social in its services (healthcare, pensions, etc.).