
China and "our standard of living" - jp_sc
http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2009/07/im-really-thinking-maybe-i-shouldnt.html
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mistermann
Wow, spot on! Likely not news to anyone here, but I really wonder how many
people out there are smart enough to realize how amazingly cheap the stuff we
buy is, and really think of where it comes from.

~~~
biohacker42
Well not quite spot on. It did mention that these people were willing to do
what ever to get away from the hellish alternative they were born into. But if
you blinked you missed it, you missed the most important point:

People are doing this voluntarily. Rumors of forced labor are greatly
exaggerated. Perhaps somewhere in Burma but in China and India and other
places, people do this hard work because the alternative is harder. This is
how you work your way up from a very low starting point.

England wasn't always a workers' paradise either. Wages in China will rise.

~~~
neilk
If you saw a drowning person, would you ask them to be your slave forever in
exchange for throwing them a life preserver? That's a voluntary exchange too,
but you're still a dick for doing it.

Yes, most of these jobs are better than the alternative, namely, starvation in
the countryside where there are no jobs. In the worst cases, (not all) these
jobs pay so little that the workers can't accumulate capital, can't send their
kids to school, etc. And due to the magic of subcontracting, the large Western
employers have no long term investment in the country -- they'll pick up and
leave when the next country over offers them a slightly better deal.

In Thailand I met a woman who was working for a private museum. She had
figured out that her boss had basically made his fortune through selling
slaves. Voluntary indentured servitude for several years, sold out of
villages. And this isn't just some backwater, Thailand is where a lot of
manufacturing is happening lately.

~~~
potatolicious
Modern, first-world standards cannot be applied to the third world - I am a
prime example of this. I owe my life to child labor and sweatshop labor, allow
me to explain.

My family is originally from Taiwan, and both of my folks grew up when Taiwan
was still an inconsequential tropical island consisted mostly of fishing
villages and a hodgepodge government-in-exile. Both of them are beneficiaries
of the "abusive" practices of foreign businesses. My father worked in a
plastics plant, and once had to outrace a cloud of deadly chlorine gas, and
survived by the grace of a low wall surrounding the factory (chlorine crawls
along the ground). Safety practices were almost non-existent - my mother is
still missing a small chunk of her right index finger (and she was lucky). My
mother's family was desperately poor - my grandfather eventually succumbed to
years of breathing in coal dust with no protective equipment, and all of his
children worked from as young as 10 years-old to put themselves through
school.

But here's the thing: people in that country could not afford to educate
themselves, and if it were not for the willingness of employers to hire child
labor and form sweatshops, they would never have had the opportunity to climb
out of that hole.

If you had insisted on no child labor, minimum pay standards, and rigorous
safety adherence, there would have been _no_ reason to set up shop in a
backwater island like Taiwan, and then where would we be? My family would
likely still be living in the jungles up on some mountain somewhere, starving.

~~~
iamelgringo
_Modern, first-world standards cannot be applied to the third world..._

That's part of the problem, though, isn't it? The tremendous migration of
manufacturing jobs to third world countries has been in large part because
they are not limited to a 40 hour work week and first world safety standards.
Of course it's cheaper to manufacture in China, their regulations are a lot
more lax than ours, although that may be changing.

I, too grew up in a Third World country. My parents were missionaries in
Central America in the 80's. I grew up playing soccer with children who's
bellies were bloated from parasites and could not afford shoes.

I've worked in communities that were essentially indentured servants to the
tomato packing industry. The tomato company owned the housing, ran the
schools, provided plumbing, etc.. to their workers. The employees were willing
to put up with indentured servitude, because on a certain level because it was
better than starving. It was better for their children to get a 6th grade
education and then go off to pick tomatoes than to have no education at all.

Why did that happen? So we can have tomatoes at our local grocery store for $1
a pound.

I agree that it is better for the people in the third world to have jobs
rather than not have jobs, but I'm pretty conflicted about the entire
situation. Starving children, vs children working 16 hours a day in a tomato
field? That's not a good choice to have to make.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
_starving children, vs children working 16 hours a day in a tomato field?
That's not a good choice to have to make._

I'd be careful where you draw the line in your judgment.

For instance, the _next_ generation of people will start with a 6th grade
education and a minimum standard of living. _Their_ challenge is to move the
goalposts further.

That's just how the rest of the world did it, in fact, starting off with child
and virtual slave factory labor and slowly moving to better and better
conditions. If you've got some kind of shortcut to make it happen inside of
one generation, I'd love to hear it.

~~~
iamelgringo
Are you trying to say that child labor is a good thing?

The point I was trying to make, albeit not too successfully was that it's a
difficult situation, and there aren't a whole lot of great options for people
in those situations.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I'm trying to say that depending on where you draw the line, you can make all
sorts of moral judgments that may not turn out to be true when drawing a line
in a different place.

Take the invasion of France in WWII. The Allies killed over 14 thousand French
_civilians_ in bombing in preparation for the invasion. Would you say that's a
good thing? It's obviously an awful thing, no matter how you slice it.

But looking at the longer picture, sometimes good things come out of bad
things. This was the case for the invasion of France, and I believe this is
also the case for child labor and sweatshops in third world countries.

That doesn't make bad things into good things, that just means that context is
important.

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sofal
This applies to the food industry as well, like how we get our meat. We'd be
better off if the things we buy were responsibly produced and priced. It's
hard to know what we can do about it besides voting with our dollars and
educating others.

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ErrantX
There is no message in this post, no "good points" (to a point). Clearly the
writer has no experience of Chinese culture or has ever really been there (I
know its satire - but the point is to make a point, no?).

Considering cultures in Asia/Africa (possibly even South America) from a
Western perspective will always lead you to draw conclusions such as "slave
labour" and "abuse".

Now, I'm not going to deny for a moment that such things do go on - but not in
quite the same way and on the scale certain people wish to imagine.

Anecdote from my university course: our dept. was open 24/7 (even on Sundays
if you had a special pass). I would regularly walk past the lobby at 1am and
see the Chinese continget (there were many on my course) still working there.
We tried to get some to come to a pub once and they didnt really get the whole
relaxing/chilling out thing.

It was an interesting insight into the culture - and when I was lucky enough
to travel in some of the less well known areas of Asia you see it in even more
detail. Greater thabn 40hr weeks are not borne out of the manufacturers
getting more out of the labour. It is borne out the culture (and, yes, they
took advantage of it).

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myth_drannon
I'm posting two very interesting blog posts about China factories and its
"bio-robots" but it's in Russian :( May be try google translate... Mices and
headphones: <http://sergeydolya.livejournal.com/55293.html> Sony and Panasonic
factories: <http://sergeydolya.livejournal.com/55924.html>

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InkweaverReview
Awesome!

Fake Steve just gets better and better. ;)

------
onreact-com
Soon enough when there is no manufacturing left elsewhere China will
capitalize on their monopoly and the rest of the world will have to work 7
days 80h+ shifts to make a living.

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Ardit20
Of course we do not care man. It is not like the Chinese gave us the wealth.
We invented stuff, we traded with other countries and shared our knowledge,
they decided to close up, to live in some island, and now that they are
opening up they will have to start at the bottom no.

You may ask whether the birth lottery is any fare and I do not know about that
one really, it is, it goes really deep and it effects everyone, but being a
practicalist, although this one event may be unfortunate, until the Chinese
government opens up fully and adopts our values, there is not much we can do
really. So stop crying and start working on making those super cool macs
cheaper :)

~~~
stavrianos
It's obvious the birth lottery isn't "fair". It's just as obvious that
fairness is irrelevant.

------
c0nsilience
While the story had some decent points to it, the ending was a really horrible
cop out and cowardly way to accuse the young man of stealing an iPhone. Even
if it is true.

------
jpwagner
I really hope one day we learn that FSJ = SJ.

~~~
s3graham
Learning NP = P is more likely.

------
wsprague
That is one of the best posts I have ever read.

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mrshoe
This exposes the truism that there is always a standard of living continuum in
society. In a different era there were Kings and Lords and Peasants. Now we
have Europeans and Americans and Chinese and Indians.

If globalization can succeed at improving the standard of living for those at
the bottom of the continuum, it will have to be at the expense of those at the
top. It's a zero sum game.

~~~
zimbabwe
How is it zero sum? I'd make you a bet that right now, more people are living
happily than ever did in the past. The bar constantly rises.

~~~
mrshoe
Let me expand upon my one line explanation. I apologize for being terse last
time.

Let's say the stock market increases at 10% per year. This growth is driven by
more capital being invested in the market each year. That means everyone in
the market earns 10% interest every year, right? Well, in reality, that's not
the case. Some people earn 30% and some people lose 20%. In fact, if anyone
earns over 10%, that means that someone else _must_ be earning less than 10%.
So, maybe it's a 10-sum game, but most people still use the term "zero-sum
game" to describe the situation.

Distribution of wealth and standard of living work the same way. Everyone's
standard of living is increasing at 10 moon units per year. This growth is
primarily driven by technology. However, if people in emerging markets are to
have their standard of living increase at 15 moon units per year (which it is,
and that's great), then someone else will have their standard of living
increase at less than 10 moon units per year. That doesn't mean that our
standard of living will decrease (although I wouldn't rule that out); it just
won't increase as rapidly.

~~~
papersmith
This is only true if the bar is rising at a pace regardless of increase in
participants.

In reality, increases in trade raises the bar faster for everyone, often so
much that it offsets the drop from the increased competition.

So say both country A and country B are increasing at 10 moon units per year.
Country B trades as a net exporter with country A, and takes 1 moon unit per
year from country A. However, the increase in economic activity boosts 2 moon
units per year for everyone. Now country A is increasing at 11 moon units per
year, and country B is increasing at 13 units per year.

