While companies are saving by moving manufacturing plants, many people (millions) in Vietnam are going to experience higher standard of living. I say it's a win win.
Aren't therefore many people (millions) in China going to experience lower standard of living?
The problem with this is, the "factory owners" of the world run a political machine which they use to prevent that from happening, claiming it prevents them from building more factories. They use the same political machine to establish the moral goodness of continued factory building as axiomatic.
This makes everything rather complicated.
Well, yes and no. The view I espoused was pretty similar to what Warren Buffet says, and that guy has owned a factory or two in his day. Even in the US, which has less government, there are a number of programs for those who don't have much. Perhaps you'd like to see more - fair enough - but the exact level of support is open for debate, isn't it? I don't think we'll ever agree on precisely what it should consist of. The Nordic states seem to work pretty well with more government. Probably depends on a lot of factors...
So I don't think there's any big cabal, really.
"There exists a System, in which we are all but cogs" doesn't seem a very useful way of analysing the world, however correct we might suspect it is. Maybe I should try harder.
But I agree with you that "factory owners" and "government" are basically the same people. That's what I was referring to by the political machine I mentioned above, although it extends far beyond government.
And in fact, what you are linking to is a right-wing attack on very legitimate economic ideas. The introduction of the 40-hour week did increase employment, and further reduction of work weeks would indeed increase the number of people employed (as we see already: all job growth in the U.S. currently is full-time jobs being converted into multiple part-time jobs in the service industry).
That is, you've linked to a discussion of something on Wikipedia and you believe that the discussion of it proves its truthfulness; nothing could be further from the truth. See also: discussion of moon landing conspiracies.
In fact, if I fire someone in China and hire someone in Vietnam, I have indeed engaged in a zero-sum transaction - actually a negative-sum transaction, since I'll be paying the Vietnamese guy less than the Chinese guy. Overall, the world economy will be moving slower because of my actions.
I don't believe in things like "the market will sort everything out", by the way. There are winners and losers, and I think society has some duty to help take care of those who get the short end of the stick. But I don't think "don't let the factories move" is the right way to help those people, long term.
Yeah... 'caus that worked for Mexico... can China look forward to a descent into drug traficking fueled civil war now?
I wouldn't define that exactly working well.
Hell, even Paul Krugman doesn't label the issue as black and white. I want to remove sweat shop conditions as much as anyone, but keeping people alive through poverty takes priority.
Also, you don't fix sweat shop conditions by closing sweat shops. You just move them into the underground, where instead of shady business owners as bosses, they have shady crime bosses as bosses. The real trick, is to better sweat shop conditions.
This can even be done at Samsung/Apple's level, where they can make part of the requirement set for a contract certain workplace conditions/pay.
That's simply how the world works. Sometimes it's a matter of greed, sometimes it isn't. The success of Walmart and Amazon seem to indicate that people will lean towards lower priced goods, period. Unless you don't buy any mass produced goods, and only source your needs to local crafts(|wo)men? Do you buy your clothes from a local tailor? How about your furniture from a domestic manufacturer?
People work in sweat shops because it is better than not working in a sweat shop. It is the bottom rung on a long ladder, albeit one that starts underwater in the sewer.
Do you have any proposal of a solution that does not make it more broken?
Sorry, but things are going well within normal.
I made no further comment.
I have.
It has nothing to do with Libertarianism, and everything to do with Economics...
As an industry, the technology sector prides itself on innovative thinking and using new approaches to solve old problems in a better way. It doesn't seem like economic development should be a path-dependent process.
It saddens me to see people shrugging off human misery as though it's required by some ironclad law of economics. Instead, we should devote serious effort to figuring out how to get from "poor, subsistence farming" to "developed economy" without the "child labor and sweatshops" step.
Rawanda is already trying to make that leap: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-11/04/paul-kagame-e...
As if Paul Krugman is the pinnacle of radical thought on the issue?
He is a Keynesian -- which I guess counts for something like "far left" in the US.
As is pretty much every economist. Neoclassical economics (which borrows many of Keynes' ideas) dominates modern economic thought. 'Austrians' seem to exist only on the internet...
They're attempting to bypass the heavy-industry stage of development, and go straight to being a knowledge/service economy. The jury is still very much out on that effort, but it's certainly worth a shot.
"When the last tree is cut, the last river poisoned, and the last fish dead, we will discover that we can't eat money."
It wasn't about workers' rights, but something along those lines seems to fit.
When you have a country that starts to industrialize factory owners only have to offer wages twice what someone gets on the farm to get people to migrate from the communities they grew up in to the cities. As the factory owners profit from the cheap labor they spend some of the money on themselves, but also spend some of the money on building new factories and absorbing new labor. Eventually all the excess labor in the countryside is absorbed, and the factory owners have to start competing for new labor by raising wages. This is the same general pattern that happened in Britain then Japan then Korea and China, and seems to be just starting in Vietnam now. There are sometimes variations, such as the fact that rural wages were pretty high in the US due to lots of available land, or the Chinese residency permits system that artificially restricts who can move to the city and so started the rise in wages more quickly than would be "natural" at the expense of the people forced to live in the countryside. But then again the Party knows that its dissent among the people in easy marching distance of it's offices that it really has to worry about.
But getting back on track, even if the companies weren't greedy then creating new factories in Vietnam to create jobs for Vietnamese people jobs would be the altruistic thing to do. The difference would be that instead of dividends they would turn their profits into more investment so as to make development happen faster.
Probably before that hits, automation for most of the product. Eventually we will need very few people to produce any part of the product. We will automate resource extraction. Automate resource delivery. Automate resource refinement. Etc.
So this leaves us with a large population that has little point in the current economic system. So we'll get higher unemployment globally. Historically this has lead to wars, either internal or external. Marx/Hegel are right. The haves and the have-nots will duke it out. The have-nots will, like Norther American generals in the civil war, throw bodies at the haves. Eventually coming to a new equilibrium of far fewer have-nots (many are dead) and probably fewer haves. Eventually everything is owned commonly and a new society is birthed based on the idea of self actualization through experimentation.
Sound familiar ? if it works so far, why won't it work further on ?
Add to that the free use of marijuana (which generally decreases motivation ) , the better capabilities of police enforcing crimes, the possible growing acceptance of unemployment in an automated society, you'll see even further reductions.
[1]http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/111191-Less-Crime-...
War is always a safe prediction, but do you have a specific historical precedent for large-scale, long-term, structural unemployment? I cannot think of one.
(Subsistence agriculture is not unemployment.)
As far as outward wars: WWII. Massive economic for German. War helped create jobs.
Edited to add German example.
Perhaps we'll move away from consuming things that need to be manufactured and towards digital goods instead.
Once all the prospects for very cheap human labor are exhausted, the work goes to robots.
It doesn't go to higher paid humans. That future will not happen.
Nothing exists in a vacuum.
Which actually benefits us as the consumer. Would you prefer a less greedy corporation that goes where the most expensive labor is which then increases the cost of production which then increases the cost of the products you buy from said company?
Greed is what keeps prices low, and competition high.
Well, yes actually, if the higher cost of those products buys me something that I believe to be worthwhile. There's a whole bunch of stuff I am willing to pay more for, higher quality, better customer service, local ownership or representation, good labor practices, environmental concern, and on and on. I hate this idea that somehow price is the only thing that companies can compete on.
Yes? I would definitely prefer an America where there is less disposable crap, but more secure and stable domestic jobs for people, and I think most Americans would agree.
I'd replace "prices low" with "value per dollar high" or "efficiency high". Most of the replies to your comment complain about cheap products or claim higher prices are better if they come with particular outcomes. To be fair, they have a point.
However, the average commenter here doesn't have to choose between buying new work clothes and eating meat this month, so you have a point as well. So I'd generalize the sentiment to value per dollar or something similar.
Higher wages and better benefits benefit the consumer.
How do you figure? TVs are cheaper and bigger than ever - they're practically giving them away.
My understanding was that producers are pumping gimmicks like 3d and huge curved screens because there are absolutely no margins left in the commodity TV/monitor market.
The actual history of the industry would indicate that price fixing is common: the LCD[1], RAM[2], optical drives[3][4], GPU[5] and CPU[6] markets have all faced massive scandals involving price fixing or other anti competitive collusion, often resulting in huge fines.
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aP1P0...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing
[3] http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9243591/HP_sues_seven...
[4] http://www.pcworld.com/article/240937/hitachilg_data_storage...
[5] http://www.engadget.com/2008/09/28/nvidia-details-settlement...
[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/business/global/14compete....
Price fixing in electronics seems entirely possible, and I don't doubt that it happens. But if it was happening in the world of TVs, surely TVs would cost more than they do now.
For the relatively monied -- and software developers usually count among that number -- it's easy to argue that companies are too greedy, and that companies shouldn't use exploitative labour. For the lower class, paying extra so that someone in the third world can enjoy a better quality of life isn't an option.
Yes, this is systemic. Are you trying to convince me that the situation isn't fucked? For all the claptrap about how the economy isn't a zero-sum game and that the tide lifts all the boats and so many other platitudes, there's no denying that the quality of life of most people in the world is nothing but a point in a gradient of declining living conditions, everyone benefiting from the labor of people with fewer options who have to work and live worse than them.
Anyhow, how much do you think it would raise the cost of the things you use, just to ensure safe working conditions at factories? For jeans, it's a paltry 90 cents.
http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2013/07/10/bangladesh-factory-saf...
Yes, the poorest in my country would probably have to think twice before spending even 90 cents, hell tell that to the homeless. The vast majority of the poor here probably wouldn't mind, given that it's a mere drop in the sea of debt they are drowning in, and that's a problem with many facets, on its own.
But there's quite a lot of room for diminishing the unfairness of this scheme, even if the solution feels even cosmetic at times given the broader problem of exploitation and inequality.
I won't deny it, but I find it hard to believe. In any case, the poorest are better off, even if the middle class is declining (700M out of extreme poverty in just 20 years).
In the end, greed will bite you back.
I don't think Vietnam can compete with China until China stops treating its workers as slaves.