What a lot of economists forget is money really does not exist, it is a truly marvelous human invention. Money is just a token a representation of a nation’s industry, resources, land, technical know how. So you have a situation where all of the above is traded for cheap labor and what does the nation get in return? Numbers on a balance sheet mostly to the top 10%. This is beginning to no longer mean much to the country that has lost the technical ability to produce anything of real intrinsic value.
Which country has lost the ‘technical ability to produce anything of real intrinsic value’?
-XT
Economists understand that. Politicians and common folk don’t.
gonzomax, the imporant metric is the volume of production, not the number of jobs. The simple fact is that because of technological advances over the past 42 years, we can produce 33% more per citizen using roughly the same number of plants we had in 1967. Those 3 million workers have long since moved onto jobs in other sectors.[/QUOTE
Oh, yes, like the factory closing in my town 10 years ago? No problem, all those poorly educated and now unemployed men with families to support went on to become brain surgeons and computer whizzes! And how did that lint roller company in “Roger & Me” make out after those mass firings, anyway? I’ve been looking and looking in the Dollar Tree, but all the lint rollers seem to be made in China.
And what exactly is your point here?
He finally discovered that business has moved to China for cheap labor and a lack of environmental regulation. Sometimes it takes people awhile to get there.
China is not on earth. If our companies pollute there it must not go into the atmosphere. No worries just have at it.
Yes, some business has moved to China, and yes, the cheap labor and more lax regulation. But the world is considerably more complicated and subtle than you think it is.
You see, there’s this thing called risk. When you take some action, like accept a job, there’s a chance that something quite bad will happen to you. And then there’s this thing called reward, which is the good thing that might happen to you if you take that job. Looking at risk without considering the reward, as you seem intent on doing, is a completely flawed perspective and leads to horrible choices. Risk hit the people in Bhopal hard, but you can’t look that one disaster to the exclusion of the rest of India and expect to come to any worthwhile conclusions.
But it’s even more subtle than that. The amount of risk a person is willing to take on for some amount of reward is extremely personal. It depends on your personality, and yes, your situation in life. If the people in India believe that taking a job in a western company is a good decision, I’m certainly not conceited enough to tell them that their personal level of risk tolerance is wrong.
And then there’s the other side of the issue: people with adequate shelter and enough food are much more likely to spend the extra resources to avoid personal injury and environmental damage.
Personally, I think the humanitarian gains of economic development in poor nations outweigh the negative impact on the environment, but I recognize that reasonable people can disagree on this point. If it helps to ease some tension in your mind, consider this: as China advances to first world status, we will have roughly twice* as many extremely intelligent people working on the problem of climate change as we would have had if China remained poor.
*Based on the fact that the population of China is approximately the population of US + EU + Japan + South Korea + Australia. Basically just a first approximation.
You speak for people in mud huts as if you actually possess knowledge of their lives. You presume that people with very little should be satisfied with whatever crappy conditions we throw at them. Why can we not deal with foreign workers with some degree of respect.? Why do we think that they should be ecstatic that we are giving them an opportunity to give up their lives to work for a corporation that will pay them badly, treat them like shit and destroy their environment ? Why cant we provide a decent wage ,safe working conditions and show some respect for the environment. We go into pristine environments and pollute the crap out of them for profit… It is despicable. Do you really believe that they should be happy to be ill treated by a corporation ? Do you believe they will never figure it out?
Do you?
I did not bring them up. I did not presume to speak for them.
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You did bring them up. Your posts were the first to mention outsourcing, and the first to mention exploited workers
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If you don’t presume to speak for them, why are you arguing so vehemently that their actions reflect the opposite of their true desires?