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$6.50 of manual labor in China translates into $68 worth of labor in US only if you forget about automation. At American wage levels a whole set of production s
by speleding 15y ago
$6.50 of manual labor in China translates into $68 worth of labor in US only if you forget about automation. At American wage levels a whole set of production steps could be more profitably done by robots.
- dredmorbius 15y agoAn interesting factoid I saw online was the economic value of a quantity of oil. One of the cost visualizations was what the lost oil could produce in economic output in China, and the US. The US value far exceeded China's. China benefits from low-wage and low-rights labor. Capital productivity is still higher in the US. Not something to take as a given for all times, though.
- trimbo 15y agoAs long as there is manual labor that can be found for that low cost, no one will invest the capital to automate.
- molmalo 15y agoAnd don't forget that the government of a country with 1340 M people, has an enormous incentive to keep the status quo. If automation destroys hundreds of thousands of jobs, it's a recipe for chaos. The ones ruling China, surely want to keep people working with low wages, so they can be replaced easily if they start causing trouble. Having hundreds of thousands, or millions of unemployed people is by far much more dangerous for them, than loosing a few bucks per phone by not automating the process.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- forensic 15y agoThey will if we tax human suffering. Internalize the externalities. It's not complicated.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- tsotha 15y agoLet me see if I understand you. You'd rather people be unemployed than have the opportunity to work a (by your standards) crappy job? What do you intend to do with all the people who get taxed out of a job? What about people who work crappy jobs in China but aren't employed by multinationals? Shall we tax them too? That's going to be kind of a hard sell, isn't it? I mean, the Chinese people might have this crazy idea they ought to decide what's allowed to happen in China.
- zmj 15y agoWhy does everyone need a job? There are many people without jobs already. We call them 'retirees'.
- tsotha 15y agoSure, but retirees had many decades to save up enough money to survive without a job. Since poverty is the default condition of human existence, i.e. all you have to do to be poor is not do anything to make money, most people will need some kind of gainful employment.
- forensic 15y agoThe direct cause of poverty is the police. A naturally born human goes into the forest and hunts for deer to eat. Then the police arrest him and throw him in jail. He was not born poor; he had a forest full of food. The police made him poor. In this way what you are calling natural poverty is actually a creation of civilization. The natural state of a human is that he may live off the land. Civilization has broken this connection in favor of the state and so the state has an obligation to the human to provide him with a fair chance. Note that the superrich or even the middle class are not born in poverty. Rather they are born with silver spoons in their mouth. How is that justice? These wealthy families then engage in nepotism to ensure the wealth of their offspring at the expense of the poor. This is deeply unmeritocratic and is injustice. For these upper classes to then turn around and tell the poor to be enslaved or die is the height of evil.
- backprojection 15y agoEven if it's $100 more, personally, I wouldn't mind paying the premium for a product produced under basic-humane conditions.
- mattmcknight 15y agoIn aggregate, this would result in fewer products being purchased and fewer jobs. That said, the conditions in these jobs appear to humane- with a few exceptions.
- beatle 15y agoYour Samsung Android smart phone,Sony TV, Xbox, Dell laptops, etc. are all manufactured by the exact same people.
- jules 15y agoHow would that help those people though? Presumably these people are not forced to work in those factories, so just moving their jobs to robots in America isn't going to help them. It would only help them if the premium is going to the workers (and you could probably make do with less than $100: assuming that the workers get $5 of the $6.50, increasing the price of the phone by $100 and giving it to the workers would give them 20x additional salary).
- twelvechairs 15y agoHow about you just charge $5 more and pay the Chinese workers more, get them some better working conditions and stop them working 14 hour days...
- gbog 15y agoI am in China, if you force them to work less most will get a second job.
- twelvechairs 15y agoSorry. not about 'forcing' them to work less, just making sure they can survive (and support others) on 8 hours a day if they choose to. Of course its their choice if they want to work longer and earn more.