Contributors

Monday, September 17, 2012

Uh Oh

3 comments:

last in line said...

I recently spoke to a guy at my gym who is in the steel business. He recently came back from China. Mitts description mirrors his description of the living conditions at every factory he saw while over there. Dorms with tiny rooms, every building having a lining of garbage around it like a moat because the people just throw their trash out the window, and the demand for those jobs being really great over there.

jeff c said...

Employment camps where armed guards keep hungry people from getting in to earn shit wages....Mitt Romney's fantasy version of America?

Larry said...

No, Jeff, it's just Mark's fantasy of what he thinks Romney's fantasy America would be.

I saw essentially the same thing in the Philippines. And you will see the same thing in every developing country in the world, because where is such a nation developing from except abject poverty and backwardness? As unpleasant as the factories, wages, and living conditions are to our sensibilities, they are generally vastly better than they are on the farms from which those workers are flocking. Given a choice between 12-hour days in a factory and 12-hour days of back-breaking labor in the rice paddies, it's not much of a choice for most people. Wages are low because labor is cheap and labor is cheap because it is incredibly plentiful.

I'd be curious to see what the next minute or so of video contains. The fact is, what China has today is so much incredibly better than what it had under Mao and the following decade, and it's in part due to Western investors like Bain. I would almost think that Mark would be proud of what's been done if he could only understand economics and history. But I guess it's better that China should remain in deepest, abject poverty and starvation than that it fail to immediately jump to Western standards in a generation rather than a century or more.