<I humbly suggest that both you and Jay are making the mistake of looking at the nominal return on your 500K rather than the real return. We are in a period of sustained downward pressure on pricing for tangible goods. What matters is the purchasing power of your 500K a year from now versus today.>
ACF, I take the point, but my theory is that Uncle Al can print a LOT faster than cost improvements can cut prices. He intends to do so because the aim is to keep a small inflation rate and so he should since he's the owner of the money tree and might as well print the USA government a big swag of profits while prices are under pressure.
Therefore, I don't think the purchasing power of $500K will improve [other than for certain products where there are huge gains in productivity such as CDMA devices].
< No-one has aid that the USD measures the value of human life. That is between you and your family, or you and your God. What it does measure is economic potential - the ability of an individual to produce goods and services. The reason that the Indian life that you refer to appears to have so little value in monetary terms is because that (hypothetical average) individual has virtually zero ability to produce goods and services.>
I know what you mean, but in my book, our lives can be converted to dollars. People like to use the cliche that we can't put a value on human life, but we can and do, every day, and it's a surprisingly low value for most people.
To decide what roading to build, road planners have values established for human life. There is no other sensible way to decide where to allocate effort and expenditure than to put a USD value on human life.
Life using metres, kilograms and litres, it's simply a more accurate way of measuring something rather than just waving our arms around and arguing how big or valuable something or somebody is.
The average Indian life doesn't just appear to have less value, they actually do have less value than the average American. Which isn't to say that they are qualitatively inferior, nor that that situation is likely to stay as it is [it is NOT likely to stay as it is]. But they are not worth much right now [on average]. If I could buy Indian or American children, I'd buy a bunch of Indians at a dime a dozen, educate them, then split the profits with them [which of course would require I get access to economic systems which could use their abilities, which is quite a problem right now].
A young Jay Chen in a chicken coop in Mao's mayhem wasn't worth much. But if I could have gone shopping and bought him and shipped him here [or to Hong Kong] I'd have got a good deal. I bet I could have got the whole family at a bargain price at one stage. A few decades later and he's got nausages by the thousands and the purchase price is out of my league.
That's how fast India can change and they could do it for the whole country. Each child born is just a decade away from being as good as anyone anywhere.
Heck, even those barbarian Aztecs and Incas and Mayas could have the bones pulled out of their noses, get a haircut and do something more useful than wooping at sacrificial virgins being murdered. Look at CB and Marcos - they can spell and everything. Damn near human!!! CB gets bamboozled by how the photovoltaics keep the satellites in orbit though; I think that's probably more due to defective chromosomes than anything [missing Y chromosome]. But, "Hey!" as they say, some of my best friends have got missing chromosomes, missing melanin, missing teeth and missing hair [not to mention a few missing neurons - hmmm, come to think of it, there's a lot gone missing over the decades]. But I think they should be treated as human.
Mqurice |
