You have obviously not been among the hutongs of China or observed what has happened in China over the last 30 years and hundred years. <Slums and ghettos all across the world will suddenly sprout flower pots resting on feces littered side streets and the delicious aroma of chickens simmering in pots will mix with the outhouse scented air. The biggest problem will be finding parking spaces for the cars they'll buy and prospective employers will have to slip past those crammed together vehicles and up their tendered wages in order to find the few unemployed people who might be willing to take on a different job.
Because we all know that if we could somehow get those governments off their backs we could regain the natural equilibrium that's existed throughout history* and which created such a rosy life for those working people who had no special skills. >
You are so lucky to have me to enlighten you. And you don't even pay me! How cool is that? The wonders of Cyberspace.
In China, the flowerpots are resting on the balconies of apartments which sprouted from the vacated sites of the hideous hutongs [they had open troughs as latrines, rather than faeces on side streets]. Actually, you are right that parking has become a problem in China. Driving is a problem with congested roads as hordes of people get into Otto cycle mobility. The pay rates are rapidly rising and employers are moaning about "shortages". Such complaints about the shortage of workers always seem absurd to me. The employers should try offering $1000 per hour and perhaps cut that to $500 per hour if they get too many offers to work. The shortage would magically vanish. What they invariably really means is that for their business to be profitable, they need employees who will work for lower than market rates. That means there is not a shortage of employees. It means the employers need to get jobs better suited to their talents.
<the problems of long term unemployment and why it is that people with a historically decent standard of living might feel unhappy based on their relative wealth and productivity status, I think you'll see that the discussion has taken a right turn. I'd find it interesting to discuss the possibility of changing normal work week hours and upping minimum wages in order to employ more people to share the same units of required work and thereby pass some of the "new" technological wealth back downhill >
The problem in the "free" world is that a billion and a half people in the previously "unfree" world, have been freed up enough to get work and do things which they were previously stopped from doing by their government [in China]. That means those newly-free people are bidding for work which was previously done by people in the free world. Often people do not like competition. Their preference is to eliminate competition rather than compete [that includes bankers and union workers alike]. They seek to extract monopoly rent from their customers by getting the government to ring-fence their operations to keep competition out.
Increasing minimum wages will not help at all. That will just mean more people are unemployed and misery will be increased [along with the associated sociopathy]. Much work is not "units" - it's more creative than that. Not all jobs can be simply split in two. As I have explained [for no charge], there is no limit to the number of jobs. It is not a fixed number needing to be split up among the number of workers. Perhaps you missed that first time around.
India is turning people a bit more loose too, and the number of "jobs" there is rapidly increasing as a result, with pay rates rising. Bangalore has loads of cash flooding in from Cyberspace. The Geeks of Parade Road take the money they download from Cyberspace companies and spread it around downtown Bangalore, to people doing garden variety work such as supplying mangoes, tuk tuk rides, cashew nuts and coffee.
There is no limit to the number of jobs, whether skilled, super--skilled, abstractly imaginative, or manual unskilled.
<I feel so educated now > You're welcome. No charge. It's just one of the many low-paid jobs I have of which there seems to be an infinite array.
Noblesse oblige,
Mqurice
* You are being a bit silly there because you surely know that humans, like all species, used to simply breed until their Malthusian limits were reached. They needed the numbers to fight and beat neighbouring tribes, which was the lot of humans everywhere until birth control took over and tribalism gave way to global trade and civilisation. When women had 10 children each, of course there was "unemployment" with not enough hunting grounds or farming lands to go around. Young men were given a weapon, pointed towards the horizon, and told to go and get some more. And some women too. Genocide was the name of the game. The modern civilized world is different. |
