China and "our standard of living"

http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2009/07/im-really-thinking-maybe-i-shouldnt.html

by jp_sc • 17 years ago

102 91 17 years ago

fakesteve.blogspot.com

InkweaverReview• 17 years ago

Awesome!

Fake Steve just gets better and better. ;)

mistermann• 17 years ago

Wow, spot on! Likely not news to anyone here, but I really wonder how many people out there are smart enough to realize how amazingly cheap the stuff we buy is, and really think of where it comes from.

socratees• 17 years ago

They're all smart but the government or any one for that matter doesn't give a shit when you're poor. And like he says, people don't worry being exploited as long as it makes their life a little better, just a little better. I hope some awakening happens there but the government won't it let happen.

roc• 17 years ago

Why do you think their government is trying so hard to maintain (the appearance of) economic growth?

Their ability to maintain the status quo is essentially tied to double-digit economic growth. If their economy slows down to even modest growth they face serious unrest.

jeffesp• 17 years ago

And I wonder how many of those that realize are willing to change their lifestyle based on that knowledge? To be honest, I am not doing my part.

zimbabwe9• 17 years ago

Neither am I. I wouldn't know where to begin; I don't know even if I've got the strength to go without much of what I use daily.

onreact-com2• 17 years ago

I try. I support fair trade wherever I can. Mostly groceries but there is fashion as well and I hope soon more tech products will be available in the near future.

xenophanes• 17 years ago

What do you mean spot on? It's not a serious post. It presents no evidence. He's joking around as usual.

edit: i'm seriously being downmodded for saying a post accusing apple execs of conspiracy to commit murder was a joke? and the prevailing view here is we should take that post as an accurate (radical lefty) political statement? and praise it even though it gave no political arguments capable of convincing someone who was unsure?

zimbabwe9• 17 years ago

FSJ at his best is satirical, not joking. He's funny but he makes good points anyway. His little rant paragraphs 2-4 is spot-on.

cmars2322• 17 years ago

Cheap in price, but also quality. The crap we buy today feels like garbage compared to 20 years ago. Maybe I'm getting old, but consumer products today seem watered down and made of the weakest thinnest plastic that the masses will put up with.

This applies to consumer electronics, appliances, kid's toys, you name it.

jdbeast00• 17 years ago

Are you saying that products like the iphone are crap? Sure, you can buy the cheapest thing possible from walmart and save money, and sure, it'll break faster than a a higher-quality product. Its called choice. Even the high quality stuff coming out of china, like an iphone, is made much more inexpensively than we could make them in the states.

jfoutz3• 17 years ago

Pop culture disagrees. 22 years ago, Dark Helmet: Out of order? FUCK! Even in the future, nothing works!

I'd bet when you think of old stuff, you think of a singer sewing machine or a '57 chevy, stuff that withstood the test of time. well the world was full of crap then too, most of it broke and got thrown away. My toys are more than 20 years old. they are cheap plastic. they aren't even painted, just a few sucky stickers. Our microwave when i was a kid would make parts of food smoke while leaving other parts frozen solid. Consumer electronics? i think timex made it's reputation by being a slightly less crappy watch.

You name it. You can certainly find 1 example of a stellar product that lasts for years and years. There are hundreds of that products peers in the landfill.

gaius4• 17 years ago

It isn't really, tho'. For product X you could spend $y every year on Chinese-made because it's broken or obsolete, or $10y just once on German qualitat that will last for the rest of your life. We could all own fewer but better things, all made by workers who were decently paid and it would be cheaper. The difficult question is, why do so few people even want that?

axod• 17 years ago

I expect mainly because in the world of tech, things only have a life of maybe 2 years before they're considered 'old'/'obsolete'/'stupid looking' etc.

Memory, megapixels, storage, screen, speed etc are all advancing so quickly that it doesn't make any sense to bother making something that'll last beyond a few years.

It would however be cool and responsible to make these devices more environmentally friendly, but that's a hard sell to some.

I'm sort of glad I didn't spend the extra on my first MP3 player - 32mb of wonderment.

whughes3• 17 years ago

No, you couldn't. You spend $10y on a computer or a cellphone made in Germany, it'll still be completely useless within a decade or two. Tech is different.

biohacker424• 17 years ago

Well not quite spot on. It did mention that these people were willing to do what ever to get away from the hellish alternative they were born into. But if you blinked you missed it, you missed the most important point:

People are doing this voluntarily. Rumors of forced labor are greatly exaggerated. Perhaps somewhere in Burma but in China and India and other places, people do this hard work because the alternative is harder. This is how you work your way up from a very low starting point.

England wasn't always a workers' paradise either. Wages in China will rise.

garply• 17 years ago

Thank you for making this point. This happens to be the position on the economic ladder where these people are. A few people are higher, most people are at a level equal or lower to this.

In some ways I feel like the tone pieces like this take when discussing Chinese life is condescending. For some people this is just 'work.' Consider using this kind of pity to talk about American blue collar workers - does it seem appropriate?

neilk5• 17 years ago

If you saw a drowning person, would you ask them to be your slave forever in exchange for throwing them a life preserver? That's a voluntary exchange too, but you're still a dick for doing it.

Yes, most of these jobs are better than the alternative, namely, starvation in the countryside where there are no jobs. In the worst cases, (not all) these jobs pay so little that the workers can't accumulate capital, can't send their kids to school, etc. And due to the magic of subcontracting, the large Western employers have no long term investment in the country -- they'll pick up and leave when the next country over offers them a slightly better deal.

In Thailand I met a woman who was working for a private museum. She had figured out that her boss had basically made his fortune through selling slaves. Voluntary indentured servitude for several years, sold out of villages. And this isn't just some backwater, Thailand is where a lot of manufacturing is happening lately.

domodomo• 17 years ago

I used to work in IT for a Taiwanese manufacturing company that sold to Walmart & Sams Club, with factories primarily in southern China (near Guangzhou).

Spent a fair amount of time in these factories. First thing is, no factory makes everything themselves, it's a huge network of factories and a buddy network of factory managers who supply varying levels of material to one another. That's part of the reason it's difficult to ascertain the true quality of life of workers associated with making a product, because down the line many factories go into making one finished product.

I can say from my own anecdotal experience labor conditions are mixed bag. The light industry factories seemed to have safer conditions, and my companies factories were pretty decent. One iron processing factory I saw down right scary, imagine vats of molten iron at ground level, and operators in bare feet.

One counter-intuitive thing I saw is that workers will often protest not when worked too hard, but when worked too lightly. Many factory workers WANT long hours so they can send more money back to relatives, or increase their personal savings. At least when I was there five years ago, it could be dangerous for a factory to be light on hours, as employees will quit and move to a factory where there are more hours to be paid. With the economic slowdown, this might have changed.

What I'm getting at is it's hard to generalize about labor conditions in China, so saying things like they are all "slave labor" isn't really useful. You have to look at the specific circumstances of that companies manufacturing chain, if you are able.

wsprague• 17 years ago

That is one of the best posts I have ever read.

mrshoe4• 17 years ago

This exposes the truism that there is always a standard of living continuum in society. In a different era there were Kings and Lords and Peasants. Now we have Europeans and Americans and Chinese and Indians.

If globalization can succeed at improving the standard of living for those at the bottom of the continuum, it will have to be at the expense of those at the top. It's a zero sum game.

Ardit202• 17 years ago

Unless of course technology can improve things. I doubt the Chinese have the technology we do.

caffeine• 17 years ago

The Chinese make the technology we do. But we make new stuff. So, the race is on. (That said - go to your local research university's Bioengineering department and tally up the various races. China's going to pwn us. Bad.)

zimbabwe9• 17 years ago

How is it zero sum? I'd make you a bet that right now, more people are living happily than ever did in the past. The bar constantly rises.

mrshoe4• 17 years ago

It's zero sum at any given moment, but you are correct that the sum constantly increases. It's similar to the stock market in that way.

mrshoe4• 17 years ago

Let me expand upon my one line explanation. I apologize for being terse last time.

Let's say the stock market increases at 10% per year. This growth is driven by more capital being invested in the market each year. That means everyone in the market earns 10% interest every year, right? Well, in reality, that's not the case. Some people earn 30% and some people lose 20%. In fact, if anyone earns over 10%, that means that someone else must be earning less than 10%. So, maybe it's a 10-sum game, but most people still use the term "zero-sum game" to describe the situation.

Distribution of wealth and standard of living work the same way. Everyone's standard of living is increasing at 10 moon units per year. This growth is primarily driven by technology. However, if people in emerging markets are to have their standard of living increase at 15 moon units per year (which it is, and that's great), then someone else will have their standard of living increase at less than 10 moon units per year. That doesn't mean that our standard of living will decrease (although I wouldn't rule that out); it just won't increase as rapidly.

silentbicycle2• 17 years ago

Yes, but in a different era kings still died from things that can be easily cured with antibiotics, or made endurable with insulin.

philwelch2• 17 years ago

Actually, globalization does improve the standard of living for those at the bottom, to the benefit of those on top. People work in sweatshops (which sucks from the point of view of rich Westerners), but they voluntarily chose to do so because it was an improvement on their previous standard of living. So their standard of living improves, and so does the standard of living for those of us who buy manufactured goods at lower prices.

jpwagner• 17 years ago

I really hope one day we learn that FSJ = SJ.

s3graham• 17 years ago

Learning NP = P is more likely.

myth_drannon• 17 years ago

I'm posting two very interesting blog posts about China factories and its "bio-robots" but it's in Russian :( May be try google translate... Mices and headphones: http://sergeydolya.livejournal.com/55293.html Sony and Panasonic factories: http://sergeydolya.livejournal.com/55924.html

Ardit202• 17 years ago

Of course we do not care man. It is not like the Chinese gave us the wealth. We invented stuff, we traded with other countries and shared our knowledge, they decided to close up, to live in some island, and now that they are opening up they will have to start at the bottom no.

You may ask whether the birth lottery is any fare and I do not know about that one really, it is, it goes really deep and it effects everyone, but being a practicalist, although this one event may be unfortunate, until the Chinese government opens up fully and adopts our values, there is not much we can do really. So stop crying and start working on making those super cool macs cheaper :)

stavrianos• 17 years ago

It's obvious the birth lottery isn't "fair". It's just as obvious that fairness is irrelevant.

sofal• 17 years ago

This applies to the food industry as well, like how we get our meat. We'd be better off if the things we buy were responsibly produced and priced. It's hard to know what we can do about it besides voting with our dollars and educating others.

c0nsilience• 17 years ago

While the story had some decent points to it, the ending was a really horrible cop out and cowardly way to accuse the young man of stealing an iPhone. Even if it is true.

onreact-com2• 17 years ago

Soon enough when there is no manufacturing left elsewhere China will capitalize on their monopoly and the rest of the world will have to work 7 days 80h+ shifts to make a living.

ErrantX• 17 years ago

There is no message in this post, no "good points" (to a point). Clearly the writer has no experience of Chinese culture or has ever really been there (I know its satire - but the point is to make a point, no?).

Considering cultures in Asia/Africa (possibly even South America) from a Western perspective will always lead you to draw conclusions such as "slave labour" and "abuse".

Now, I'm not going to deny for a moment that such things do go on - but not in quite the same way and on the scale certain people wish to imagine.

Anecdote from my university course: our dept. was open 24/7 (even on Sundays if you had a special pass). I would regularly walk past the lobby at 1am and see the Chinese continget (there were many on my course) still working there. We tried to get some to come to a pub once and they didnt really get the whole relaxing/chilling out thing.

It was an interesting insight into the culture - and when I was lucky enough to travel in some of the less well known areas of Asia you see it in even more detail. Greater thabn 40hr weeks are not borne out of the manufacturers getting more out of the labour. It is borne out the culture (and, yes, they took advantage of it).

China and "our standard of living"

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