Yes and no; a living wage in most of the East, Africa and Central America is still far from a living wage in the rest of North America, Australia or Western Europe. The former group could increase production standards (and finally enforce the few they already have) without jeopardizing that, but will not unless forced, because any such efforts must reduce (though never eliminate) the all-important cost advantage bringing them Western industry. And let us not kid ourselves: Authoritarian governments in China, Burma and Africa do not invite US and European multinationals to seek cheap labor and resources in their countries out of benign commitment to empower and enrich their people: They do it for their OWN personal enrichment at the peoples expense, which is how it usually works out in practice.


If you have data I would be happy to review it, but if the wealthy powerful elite running those countries have seen their wealth increased 1000%, that might well raise the per capita income of each nation a great deal, but does not mean the people as a whole are any better off than they were. Neither does increased consumption or wages if it simply means inflated prices for food, housing and other necessities, increased need for things like automotive and other transportation to reach their workplace, or increased availability of cheap consumer goods that do not make life any more livable, only distract from how unlivable it is.

A seldom discussed aspect of Chinas boom is how much farmland it has cannibalized for industry in a country that has for centuries terraced every square inch of arable land to feed itself. Perhaps the oldest cause of aggressive expansionist war is the need but inability to feed huge populations; conquest simultaneously increases ability while reducing need. Chinas shrinking agricultural land makes it hard to believe many people are any better off even if they earn nominally higher wages (which remains to be seen anyway, since inflation prompted China to do what the US has long demanded: Revalue the yuan.) Manufacturing goods for US companies to sell back home benefits China little if it must import more food at higher prices that consume any nominal wage growth.

Honestly, it seems hard to say, and the closed nature of China makes it even harder. Just googling "Chinese inflation" now I found a bunch of articles from two months ago touting 30 year low Chinese inflation, and a bunch of others from last month voicing alarm that runaway Chinese inflation may cause problems. Somewhere between "Chinese inflation hit a record low in July" and "Chinese inflation skyrocketed in August" lies the truth, but darned if I can see what it is.

http://www.businessinsider.com/china-inflation-2012-9
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/china-business/9463507/Chinese-inflation-falls-to-30-month-low.html
http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2012/07/23/will-inflation-scupper-chinas-rebound/#axzz27Lm76HKw

What I do know is that large hungry countries are almost automatically bellicose countries, and that Chinas manufacturing boom is coming at the expense of agricultural land that had already been overtaxed for centuries. Ignoring the implications of that, people making 50% more are no better off if demand pushes food and housing prices 100% higher and people who once lived and ate at their "workplace" now require a means of travel to it. At best it is a wash, however much Foxconn and similar execs benefit from shopping forced labor to Western multinationals.


The first bit is addressed above: Show me some data suggesting Chinese labor and consumer benefits are real, not absorbed by inflation and higher consumption NEEDS and/or largely confined to the governments business/party executives, and you might convince me.

As to the second, perhaps you are unaware of the contentious national fight over welfares very existence in the US, in no small part because of the amount it increases federal debt. US unemployment insurance expires, and Obama has only managed to convince Congress to extend, not SUSPEND, that expiration date. Even were that not so, if unemployed Americans were simply handed tax money to spend on Chinese products that would only be wealth redistribution on a global scale of which Marx and Mao could have never dreamed. Since that tax money came from people who were employed until they lost their jobs, it not only does not remedy the problem, but is reduced by it: When much of America has lost its job to Third World slaves and the rest has its wages reduced to compete with them, tax revenue will shut off like a tap, and there will be no funding to simply place everyone whose job went to China on welfare (not that that would be the most effective response in the first place.)

The reality, however, is virtually all gains go to Western multinationals, not Third World workers. It is not global wealth redistribution, but further concentration.

I suspect much current Third World poverty is from the dollars inflation after it left the gold standard, and thus hyperinflation in many countries with currency pegged to it (nearly all, under Bretton Woods, which the US ignored and did not alter in abolishing it.) Since many currencies remain pegged to the dollar, and it is usually the largest component of the "baskets" most others use, further devastating the US economy can only increase, not decrease, global poverty. Booming Third World manufacturing depends on Western, mainly US, consumption, unsustainable as ever more Americans lose jobs to the Third World. Again, even if giving them all welfare to continue that consumption were responsible it would not be VIABLE, because welfare comes from taxing the shrinking number of employed Americans.

Incidentally, do not take Americas 8.1% unemployment (still ~20 million people) at face value. The best estimate is that at least as many, if not more, Americans are "underemployed," working whatever job they can find for 30, 20 or less hours each week and still not able to cover their expenses. It does not take an economic genius to realize that if 40 million or more Americans are losing their homes an living off food stamps the market for Third World manufactured goods is in grave jeopardy. The claims Third World disposable income is rapidly growing had BETTER be true, because it is undeniable that First World disposable income is vanishing.


I still dispute the former, but not the lower price of Third World goods in dollars. The COST, however, involves far more than that. It is cutting off our noses to spite our faces; we were told 20 years ago "free" trade falsely so called would bring Western consumers a golden age of prosperity: WHEN?! To date I have only seen Ross Perots Giant Sucking Sound finish off unions Reagan dealt a mortal blow during the 1981 air traffic controllers strike. It is an old, frustrating and inexplicable debate for me, as I hear friends and family gratefully gush about how much farther they can stretch their shrinking budgets thanks to Wal$Marts "always low prices" on everything from TVs and computers to detergent and toothpaste, while complaining about losing their job to outsourcing, AS IF THE TWO ARE COMPLETELY UNRELATED.

To paraphrase the US president who first pushed the "free" trade treaties Clinton enacted, are you better off now than you were "free" trade ago...?

Anyone who signs paychecks on the front instead of the back is emphatically not, even if few realize they are "feeding the beast that killed them."


Show me. The people regularly jumping off Foxconns factories are not getting out of poverty, nor better wages and working conditions (that is, er, actually why they are killing themselves.) The students whose classes (and thus education) are cancelled so they can be bussed to Foxconn and forced to work there or receive no diploma are no better off than they were. Certainly the parents of kids kidnapped and enslaved in coal production are not, nor are the kids.

That China (sometimes) condemns and harshly punishes those who ordered that IF they are caught and exposed to global media changes nothing. Look at the poison grain scandal a few years ago: Throughout most of it China denied the grain had ever been IN, let alone processed and shipped from, their country; when the shipping manifests (naturally) proved that a lie, they grabbed a mid-level government bureaucrat, told us the whole thing was his doing and publicly executed him. Do you honestly think that changed their institutionalized policy even slightly? Why should it? The blanket denial until proof, followed by executing a scapegoat, was PART of that policy, and worked flawlessly: Why change what is working so well?

It may not be quite as bad in other Third World nations (or, more likely, it is just not as highly publicized since they do not command as much of the global labor market as China does,) but the pattern is the same. Were the Pakistani children forced to work fourteen hour days stitching Nike soccer balls better off for the experience and (nominal) wages? If so, why was force necessary? "Badly paid jobs at less than perfect working conditions are better than none"? C'mon, man, you can do better than the perennial battlecry of sweatshop owners.

Fair trade would be marvelous, but "free" trade is still no more or less than laissez-faire internationalism. Ultimately, it is not US, Western or any other labor and consumers vs. their Third World counterparts: It is people vs. multinational executives preying on all of them, in all nations. Most of those execs happen to be Western, especially American ones, but if you are worried about the Third World being again sacrificed to benefit Westerners, those are the Westerners who should concern you, because that is precisely what they are doing. They grease the palms of a few dictators and/or bureaucrats, as they always have, but a quick survey of Saddams palace should be enough to tell you THOSE Third World residents were never impoverished in the first place, and need no uplifting.

Laissez-faire internationalism, modern colonialism; whatever name you prefer, it is not improving the Third World. It is only justifying First World abandonment of all the consumer, labor and environmental reforms paid for in buckets of blood over the last century or more. It is not making "Red" China a workers paradise, but introducing it to the spectres of Dickens and Steinbeck, while reviving in Western countries that thought them long vanquished.