Cybargs wrote:
Jaekus wrote:
I guess Jay's reasoning is all wages should be on par with what China pays its workers. Maybe then the US could bring back much of its own manufacturing industry it has lost to offshore production.
wages are just a small part of the manufacturing game. you could prop up factories in africa coz its cheaper, doesnt mean shit when you have to spend a ton of money bribing officials, pull security, build the roads, have local labour not fuck up your production. Jay has never worked in manufacturing in his life yet he's an expert because "lol hayek."
China is not cheap anymore to manufacture goods. cost of living is skyrocketing there. fuck you pay more for starbucks in china than in America. it's not cheap doing business there anymore unless you want to build a factory in the bumfuck middle of nowhere and have fun paying the tolls and dealing with chinese shipping companies.
Wages ebb and flow based on a number of factors. Living in an expensive place doesn't really make you wealthier. You end up with more people at, near or below the poverty line. Sure, if you make it up to the middle class you have a lot more disposable income to blow when you visit cheaper places, but getting there is harder and maintaining any sort of quality of life is more difficult. Yes, dropping $300 on an xbox is a lot less jarring for me than it is for someone who lives in the Southern US where the cost of living is halved, but the tradeoff is my taxes dwarf theirs by many orders of magnitude and I have to spend 3 hours a day commuting to work to have more than 5000 square feet of property for under a million dollars.
As for China, this is why manufacturing is now moving to India and Vietnam and Malaysia, and yes, back to the US too. The Chinese are good at manufacturing bulk commodity trash that gets thrown away. They are completely fucked in a world where their wages aren't rock bottom making said trash attractive due to pricing. Crash imminent.
