On Sep 11, 2008, at 6:27 PM, John Williams wrote: > Yes, people are too stupid and inept to improve their productivity > unless > the evil employers help them. And I see business owners going around > all the time telling their employees to reduce revenue and decrease > their productivity.
If you're working a 120+ hour work week with no free time at all, it's pretty hard to do much in the way of improving your employability unless your employer makes it possible. And that's pretty close to where the labor force was in the laissez-faire days of the Industrial Revolution, and that's almost exactly where a lot of the people in the currently unregulated cheap labor markets are right now. Stupidity and ineptness have nothing at all to do with it. (It's difficult to conceive of that sort of life in our labor system where we can earn overtime for more than 40 hours per week (as a disincentive to encroach on what's generally been agreed in recent decades should be workers' free time) and get weekends off, or some approximation of that.) > Wow, it is a good thing all the potential entrepreneurs have you to > warn > them about how they can never succeed. Most of them already know -- they don't need me to tell them. Ask anyone who's ever tried to start a business, and all but a very lucky few will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about how tricky it is to hit a market niche just right and avoid being squeezed out by major players who are doing their best to capitalize on your efforts to break open a new market sector. (Don't get me started on our byzantine 1800's era patent/intellectual property legal system.) > Anyway, compare the USA to the former USSR, or South Korea to North > Korea, > or Western Europe to Eastern Europe. Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwain > to China of 50 years ago. Or today's China to China of 50 years ago. It's rather important to keep in mind that the USA is still running to some extent on the momentum of the wartime mobilizations of WWII and Vietnam, which both had anomalous effects on the economy -- growth economies cannot grow without limit, and war has historically been the reset button that tends to start the growth cycle over at least to some extent -- and if we had started out in our pre-WWII economic state (and managed to stay out of WWII *and* avoid being occupied by Germany and Japan), and run our markets without any regulation at all, we would not be in anywhere near the economic state we're in now and our standard of living would be far worse. But war-mobilization effects aside, our economy is not even close to a completely unregulated free market, and to me, that's a good thing, as far as it goes. The leak in that system is still the fact that the USA's fair- labor standards are somewhat unilateral in the global economy, and until those standards are accepted on a much wider scale, we're basically held hostage by the countries who are willing to subject their people to grossly unfair labor conditions to make a quick buck. >> What I'm proposing is putting pressure >> on the safe-harbor countries that currently *don't* regulate labor to >> establish strong enough fair labor laws that they're no longer as >> attractive an alternative to doing business with US workers. > > Ah, not satisfied with being king of a country, you want to be king > of the world! Everyone must do as you desire! I'm proposing persuasion. You seem to be confusing that with coercion. >> but if the best choice I have is to either >> accept the employment terms the worst offenders offer, or not be able >> to work at all because a fair wage is priced out of the market, that >> choice kind of sucks, and I'd like a better one, thank you. > > Me too. The best way I have seen to promote rapid growth in living > standards > is free markets and free trade. China and (to a lesser extent) India > are making > rapid progress since liberalizing their economies (India still has a > ways to go). > Most of Africa, not so much. But that cannot be blamed solely on > lack of free > markets, there are other factors at work (Bernstein's book above > touches on > some of those). Well, at least we agree that the choice being offered to much of the labor force isn't really a palatable one. I'm going to have to agree to disagree with you on the means to negotiating a more satisfying range of choices. I don't see any real progress coming until everyone on earth in the labor force really is free to seek fair and reasonable employment -- as long as there are at least some who are at the mercy of governments (or lack thereof) who find it more profitable to throw them under the bus, that's where the work will go. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
