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Originally Posted by Stamen
Like I said, the average person in India is too poor right now to purchase our goods. Thats changing now, and in the last 2 years India's non-oil imports have raised by more then 30% per year.
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There's no doubt that some of India's inhabitants are getting richer. That wasn't the point... the point is that the average indian salary (and indeed, the cost of living) are so much lower as to make the equalization path take on epic proportions, and that India is only one country among many that could be outsourced to. In fact, there are rumblings from people IN INDIA about people worrying that those new jobs will be further outsourced to even poorer countries (although I suspect such rumors to be injected into the work force to keep people dutifully grateful to be employed, etc).
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And as far as things being cheaper to make here in the USA, Japan and Europe send alot of things over to the USA because we are more efficient at pumping them out. For example, in India the average worker may be able to make 5 widgets a day, but here in America, the same worker on a more efficient machine can pump out 50 widgets a day.
I can afford to pay 10x as much for the American worker, because I'm getting 10x the product daily.
So this "potential" is reality... it is what has happened and what is happening.
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I'd love to see a citation of this. Not saying that I don't believe you, but I've never come across anything that says a worker in the US is 10x more efficient than a worker in Europe due to some magical machine (that could be duplicated) or some special training (that could be exported). I'll assume that 10x is hyperbole for demonstration purposes... but I'd still like to see a citation where widgets are being produced in the US over, say, china... and why. I suspect in many of those cases, it's simply because it minimizes shipping costs. If so, then that's in line with what I predicted in an earlier posting: That oppressive shipping costs bourne of increased price in fuel will help equalize that pressure.
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And for you to insinuate that these people affected by outsourcing end up working at Wal-Mart is ridiculous. Like you said, Wal-Mart is as low as you go, but its also a long way down with many stops along the way if you are eager to work. And Wal-Mart was growing and people were working there on shitty wages long before outsourcing was an issue, but thats a whole other bag of worms.
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Quite a number of them will. Quite a number of them ARE. Have you looked at how many people wal*mart employs, lately? It's probably unknowable how many of those people have once had more useful, gainful employment... but I know at least 3 people offhand who've been forced to go down that road in recent times.
Yet I'm not saying that there's an absolute guarantee that an outsourced job equates to 2 new wal*mart employees ('cuz the wife, who had the luxury of tending to the homestead has been forced into the workplace to fight for her $172/wk net). I said that this inevitably leads to the <b>Wal*martization of the economy</B>, because the very nature of the movement of capital and labor in outsourcing syphons cash from the middle class (in jobs) and lower class (that buy the cheap product) to give to the outsourcees (in jobs, albiet low paying by our standards) and the corporation (and thence to the directors and boardmembers, in enormous bonuses and salaries).
Taken to its logical extreme, given a perfectly mobile workforce and a perfectly accessable market, the world would eventually 'settle out' into 2 strata... for which I borrowed from H.G.Wells' concept of the Morlocks and Eloi (and incorrectly attributed to Johnathon Swift. Bad me!) of a huge underclass toiling away purely to service the upper echelons. Of course in The Time Machine, the Eloi end up literally being lunch for the morlocks, not an unheard of consequence when one risks alienating a much larger (and angrier!) population for your own mean benefits.
My assertion is that this "Gods and Clods" scenario is bad for the planet as a whole, yet that's the direction we're moving in for lack of sufficient counterbalance so long as men with power consider Mammon and the gospel of Milton more important to please than the people they hold sway over.
For the record, if it HAS to end up this way, I sure as fuck don't want to be a Morlock, and I don't intend to be.
