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this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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Chinese people deserve jobs too. Comparative advantage is a good thing that helps everyone involved.
The Yuan is currently trading at 7.32 to 1 USD
Companies that appease the CCP are the problem, not companies that leverage exchange rates to better lives globally.
Chinese people deserve good jobs, not jump off of a building to kill yourself, but wait your the 4th person to do that this month so they installed a net jobs.
I am questioning where I supported Chinese government policies here?
Because the initial concern was pay, and that's due to not understanding economic factors. I don't support Chinese labor regs at all.
In fact I said
"Companies that appease the CCP are the problem" which I also thought was a nice little pun, given the show being discussed.
I wonder why labor is cheaper in China.
Two big reasons
1: currency exchange rates
2: China is sill fundamentally agrarian and industrializing, and many workers are looking for (comparatively) higher pay
How is that a pun?
The show that Stewart walked out on is "The Problem with Jon Stewart"
Chinese people also deserve to not be sent to internment camps.
Yeah totally. Fuck the Chinese government.
Yes, fuck the Chinese government.
And the corporations, both Chinese and American, that help support it.
Depends on what that means imo. Global trade theoretically supports the Chinese government, because money is fungible, but is a net positive all around.
The Chinese will never stop clinging to autocracy without wealth of their own.
The "Chinese" will never have wealth, ask Jack ma.
The ccp would burn China to the ground before releasing an ounce of their power and stolen wealth.
That is not an excuse to stop trying to empower the Chinese to rise against their hellstate.
Capitalism broke the USSR and it will break the CCP.
No, just like capitalism didn't break the states that later formed the confederacy.
Even after they lost formal slavery they put horrible policies into effect like Jim crow and share cropping that allowed them to keep slavery in all but name, but were entirely compatible with capitalism.
Haiti understands this.
We need to stop enabling authoritarians, who do you think taught them how to build the great firewall, they bought literally all of their technology till now from us.
It literally did though. That's why they went to war - the writing was on the wall.
That means nothing without knowing the total supply
It means everything when talking about people's pay.
For that you need 2 data pieces:
You then use the second to convert the first into US Dollars so that you compare the Chinese salaries in USD to American salaries is USD.
Merely the second piece of data wIthout the first means nothing if you're trying to compare salaries.
For example, before the Euro the Italian Lira used to have a cross currency exchange rate with the dollar which was thousands of lire per dollar and that didn't mean Italians in the 80s were incredibly poor: because for every dollar the average US worker received in their salary the average Italian worker got thousands of lire, all put together mean they got about 1/2 to 1/3 of a US salary rather that the 1/1000 that by your the exchange rate alone suffices "logic".
By the way, that cross currency exchange rates are meaningless to compare incomes or costs without the actual incomes and prices in the local currency, is really, really, REALLY basic financial knowledge.
You don't need to do this because you only need to look at the fact that those jobs are competed for to see that they are desirable.
Wage parity isn't a meaningful discussion when discussing comparative advantage. Too many other factors come into play.
Okay but you realize that any job would be competitive in situations of poverty right? That's why you need the second data point.
That's specifically why comparative advantage is a good thing - lifting people out of poverty is a good thing.
To fully measure Comparitive Advantages, you must include the differences in manpower costs, which brings us back to salaries (plus, since this is to compare manpower costs, you also need things like the employer-side tax costs such as social security payments), which then needs to be converted to a single currency using cross-currency exchange rates.
Further, every single monetary elements of calculating Comparitive Advantage which is in local currencies needs to go through those cross-currency exchange rates in order to be comparable.
There is no way you can calculate comparative advantage merelly with the single datapoint which is a cross-currency exchange rate because all that tells you is the relation between two units of measurement and says nothing about the actual quantities being measured.
As I said, this is incredibly basic financial stuff.
To give you a really basic non-financial example which hopefully will make you understand it:
What you wrote in your original post is equivalent to saying that "The farm in Britain produces more milk because 1 pint = 1.759754 liters".
You don't know anything about how many pints the British farm produces, or about how many liters the Dutch farm produces, yet you claimed the ratio between two measurement units is enough by let you draw conclusions about production numbers even though you used no prodution numbers.
If I was to bet I would say you've read some articles about how the exchange rate of the Yuan vs USD is kept artificially low to increase the competiviness of Chinese exports, didn't quite understand how it works and still thought you knew enough and applied it were it wasn't applicable and/or in the wrong way.
No I just work in international business and know hy we outsource certain roles.
You keep pretending you know more about this, and you're describing irrelevant things. I took econ/IB in college too, bud. Lots of people do.
Since we're pulling rank, I worked in Finance, specifically the Investment Banking and the Funds industries, some of which being very well know names (Fidelity, Deutsche Bank, even Lehman Brothers back when they still existed), always in the EMEA divisions which, unlike our US colleagues, deal with cross-currency trades all day every day (because EMEA actually means Europe Middle-East and Asia, so it's a lot more than just trades on USD priced assets, for USD books, settled in USD).
So I'm quite familiar with exactly what cross-currency exchange rates mean, and it's painfully obvious that you have absolutelly no clue what you're talking about when you're quoting a cross-currency exchange rate by itself and claiming that alone is proof of comparitive advantage.
Lmao you either didn't work in finance or can't parse simple comments, which is why you no longer work in finance, but nothing I have said is incorrect whatsoever
Best of luck in your career move
LMAO!
Keep digging.
I do genuinely wish you luck, but I'll amend it to "when you graduate" too
Boy you sure do sound like you just got your MBA. Chasing the cheapest labor and lowest regulations really doesn't do much for the populace other than make them slave laborers for better products for the benefits of other nations.
If the wages are the same across multiple industries then it doesn't really help right? It's just taking advantage of a poor countryand enriching higher members of that country who actually do see the most profit gained.
It might help in getting advanced manufacturing set up in the country but that actually also hurts countries that rely on advanced manufacturing to keep GDP high when they are creating their competitors while doing little investment into themselves.
So yes it works to get the cheapest product possible but it's really not the super helpful beneficial concept that you think it is and the whole world is not richer for these jobs we give to them to enrich further a group that just chases the quickest profit.
It demonstrably improves their personal wealth, incentives inclusive institutions, and changes countries. History is most assuredly not on your side here.
Nativism is a plague and populism is the cancer nativism spawns.
What a strange take when a mountain of evidence is right in front of you. China went from "nothing but cheap labor" to the next world superpower because of exactly this kind of exchange. They have modern cities with rapid transit, EVs, and a top tier domestic tech industry.
Well yeah I mean I kinda covered that. They now have advanced tooling and active investments into their infrastructure and country. It's not yet actually reaching the majority of China and there is still wide issues with these investments. But now companies will have to find the new cheap labor if there is increasing access to jobs that are to pay enough for the citizens to access these higher standards.
A country can't be cheap labor and an important market without either massive divide in the populace or slave labor.
And if they can't get cheap labor there anymore these companies will leave and create rust belts like there are in the US. At which point the advanced manufacturing arm and service economy could take over if it's built enough but they join into a already crowded space with dwindling access to resources. Not to say things haven't gotten better in sense of moving forward technologically and amenities wise but that is basically always a guarantee of time passing. But this hunt for cheap goods for top level enrichment is not a wholly good venture and is quite destructive in ways that take little effort to see.
Why, specifically, do you hate the global poor?
Wow what a terrible response meant to cause an inflammatory response instead of having a discussion about a topic on an intellectual level. You have set up a pin with an impossible answer and claimed that you are the only right response to knock it down.
But, I have an answer. I care about their well being and not their economic status. I don't care if they are making more money or not and they aren't from my country. My countries laws will have no direct impact on them and while I care about the ecology of the planet I can't be reasonably expected to care about everyone.
You falsely assume globalist ideals are the only right way to live and I would rather care for those immediately around me who have an impact on my life.
We can aim for bettering of societies that aren't our own without it being based entirely around taking advantage of their cheap labor and unawareness of their lacking systems.
You speak as an economist who only thinks in terms of money without any real compassion and assumes money is compassion.
These two things are incompatible
And this is evil
Oh my God you are a moron. I am just so sorry, I thought you were capable of complex thought there.
Which I guess was my mistake, I did see your other comments.
...Evil. That's funny, you have definitely truly never met actual evil. Trust me it's much worse than loving those close to you and caring for others as much as you can, without over dedication of mental space to those you can't. And as annoying as you are I actually hope you continue to never have to deal with evil, I hope the world is better and you get to remain a protected smarmy dick. Evil is truly repugnant in a way you apparently can not actually comprehend and it's better if it stays that way.
Literally laughed out loud.
Thanks man.
Companies in China ARE the CCP. Nothing is actually privately owned. Everything is owned by the government, so giving any money to a company in China is supporting the CCP.
Lots of foreign companies have branches in China, including most global corps
True, but that is completely irrelevant to the topic of whether it is ethical to use cheap Chinese labor. Those branches are not the ones employing cheap labor from the blue collar workers in China. Those are almost entirely white collar jobs, and many of them are in place specifically to work with the local companies who DO employ the blue collar laborers. The sweatshops aren't OWNED by Nike or Gucci or Apple. They are contract facilities owned by a CCP-backed corporation.
Sure but that level of contracting is not contributing to the CCP so much as to the Chinese people
It's ethical to employ any sort of labor
did this mfer just imply slavery is ethical
Slavery isn't employment
You didn't say employment. You said labor.
I said to employ labor.
"Employ" is the verb form of the noun "employment."
Hope this helps.
Sure. The context makes it mean something else however. To employ also means to make use of something. You don't "provide employment to" labor, that would make no sense.
Besides, is the alternative that you think any worker treatment is fine so long as it's technically employment and not slavery? That's a little fucked innit
Rather than desperately trying to take me in bad faith, maybe read what I say.
If someone agrees to a certain rate of pay, they are not being exploited. There is nothing unethical about the hiring. I am obviously pro regulations like worker safety.
This is a really stupid discussion that should have been obvious if you weren't trying to be a shit.
lmfao
$3 per hour.
Ok?