Cheap labour has built China’s economic miracle. Its manufacturing workers toil for a small fraction of the cost of their American or German competitors. At the bottom of the heap, a “floating population” of about 130m migrants work in China’s boomtowns, taking home 1,348 yuan a month on average last year.
That is a mere $197, little more than one-twentieth of the average monthly wage in America. But it is 17% more than the year before. As China’s economy has bounced back, wages have followed suit. On the coasts, where its exporting factories are clustered, bosses are short of workers, and workers short of patience. A spate of strikes has thrown a spanner into the workshop of the world.
The hands of China’s workers have been strengthened by a new labour law, introduced in 2008, and by the more fundamental laws of demand and supply (see article). Workers are becoming harder to find and to keep. The country’s villages still contain perhaps 70m potential migrants. Other rural folk might be willing to work closer to home in the growing number of factories moving inland.
But the supply of strong backs and nimble fingers is not infinite, even in China. The number of 15- to 29-year-olds will fall sharply from next year. And although their wages are increasing, their aspirations are rising even faster. They seem less willing to “eat bitterness”, as the Chinese put it, without complaint.
“WITH iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations—none of which I know how to work—information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment.”
In a speech to students at Hampton University on May 9th, Mr Obama did not just name-check some big brands; he also joined a long tradition of grumbling about new technologies and new forms of media.
Socrates’s bugbear was the spread of the biggest-ever innovation in communications—writing. He feared that relying on written texts, rather than the oral tradition, would “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls…they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.”
Enos Hitchcock voiced a widespread concern about the latest publishing fad in 1790. “The free access which many young people have to romances, novels and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth.” (There was a related worry that sofas, introduced at the same time, encouraged young people to drift off into fantasy worlds.)
Cinema was denounced as “an evil pure and simple” in 1910; comic books were said to lead children into delinquency in 1954; rock’n’roll was accused of turning the young into “devil worshippers” in 1956; Hillary Clinton attacked video games for “stealing the innocence of our children” in 2005.
Bill Gates just retweeted an article on The Economist along with the statement that it “does a good job of summarizing the scientific discussion on global warming”. Surely enough, the once-richest man in the world had it right.
For a planet at a constant temperature, the amount of energy absorbed as sunlight and the amount emitted back to space in the longer wavelengths of the infra-red must be the same. In the case of the Earth, the amount of sunlight absorbed is 239 watts per square metre. According to the laws of thermodynamics, a simple body emitting energy at that rate should have a temperature of about –18ºC.
You do not need a comprehensive set of surface-temperature data to notice that this is not the average temperature at which humanity goes about its business. The discrepancy is due to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which absorb and re-emit infra-red radiation, and thus keep the lower atmosphere, and the surface, warm (see the diagram below). The radiation that gets out to the cosmos comes mostly from above the bulk of the greenhouse gases, where the air temperature is indeed around –18ºC.
Graphs care of The Economist. Not being an American taxpayer myself, I blame my ignorance of the staggering implications of the Bush-era tax cuts on the “need to know” rule.
This is something Barack Obama has been at pains to point out, as Republicans have attacked him as a profligate spender and runner of deficits. Most of today’s borrowing, he has said, is attributable to factors beyond his control. He is essentially pointing people to charts like the one at right.
That’s a damning chart. It implicates a lot of people, including some of the same Congressional Democrats who are now joining Republicans in assailing the president for budgeted deficits, but who voted for the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Politically, this is a pretty important chart.
That said, these most recent contributions to the federal debt appear to be irrelevant when looking at the long term:
That massive increase there at the end is due to two things: growth in spending on Medicare and Medicaid, and growth in interest payments on the debt. But the real problem is Medicare and Medicaid. By about 2070, spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid alone will outstrip revenues.
In the end, who caused what deficits when isn’t important. What is important is finding some way to avoid that spike. And both parties seem to be a long way away from having anything like a serious discussion about that challenge.
From the Canada West Foundation’s discussion paper Look Before You Leap comes a rather compelling reason why Canadians should consider “the importance of the oil and gas industry to the Canadian economy [and to take] into account when debating how to address greenhouse emissions in Canada.”
Unlike most of the world, it appears that Iceland’s failed banks won’t be bailed out using public funds. The situation is unique and unprecedented – but while the Icelandic taxpayer may have made the right moral choice, they’re probably doing the wrong thing in realistic terms: As badly as their bankers may have behaved, this is not the right time to display to the world the fact that your money is not safe and secure in your country’s banks.
Another good point made in the article (one I haven’t quoted below): These failures occurred at “the hands of inept politicians, bumbling regulators, a farcical central bank, abuse of deposit insurance and the adventurous world of currency traders,” not at the behest of a free market/laissez-faire system. Like all scams, the Icelandic one was a timebomb, a plot derived from greed and ignorance.
In many countries, taxpayers are rightly cranky over the idea that their governments are bailing out banks and others — including their own regulators and central bankers — who helped create the 2008 global financial meltdown. Iceland appears to be setting a new standard of taxpayer response that politicians everywhere might want to note.
Under pressure from voters and taxpayers, Iceland’s President, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, this week refused to sign a bill to reimburse almost $6-billion to Britain and Holland for money paid to depositors who put money into two high-flying Icelandic banks that failed in 2008. The president was responding to taxpayers who are essentially rebelling against being forced to pick up the tab for a financial bailout of depositors, regulators, foreign governments and even their own government and politicians.
It is only a bit of an exaggeration to say that the people of Iceland are refusing to pay for all the schemes of private bankers and public officials who, over the course of the last decade, drove the whole of Iceland into bankruptcy.
Criminal acts like those by Major Nidal Hassan at Fort Hood raise the question of how a native-born son of an inclusive, democratic nation like the United States or Britain could turn against it and hold in their heads ideas that mere common sense would dispel.
The commentary is comprised of four parts, and is seemingly out of order: The discussion of why Britain gives birth to extremists is the third act. This is the part I’ll post below.
As children and teenagers, the ex-jihadis felt Britain was a valueless vacuum, where they were floating free of any identity.
Ed Husain, a former leader of HT, says: “On a basic level, we didn’t know who we were. People need a sense of feeling part of a group – but who was our group?” They were lost in liberalism, beached between two unreachable identities – their parents’, and their country’s. They knew nothing of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or the other places they were constantly told to “go home” to by racists.
Yet they felt equally shut out of British or democratic identity. From the right, there was the brutal nativist cry of “Go back where you came from!” But from the left, there was its mirror-image: a gooey multicultural sense that immigrants didn’t want liberal democratic values and should be exempted from them. Again and again, they described how at school they were treated as “the funny foreign child”, and told to “explain their customs” to the class. It patronised them into alienation.
“Nobody ever said – you’re equal to us, you’re one of us, and we’ll hold you to the same standards,” says Husain. “Nobody had the courage to stand up for liberal democracy without qualms. When people like us at [Newham] College were holding events against women and against gay people, where were our college principals and teachers, challenging us?”
Currently imprisoned but still prolific writer Conrad Black has a three page editorial on the rise of China and if the West has anything to fear from it. In short, no, but the article is an interesting read anyways. I’ve extracted the portions that highlight China’s strengths and weaknesses below.
Since 1978, [China's] annual economic growth rate has been a formidable 8% to 9%; and since 1990, per capita annual income has risen from $350 to $3,000. There are the predictable claims of imminent Chinese world economic supremacy, but we have heard all that before from the Nazis, Soviets, and Japanese, and they should be received with caution.
There are still at least 800 million Chinese peasants who live much as they did thousands of years ago. There is a population control plan that will raise the average age by one year every two years for at least two decades, and reduce the worker-to-retiree ratio from 3-to-1 to 2-to-1 in the next 20 years. There are acute shortages of land and water, and most social services.
Government spending on health and education has declined from 25% to 35% in 20 years. The private sector has taken up a lot of this, but about half the population receives no medical care at all. The percentage of middle school students going on to high school has actually declined by a third in the last 20 years.
The state still owns the country’s banks, natural resources, heavy industry and telecommunications, and controls about 35% of all production. Ecological damage is very serious and costly, affecting three quarters of the country’s water courses and most of its air. Distinguished China specialist James Fallows reckons that China suffers 250 deaths in mining accidents every day.
It’s obvious that a lot of Torontonians are become especially disenchanted with Mr. Miller after the garbage strike debacle, but I hadn’t realized that the disapproval extended to key re-election personnel like Mr. Lean and Mr. Crombie. That’s big news.
I was concerned about other candidates splitting the opposition vote and handing the election back over to Mr. Miller, but it sounds like there will be an united front against the incumbent. That’s good news.
Ralph Lean, the chairman of the Cassels Brock law firm, has a long list of grievances against his Mayor, David Miller. Yesterday, he took time off from golfing in the Justin Eves Foundation charity tournament in Milton to spell those out in detail.
He is upset at Mr. Miller for overspending, for failing to freeze councillors’ salaries, for narrowing Jarvis Street, for fighting with Porter Airlines (“I’m a big supporter of Porter”) and for refusing to examine outsourcing some city functions.
Mr. Miller could shrug this off, except that Mr. Lean is not just any old disgruntled voter: one of the city’s most influential fundraisers, he co-chaired the team that funded Mr. Miller’s runaway victory in the 2006 municipal election. And now Mr. Lean is walking away.
“I quite like David Miller,” Mr. Lean said. But, he adds, “He’s gotten off track. He’s made a lot of mistakes. His supporters on council have pushed him in directions I don’t agree with.”
“Everybody I talked to, 100% of the people, have stopped supporting the Mayor,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my political career.”
Mr. Lean now says he will support either Mr. Tory or George Smitherman, the deputy premier, in a mayoral bid.
“I guarantee you one of those two will run,” Mr. Lean says, adding, “Both of them told me, ‘Only one of us is going to run.’ ”
Mr. Crombie is also declining to work on another Miller bid for the mayoralty, although he took pains to say he is not opposing the Mayor. He says he signed on in 2006 because it was a multi-party effort with Mr. Peterson and Mr. Miller, to make Toronto better.
While I’ve been aware of the media furor over Abdel Basset al-Megrahi’s release and return to Libya, only today did I happen across something that made me sit up and take interest in the affair. Read ahead.
Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, having served about eight years of a life-sentence imposed on him in 2001 for his role in bombing Pan Am Flight 103 that exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 259 crew and passengers and 11 people on the ground, was set free last month as an act of executive clemency by Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill.
Well, why did Scotland release him? Those who know the West have a better question. Why did Scotland jail him in the first place?
The crime was heinous; the investigation slipshod, even corrupt. The evidence against the two Libyan suspects, Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, was so flimsy it left the Scottish judges no choice but to acquit Fhimah.