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HappySqurriel on 31 January 2010
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Kasz216 said:
SamuelRSmith said:
numonex said:
Outsourcing factory jobs to China is good in the short-term and significantly improves multinational companies bottom lines and profit margins. But in the long-term the loss of factory jobs results in higher unemployment in developed countries, local factories close down and consumers in developed countries may stop spending. Outsourcing lots of jobs ends up hurting a lot of people. 

Except that's not the case. Manufacturing in the UK, for example, has been falling for decades, now, and yet, recessions aside, employment has been rising - since the 2000s, in particular: when the rise of Asia started to go into full swing, and manufacturing started leaving at a much faster rate, and yet unemployment had been falling rather rapidly, also.

This is because new jobs are being created at a faster rate than which they are being lost. This is directly attributed to globalisation. What's happening is that different countries have different things to offer. China can offer cheap labour, so it's taking manufacturing. The UK can't offer this, however, but it can offer a far more educated work force, so businesses that focus on these areas flourish in our country. Hence our financial and research industries - China won't be able to compete at a grand scale with these industries for many decades, and, then, when they do, our competitive advantage in other areas will grow, and we'll specialise into a different area, again.

I'm not sure it will grow though.


China is currently running on a "have your cake and eat it too model."


They've got a official gini coefficent higher then the US, and it's considered in reality MUCH higher because a lot of wealth is off the books.

 

The China plan seems to be to keep "poor" china and "rich" china divided... and try and dominate both markets.  It's really a brilliant twisting of Marx fundamental rule.

People don't care if they're rich or poor, they care how rich or poor their neihbors are in relation to them.

 

This path could eventually lead to revolution, either as the poor are left in third world status while the rich are as rich as any american or europeon....

however it keeps the country split, since the rich while more and more affluent wont' want to rock the boat for democracy since it lets in all the poorer people and hurts them economically.

China can get away with this at the moment because of how undeveloped a large portion of their economy/work-force is; but at the rate their economy is growing it really won’t be that long before finding individuals who are willing to do this labour at such low wages will become impossible, and they will be forced into a more equitable distribution of income.

Realistically, 50 years from now I expect people to talk about China and India as being two massive modern economies where the standard of living of most people is (somewhat) in line with the rest of the developed world; and the production of cheap crap will mostly be focused in undeveloped nations (Africa would be my expectation) or by robots.