On Sep 29, 2004, at 3:13 AM, Erik Reuter wrote:
[actually a forward of an article by Brad DeLong]
What are the people who used to sit in their huts and make coir mats doing instead? We don't know. But we do know one thing: Whatever they are doing, they would rather be making coir mats.
I believe that is an indefensible assertion. There is no evidence to support this conjecture; the people making mats might well instead be performing some other labor, at a factory perhaps instead of in their one-room hovels, that pays considerably more than the money-grubbing racket ever did.
My postulate is just as feasible, just as likely as the worst-case speculation submitted by DeLong.
Those who took up the option of making coir mats did so because it seemed to them to be the best available option.
That's similarly insupportable. Certainly making mats is not preferable to acquiring an education (there *are* public schools in India). This is another premise that DeLong wishes us to accept without consideration of plausible alternatives.
The problem is that the foregoing assertions, which are glossed over and buried in a way that makes it seem like they wish to be hidden, carry no weight, even though the entire crux of DeLong's argument is (in essence) that the desperately poor choose to remain so. ("If they didn't have doormats to make they'd be doing something worse/less productive.")
There's subtle -ism at play here too, possibly racism or culturism: If our great corporations didn't magnanimously extend their ever-so-generous economic patronage, keeping the lowest economic rung occupied, why, who knows what mischief Those People might get up to? Perhaps manufacturing drugs (to sell to the wealthy) or engaging in petty cutpursery (perpetrated against wealthy tourists) -- in other words, we're keeping them economically suppressed for their own good (and to protect White Folks from Those People's idle, devil-occupied hands), because like the blacks were in the Southern US in the early 1800s, they's jus' too simple to knows any betta', boss.
DeLong's argument sounds very suspiciously like some of those advanced to support slavery, but that's hardly surprising, as toiling day after day making mats for a corporation, with no hope whatsoever for advancement or escape, is, in essence, just that.
And we--by trying to preserve our moral purity by not becoming polluted by physical contact with the products of Third World labor--have stolen that option from them.
Used to be that liberals were bashed for wanting to "throw money at a problem" to make it go away. I'm unable to distinguish a difference here. Spend money buying fourth world goods and the problems in those countries will evaporate? Piffle.
The problem with the "do something worse than..." argument is that it's totally hollow. If an exploitive, wealthy culture moves in and abuses the local economy for its massive gain (and minimal recompense is offered to the laborers), that culture has effectively become a monopoly -- on *work source*.
If that massive, or even large-scale, work source were not available, other modes of employment, which might or might not be "better", would become available to the locals. (What did they do before old white cows in the states got a collective moistie for doormats? India's culture is about 20 times as old as America's -- 5000:250 years -- they had to be occupied during at least SOME of that time.)
This is significant in part because, even if wages were worse, the odds of the business being owned and operated entirely by the locals would be much better. Whatever capital was made would then be diverted entirely back into the community -- not a pittance skimmed from vast offshore coffers.
What's being carefully ignored by DeLong, though, is the inverse pyramid. That a vast amount of capital is acquired by relatively few. This is a significant problem. Every economy that has *ever* existed with wealth concentrated among only a very few has been fundamentally unequal, fundamentally undemocratic, and in the main feudal. DeLong is arguing in favor of a feudalistic social structure that is covered with a very thin veneer of democracy (at best; at worst he's arguing for an economic colony-state), and it's reprehensible.
Of course this is precisely the same kind of drivel one hears from wealthy people in the US as well. And as the divide between rich and poor becomes greater in our "jobless" economic "recovery", as the middle class -- which used to be the backbone of American society -- continues to shrink, we're going to continue to see more dreck spewed from patsies such as DeLong as the US continues to more closely resemble the very third- and fourth-world countries it exploits for cheap labor now.
And as long as fools propagate this policy of usury, problems will continue to get worse, not better.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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