I had Steve Cheung for a class in the early 1970s. I heard him describe the
selling of children in China. His comment: "that's okay; they were just
maximizing their wealth." He seemed serious.
I bit my tongue rather than ask, "is that a positive or a normative
statement?"
----- Original Message -----
From: "michael perelman" <[email protected]>
To: "Progressive Economics" <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, March 24, 2009 3:09 PM
Subject: Re: [Pen-l] Law and Order: AEA
More Stephen Cheung, from my Manufacturing Discontent
Greg Clark proposed that "factory discipline [was] successful because it
coerced more effort from workers than they would freely give .... The
empirical evidence shows that discipline succeeded mainly by increasing
work effort. Workers effectively hired capitalists to make them work
harder" (Clark 1994, p. 128).
Greg Clark was referring to the sort of theory earlier proposed by
Clark Nardinelli, who, presumably in all seriousness, declared that
children in the factories would voluntarily choose to have their
employers beat them. In his words: "Now if a firm in a competitive
industry employed corporal punishment the supply price of child labor to
that firm would increase. The child would receive compensations for the
disamenity of being beaten" (Nardinelli 1982, p. 289). Does any parent
seriously believe that children would make such a calculation?
Similarly, Steven Cheung maintains that riverboat pullers who towed
wooden boats along shore line in Pre-communist China agreed to hire
monitors to whip them to restrict shirking (Cheung 1983, p. 5).
Even if these children defied all of our understanding of child
psychology and chose to have themselves beaten to earn more money for
their parents, would such treatment represent an expression of slavery?
For example, some people in impoverished nations, such as China and
Japan and Russia, were so destitute that they sold themselves into
slavery (see Patterson 1982, p. 130). Voluntary slavery is said to
exist today in some of the poorest parts of the world. Would any
rational person see slavery as an indicator of freedom or just as an
absence of choice?
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA
95929
530 898 5321
fax 530 898 5901
http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com
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