The Cost of Financialization-Globalization: You Lost $500k and Gained $137.13
charleshughsmith.blogspot.com
charleshughsmith.blogspot.com
There's an idea about financialisation, which is just completely wrong: he notes companies are willing to pay $20 billion for a $10 billion company, after selling it off for its pieces, and noting no value has been added.
Typically the reverse happens, companies get merged for economies of scale, thereby adding value through efficiency.
Sometimes companies are broken up because the individual pieces don't work well together anymore and create strategic issues, e.g. because a company has two units moving into two different directions, and require completely different strategy, people, ideas, customers, financing approach etc. e.g. a newspaper company that has a journalist branch that produces news, and a factory branch that produces printed (news)paper. That may have worked before. But in a digital age, journalists want to focus on news, and paper printing businesses on paper printing. You can lose value by tying these companies together under one CEO, one strategy, one financing model. You can add value by disentangling, letting them focus on their core business.
The notion you can routinely magically just sell for 20 billion, what you purchased for 10, without adding value, is I hope obviously nonsense.
Then there's a whole piece on globalisation... again, not sure where to start. The big claim is it reduces quality and this is a net loss for everyone, and that second, personal income has been dropping for decades. In reality, quality changes are well studied and part of inflation data, and personal income after inflation adjustment has been increasing for decades. [0]
This is just one face of financialization.It's known as asset stripping and it has a long wikipedia page so my sophomoric take is that it's probably real, but I'd be interested to see your rebuttal to it nonetheless.
>Typically the reverse happens, companies get merged for economies of scale
They typically get merged to bolster market power and they say that it's for economies of scale because it sounds like it's in the consumers interest rather than diametrically opposed to it and that's how to get mergers approved.
Anybody who has worked in a large multinational corporation of stitched together mergers could tell you just how kafkaesque the diseconomies of scale can be.
>Then there's a whole piece on globalisation... again, not sure where to start
Maybe don't.
Towards us employees as well as to the market the talk was always to generate better opportunities that one agency alone would not be able to target (read win pitches from the big corporations).
Shortly thereafter we were the biggest digital agency in ASGR (Austria, Switzerland, Germany & Russia) and every MD was clapping themselves on the shoulder for achieving this. Nobody seemed to mind that the status came because of a big shopping spree by Accenture and not from natural growth. And what does it actually mean to be the biggest?
But I have yet to see said opportunities being won after nearly 5 years.
Sure there were some big wins. But in the end the existing agency brands won these pitches, not because they were part of Accenture (Interactive) but brought their own DNA and approach to the table. On the contrary - having to price in the Accenture overhead either led to loosing because of being too expensive or the necessity to offshore most work to India (or nearshore towards Eastern Europe).
Each time they rolled out the efficiencies, synergies and economies of scale spiel and each time it got worse as they patched a new IT system onto an old one.
Or the necessity to forbid ssh connections in the corporate networks as well as ssh ports being open on cloud instances. If you need a shell use the one the cloud provider provides you in the browser.
While also installing software on your work machine that MITMles you opening up ssl connections (just for security reasons) at least in countries that don't have strong employer protection institutions in place (like mine).
/s
Pardon my sarcasm. I hear you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture#Split_from_Arthur_An...
Remember Enron?
Oh yeah, sure, they were separate divisions and all that...
> Early innovators of asset stripping were Carl Icahn, Victor Posner, and Nelson Peltz;[4] all of whom were investors in the 1970s and 1980s. Carl Icahn performed one of the most notorious and hostile takeovers when he acquired Trans World Airlines in 1985. Here Icahn stripped TWA of its assets, selling them individually to repay the debt assimilated during the takeover. This particular corporate raid formed the idea of selling a company's assets in order to repay debt, and eventually increase the raider's net worth.
But. The main point is, healthy corporations are not taken over in leveraged buyouts and whatnots. Companies that would be bankrupt soon are the targets. In that sense these raiders for their own gain what the bankruptcy proceedings does anyway.
> mergers
Yes, mergers lead to hilariously inefficient giants. And if it goes through the consolidation it manages to be more profitable than the "mergees" together. If it fails, well, eventually they'll lose market share and close, or sell of their parts, or one of the aforementioned corporate raiders does this for them, and so on.
However, many times the really big mergers are about simple oligopoly. At that point there's just no real competition between these entrenched already-giant entities. The diseconomies are already there.
If I made 50k in say 2012 and now make 52k in 2022. Did my spendable income increase?
The linked graph would imply that imho.
Because if you have a bar with 9 people and together they have each an average net worth of say 100k nothing much happens to the average when the next regular Jane enters the bar. But once Bill Gates (or Warren Buffet) enters the bar the average increases massively. But regular Jane and John Doe did not suddenly become more rich.
That is what I am trying to understand about the linked graph above.
Does it tell me that the average household in the US has now significantly more disposable income than in the past.
In my experience taking one single metric (be it mean or median) without context is more often than not because it supports a specific politicsl/ideological point of view.
Using the mean in this case supports the notion that globalization was a win for the American society.
Using the mean alone shows that it more or less did nothing (but maybe also did not hurt).
Showing the distribution or the mean increase per income bracket would show it benefitting the upper income/net worth levels while maybe hurting the people on the lower end.
Comparing income with buying power for specific goods (like done in other places of this discussion) is also often dependent on the political/ideological point of view.
Others have stated that nowadays everybody has a supercomputer in their pocket (implying things got better through globalization) while others pointed out that the average worker cannot afford a home for themselves and their family (implying globalization wasn't so great - at least not for everyone).
So it takes context and different metrics to at least paint a rich picture to enable us to rationally discuss good and bad sides of a phenomenon like globalization and what could be done to fix the bad things (if we (not you and me, but all discussion participants) could find middle ground in defining the same things as being bad).
I've yet to hear any of the former group actually say that they'd rather live on the street with an iPhone than in a house they owned in the 1960s with a rotary in spite of that being the implication.
Agreed that people cherry pick the specific goods vs inflation to defend their point of view. TVs vs College are typical examples of radically cheaper vs radically more expensive.
The housing situation is quite a bit more nuanced though, in my opinion. A lot of data shows it hasn't really been getting more expensive.
For one, we're not comparing the same houses. The average home size in 1969 was 1200 square feet. Today it's over 2400 square feet, or double.
Second, we're not comparing the same members of the household. Homes were shared by 3.33, now by 2.5. That's in part an indication of cultural change, but also in part a change in wealth and luxury, as the number of single-person households more than tripled since 1969, something unaffordable at the time.
Then there's the costs of the loan. Virtually nobody, certainly not first-time buyers, outright buys a home in cash, not then and not now. Homes are financed with mortgaged. The price of a mortgage is in the interest rate. Paying off the principal isn't an expense because it reduces your liability, any debt paid off means the equity is now yours, and if you sell the home you get the cash back. The interest you never get back, it's the price of the loan. The interest rate was 7.5%, now it's 3.5%, less than half.
Putting it all together, yes, nominal home prices are about 15x higher today. But the cost to rent money to own a certain size home per person, is indeed 14.8 / (3.332.55) (1200/2500) / (7.5*3.55) = 2.57x as expensive, nominally. Whilst median personal income grew by about 6-7x [0]
In other words, housing has gotten cheaper. It's the reason current prices are sustained despite the average house being 2x as big, and shared by 25% fewer people. The reason housing prices are so high is because we're living in bigger homes and sharing them with fewer people and paying less on the financing costs.
Not only 1.5 times like the median income: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30325835
Trend is clearly up, although some generations can experience a flat decade or so. Comparisons with 'back in the days' (e.g. 70s) show a clear 50% or so increase.
While for one 1975 dollar you would need to invest 5.22 today's dollars because of inflation [1].
So today the median income has massively less buying power compared to 1975 while chained dollars still outgrew the inflation.
Not yet sure what to make of this, but it might not be the success story.
[1]: https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1975#:~:text=Why%....
Wait, I don't follow. What I linked was real median income, i.e. it's already adjusted for inflation. So median income in fact has >58% more purchasing power than 1975.
This is nominal personal income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N
It grew by a factor 6.7x, whilst prices (using your inflation link) grew by a factor 5.23, since 1975. That translates to a purchasing power improvement of 28%. Different from the 58% figure above (which may use different inflation benchmarks), but obviously an improvement of purchasing power nonetheless.
If you compare that to slightly fewer working hours (5-6% reduction) and slightly more leisure (a few extra holidays), longer life expectancy (72->79) and longer retirements (5 -> 10y average), I'd say an improving purchasing power despite this is definitely a success story!
And it's also telling that no other giant felt to enter this space (Google after G+ just started to focus on B2B cloud/workspaces, and their B2C is limited to Youtube (Premium) and Android (Pixel and AndroidOne)).
Basically the only real competition is TikTok, which is made possible by high resolution/definition smartphone cameras and displays, and a ~10 second attention span. (Which is still more than the doomscrolling on IG/FB.) But since their revenue share model is very hostile/unfair to creators, in its current form it'll eventually hit a ceiling. (Or not, predictions are just predictions.)
> ARM
SoftBank found a buyer for ARM, but authorities stepped in. Is this good or bad?
On one hand it would have created a lot of added value for Nvida, so it would have been a mergers success story. But on the other hand Nvidia would have extorted the market (allegedly!) so it would have created (yet another) success story for the "capitalism bad" ongoing highly acclaimed ideology series.
> Apple
People seem to love Apple (people buy their expensive gadgets, like there's no tomorrow), and their acquisitions (like the well known laser drilled holes, and CNC machined bodies for their laptops [0]) allowed them to deliver those high quality gadgets with enormous profits.
Likely their acquihires are providing them a lot of added value ... and people seem to agree that Apple is good. So maybe acquihire is good too?
I assume 'you' in this piece isn't addressing the people in this circle[1]. I mean even the extremely wrong basis for that quoted claim aside (anyone who has visited an electronics store and compares quality and price to pre-globalization can verify that for themselves), I always find it funny how anyone can think globalization hasn't drastically improved the world we live in. It's somewhat bizarre to me that support for globalisation is being attributed to shills and some financialied elite. I don't know which 70s the author grew up in but I don't think a minimum wage worker had a pristine supercomputer in their pocket and a big flatscreen tv on the wall.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle#/media/Fi...
The author should be mapping the life of a 70th percentile person across all the decades... till the late 70s, that person was a poor industrial worker.
The existence of a 100 people with 100 billion each really does nothing for the real purchasing power of the middle and lower class. Income inequality is a red herring designed to act as a political wedge and distract you from a failing government.
It has many deleterious effects but the most visceral one is that it prices them out of the housing market. Those 100 people's purchasing power distorts the hell out of any market they dive into and real estate is very much one of their favorites.
Taxing them and all the people with wealth close to them to hell and back would make the real estate market sane again even if the tax money wasnt used to build new housing (which it should be).
Wealth inequality is the real killer though, and the measure that is the most out of whack. I The rule is that if you ever want to downplay how bad things are, focus on income inequality to the exclusion of wealth inequality.
It doesn't much matter if everyone lives in a 2-bedroom house and rides a bicycle to work, or in a 5-bedroom McMansion and drives a Lexus. DDG for "hedonistic adaptation." Or travel to poorer countries.
What does matter is /stress/.
Right now, most Americans seem to be living in a state of high financial stress. Baseline costs, e.g. college debt, housing costs, medical costs, and similar take a majority of people's income. The remaining disposable income might buy more computers and TVs than in 1950, but that doesn't matter much.
What does matter is that, for example, the short-term job loss, a litigation, a divorce, or a medical problem can lead to cascading financial ruin. It matters that the cost of raising kids puts having a family out-of-reach for many, or just very, very hard.
The economy in, for example, the Soviet systems was far poorer, but on the whole, everyone was guaranteed housing, food, and basic medical. People were happy enough.
I have mixed thoughts on universal basic income, but as I get older, I find concepts like that more and more appealing (personally, I'm more a fan of universal basic food, medicine, and housing, with all the complexities that entails). I also find Chinese-style socialization of land and of finance more appealing.
Concepts like this date back to Rome. The poor in Rome were guaranteed grain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cura_Annonae
Poor people and even the median did indeed become poorer, as wages either stagnated or even declined in real terms. Some consumer goods particularly electronics have decreased in price, but essentials have not: they increased a little (food) to a lot (housing, healthcare).
Poor people did not become poorer and incomes did not stagnate if you include benefits. Currently healthcare is more expensive, and a larger percentage of total compensation is given in health benefits.
Doesn't matter what your view on the health care issue is, if you're an employer, you spend more on your employees now than before
Which one makes for a successful society?
You couldn't have an MRI in 1970 because your hospital didn't have it. The technology of health care is now a lot more advanced and can add years to your health expectancy.
Now, there are government programs that help you pay premiums or give you free care. I was on Medicaid several years ago, so the poorest people don't have the issue of not being able to pay.
But that's a whole another topic. The point is you can't just compare what you can afford, because you're not comparing the same things. Houses are bigger these days as well.
UK seems worse, but other EU countries actually gone down, for instance France has had a big drop since the 50's.
Seems as unreasonable to blame the people who assemble your iPhone for Reaganomics as it does to accuse them of making consumer goods substantially worse than the great phones we had in the 1970s!
Single worker households, healthcare, education, home prices, etc. being what they were in the 1970s would’ve prevented LED TVs and iPhones? Really?
A weak and hollow response would be defending that absurdity by constructing a straw man to attack me with (ignoring what I actually said about welfare policies, which is that they have little to do with globalization).
I could be wrong of course but it seems to me consumer electronics need to be so cheap because people don't have money.
So sometimes I am not sure how much of the US is (in parts) a developing country in disguise?
And from 1st hand experience I can only say that I have to come to that conclusion for parts of Germany (where I am from and living). There are big-ish areas in Germany where you can't call emergency services from a mobile phone as there is not one carrier servicing these areas. If you happen to have an emergency there - good luck.
But as only a few people live there it doesn't make economic sense to service these areas and build the necessary infrastructure for the service provider companies. So these areas go unserved.
Even poor Eastern European villages do better sometimes.
Ukraine 100 mbps 6.19 $
Romania 1 Gbps 8.84 $
Ukraine 1 Gbps 10.11 $
10 * (46.92 / 8.84) = 53
population Germany vs Romania:
83.24 m / 19.2 m = 4.34
size:
357.386 km2 / 238.397 km2 = 1.5
/* Insert economy of scale joke here */
More like German political corruption that guarantees telecoms' monopolies to milk customers with expensive shitty offers, rather than a free market with healthy competition like in Eastern Europe.
Also, didn't some German politician say "There's no way to make money with the internet so why bother with infrastructure investments?" LMAO
Our 100 MBit includes satellite TV and telephone flatrate for 30 € per month. Still not in the range of other countries, but at least significantly cheaper than the big players in Germany.
It is provided by our municipal telephone, gas, electricity provider. With really good customer service thrown in (compared to the crap of the big corporations at least)
Have you been to Detroit?
Great, now do rent. Healthcare. Education.
But hey at least we have iPhones with 73 cameras and cutting-edge CPUs which we use to browse instagram.
Image no globalization for electronics as well, it'd be as unafordable as the other 3 today.
Your logic is exactly the wrong way around. If Americans could consume global education or healthcare it'd be much cheaper, the same way everything else has gotten cheaper. Let Asian construction firms actually built some homes in California instead of stopping everyone from doing that and you'd be surprised how affordable your housing is going to be.
Right now in the US you can't even buy health insurance across state lines. not only is that not a global market, it's not even a national market! The three sectors uniquely shielded from global as well as local competition are the ones that have exploded in cost. That is a lot of things, but surely not an argument against more open markets.
Yes, I know that you cannot afford housing, or decent healthcare, or access credit, that childhood poverty has increased, that you're 100K in debt for getting an education, that worker's rights are being eroded, that we've bailed out the very rich to the tune of trillions for the second time in a little over a decade... but have you considered that in the 70s you didn't have a Samsung Galaxy Pro S37+ Ultra©™? /s
I can't believe I'm reading this, it's the stereotypical "consoom" meme.
But they might have had available healthcare, education, pension and ability to afford a place to live. You could say losing all those for tvs (that are just ad delivery mechanisms people have been duped into paying for) and smartphones (that are mostly ad delivery mechanisms people have been duped into paying for) is a good trade, but a lot of people seems to disagree.
How does he propose stopping those goods from entering the U.S. if the U.S. (presumably) wants to export to those countries?
My cheap Chinese-made Android phone is a remarkable piece of work. Not junk for sure.
Cites no sources other than his own blog post in which he rants about the IRS (and also doesn't cite any sources).
These are both profoundly misguided. In the last several decades QoL has improved dramatically, as has the amount of disposable income available to every household: the distribution is higher. And the main reason for increasing inequality in the distribution, is the rate of investment returns... ie., different rates of gain -- not money being "stolen".
Recent one: https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/money-matters-to-happiness-...
--edit-- Ok, you edited in a link. Do you have like a metanalysis or something? Individual studies, especially in psychology with its myriad quality problems[1], are hard to take at face value without context.
In my experience this is obviously true.
People who have a positive outset are more likable and more likely to have successful careers, whereas people who are depressed are more likely to neglect their jobs and relations and as as a result will struggle economically.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01676...
Edit since you rewrote your comment: I’m sorry if these studies aren’t convincing to you, I’m still waiting to see one supporting your point of view.
In general I don't think abstracts and studies are particularly convincing, given the field is infamous for its quality problems. I can't in good faith argue like that.
Sorry if I’m wrong, but you’re on HN and seem pretty technically oriented.
Do you not think that less stressed people are happier?
Regardless of what they are attempting to measure, the tool they are using is used to measure stress.
Chronic stress can absolutely make you less happy, but it's not the single source of unhappiness, and the complete absence of stress isn't equivalent to happiness either. People need challenge in their lives. Not overbearing challenge, but not too little either.
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Look at it this way: Even some of our poorest can turn night into day with a light switch, can produce potable water from a tap, can see and talk to people across the entire planet, we can travel faster than the fastest horse, can read almost any book from any time without even having to master latin and greek. Our kids don't have a 75% chance of dying, our noses aren't falling off from syphilis, nobody is going mad from ergotism, we have access to seasonal foods all year long.
So if it is true that having wealth makes us happy, why isn't everyone living in perpetual bliss, given we have wealth that exceeds the wildest imagination of past times' kings and emperors? Why aren't we happier than we are? Or was Alexander the Great suffering and miserable from not having a new model iphone?
A. You start your life at this level based on what life your family can afford. You can't control it, you can just adapt. You get used to it and that is your base level. You have some "needs" that were not possible at this level and this is your ambition level.
B. Depending on a lot of factors you can go in any direction from level A. If you have a lot of motivation - you will work hard and if you are lucky - you will get to higher levels, if not - you can even degrade compared to the level your parents are in. Most of the things that you dreamed of as a child will not be at the billionaire level. Probably most things will be at the level C, which is slightly higher than what your parents had (depends on a lot of factors like your character etc.)
C. This is the level where you probably fulfilled all your child dreams and wants. You can afford everything your parents could + something on top of it. This is usually the easiest level to get to - you can get here by exploiting tools of level B given to you by your parents + smart work from your side. While you fulfil your child dreams you start become smarter as well and some of the crazy child dreams, which seemed genius (buy 100 Lego boxes and build the most epic Star Wars fleet among my friends) now seem irrelevant and is not worth the resources. If you haven't reached level C - additional resources will bring you happiness doesn't matter if this level is at 75000 or 1M. If you reached it you have a decision to make.
D. Next level after C. It is much more harder and riskier to reach it. You might need to sacrifice your family, time and life to reach it. But all your basic wants and needs are met. So now you face a few great options:
1. You can keep increasing your needs and now your level C becomes your level B and D becomes your new level C. This comes with the risk to lose your ground at the level C and get back to Level B or lower. You become unhappy again before you reach your new level C.
2. You can stop raising your needs, give it some time and/or hard work and cement your position at level C. Diversify, deleverage, lower risk profile etc. This works toward your feeling of security, which increases happiness, but not to the extent of new needs.
3. You can do #1+#2 and reach level #2 faster with higher risk.
As you can see at the level D you are looking for a mindset change. Before that you had a clear goal of "why do I need more money", but when you are at the level D you have to come up with new goals. This is the most exciting place to be in my mind.
See Anton Kreil's "Build and Own Your Own Infrastructure" - this talk changed my perspective on my personal financial goals.
What do you think is the gold standard study supporting hedonic adaptation over large populations? At least the studies referenced on Wikipedia don’t seem to be particularly supportive of the idea.
I suspect that this is a comforting idea that people like to believe, but not actually something supported by data.
The fact that you are asking someone how they feel makes them feel different to how they would have felt if you didn't ask, and how you pose the question impacts the answer as well.
This is effect is so profound it's used in therapy. A therapist may have you note how you feel at points during the day, and the act of doing so changes how you feel.
This combination of observer effect and suggestion is really hard to avoid even if you try, it's very easy to manufacture results based on how you phrase the question.
>>Research has largely shown this theory to be false.
The research you link does NOT show that, it looks at a link between log(income) to happiness level.
1. It says nothing about hedonic adaptation as it does not take into account how long the person has been receiving that income. How their happiness shifted over time relative to income.
2. It does find a link between log(income) and happiness. If anything, given that happiness likely relies on multiple factors, and that the relationship is log, i.e. diminishing returns. It suggests a weakening link as income increases.
In other words, envy towards "the better off" is not a general feature of human experience. It is of some, but not all. One of the cultural triumphs of the west has been, somehow who knows, to mitigate envy (ie., hostility towards those who have more).
So that most people today think "I'm grateful that I can do xyz, who cares that Musk can do o,p,q".
People who write articles like this are the people "on the (envy) treadmill", and this isnt a cheap attack: they really are suffering! For them, it is a daily stress to see others have more.
Society should do more to understand how this comes about, and what can be done to ameliorate this issue. It seems most acute in the "almost rich", i'm guessing because the condition of being rich seems available, but they cant get it. Whereas poorer people don't even think its an option.
Given the amount of such possible "elites" we are producing today, who will never be elite, this is a politically unstable situation.
When the wealthiest country in world history has 1 in 6 children living in poverty, I really think you ought to look at yourself in the mirror when you talk about "envy".
All the billionaires in the world hold enough assets all together to pay for c. 6mo of healthcare across the EU. So in that one-time liquidation, you get 6mo of one social service for one medium-sized continent.
Sure, it's an impressive amount for a few thousand individuals to hold. More impressive, I'd say, is the net output of those few thousand individuals (ie., the 1000s of industrial bets they make which increases wealth for everyone over the long-run).
Wealth statistics are often quoted to deliberately outrage the status-anxious; if it really were teh case that 0.1% of people could somehow fund lives for 80%, they'd be a revolution overnight.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28509465
The unspoken flip side of the World Economic Forum's "You'll Own Nothing" campaign is "...And We'll Own Everything."
But the problem is not that production was mostly removed as the enabler to buy stuff. The real huge problem in the last 45 years is that the constraints on financing were removed.
Once upon a time in order to buy cheap labor from another country, you had to pay with something physical, probably something you actually produced. Today you can just punch a key on your keyboard and give them extra numbers that are backed by nothing really, there is no need to produce anymore.
When the only constraint on production is to find more fools to produce for you, eventually you run out of fools.
This just isn't true. People were wealthy slave owners and got rich because you had forced labor. You didn't even have to pay them pennies. We have a long history of unpaid labor, globally, and the fact that we still have low-and-unpaid labor shouldn't be a surprise (even if we find it wrong now). Lawyers have been somewhat well-to-do for some generations now, alongside other things you had to go off to college for, and I'm not sure they produced anything either. Perhaps not in the US, but churches were freaking wealthy at one time too, and I can't really think of things they consistently produced either. Same for royals: They didn't directly produce anything.
But his appliance example... let's put $500 from 1975 into an inflation calculator. Oops, they're worth $2600 ish 2022 dollars. Versus the $400 cheap option.
Edit: also globalization will stay no matter how protectionist the state is. In the black market.
Just for the record, I'm eastern european and slaving for the evil american tech firms ;)
Unironically yes? Do you claim those people are making choices of their own free will? When they have no other option? They can't even change their government for christs sake, how can it be claimed they are engaging in a "free" market?
You are very privileged that you can work from your bedroom and get a nice salary while living in a low cost of living area. Don't forget that, when you talk about how sweet those assembly line jobs are.
Maybe if we're being pedantic, but realistically that's modern economic slavery.
As far as i know Foxconn factories are cities. You don't look for a Foxconn ad in your city, you get on the train and relocate there.
Wikipedia says: Number of employees 1,290,000 (2020).
The largest Foxconn factory is located in Longhua Town, Shenzhen, where hundreds of thousands of workers (varying counts include 230,000, 300,000, and 450,000).
[I live in a 400k city.]
Another Foxconn factory "city" is located at Zhengzhou Technology Park in Zhengzhou, Henan province, where a reported 120,000 workers are employed as of 2012.
Yes.
> When they have no other option?
Peasant's life was the other option.
> They can't even change their government for christs sake
And you can? I mean, beyond replacing a psychopath for another...
Research the thing. Back when the suicide "scandal" made the news, Foxconn had over 1 M employees. The suicide rate was actually lower than the average suicide rate in China. But since they had so many people, some of them were statistically bound to suicide for... whatever reasons people suicide for.
How about tying green cards to a specific job so the people holding them have no negotiation power and their salaries stay low?
>printed dollars backed by nothing
If it were backed by nothing they wouldn't accept it. Money can be exchanged for goods and services. China is receiving more steel, oil, and pork than ever by exchanging it with dollars.
When clearing out my grandmother's house a few years ago, my uncle and I almost broke our backs trying to get the freezer out. It felt like it weighed a ton, even empty. My grandmother told us it had been a wedding present, and that they had been totally awestruck at the time at the generous present from her parents-in-law. After all, a decent freezer cost at least 2,000 kroner! (At this time, the average yearly gross pay was just in excess of 7,000 kroner.) My grandparents married in 1950. Since then, monetary value has been reduced twenty-fold. You can still buy a top-loading freezer for 2,000 kroner; I just checked. So - in 1950, you had to work for five months to earn money for a freezer (after taxes.) In 2017, I have to work one day for a freezer (after taxes.)
If you produce real things, and you have excess, you can use that excess to trade with other countries/states that have excess. But the USA for at least 30 years had a deficit, covered by debt, covered by printed dollars. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOPGSTB
Today at 30yo you are still living with your parents and services you receive are over-the-phone-from-another-country, and it takes about 20-30 phone calls to get something simple done.
Think about all the cotton, then thread, then cloth, plus dye, plus metal, plus other thread for putting it together, all the transportation and machinery, all the manual labor in poor conditions, and so on, which go into that cheap pair of jeans. Now, consider that every time you buy a pair, you're voting for more of that to happen. Now, consider the environmental and habitat cost to us and the rest of the world contained in that one "cheap" pair of jeans.
I would not call that a feature.
Quality goods are very much a niche product these days. Economics of scale make them even more expensive than they otherwise would be. Even middle class consumers find it hard to swallow the price of a 200$ tshirt so they mostly buy Pakistan made 10$ ones, with all the environment, social, moral, etc, problems that come with that.
What's the alternative and how do we get there? I can't even begin to imagine.
With how the corporations are set up today, it makes sense for them to reduce wages and quality to the minimum. Corporations only see the profit in the near term, and really don't care about the future of mankind on the long term all that much - those who do get crushed by competition.
There is some talk about faking it with ESG mandates, I personally doubt its anything more than lip service.
Example: Safety features make cars better quality, yet manufacturers haven't exactly lined up to implement them early. We didn't take arsenic fabrics off the market for... well, a long time. I don't know about you, but I expect a quality product not to poison me. We used to sell breads with additives in them if we could.
"Quality mindset" is just a scam of nostalgic thinking. The products were simply different back then.
This is an imaginary spiral. Well, except for the products getting cheaper. That is a good thing.
“I’ll trade you 2 T-shirts for a month of groceries for my household” seems utterly non-sensical to me.
0 - https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/how-much-should-i...
If it can’t be explained, it is ripe for exploitation by ones who spend most of their time trying to find loopholes to get wealthy off of some esoteric financial instruments. Much like clever MMO doing their best to find bugs in the game and find things like duplication glitches.
If it can’t be explained it is going to create a new global papacy that we have to defer our earthly futures to in hopes that they will find the magic cure for our stagnating incomes.
Much of it can’t be explained and that’s why we can’t vote our way to a world that doesn’t give the wealthy and their foot soldiers an unfair advantage to use financial instrument tricks to gain vast amounts of on-paper-wealth that can then be used to repeat the process.
Even though this is a shoot from the hip blog it does point at the fact that while globalization has seemingly made some costs cheaper for wealthy westerners, it also made the ones who planned and executed this shift many times more money.
> Even though this is a shoot from the hip blog it does point at the fact that while globalization has seemingly made some costs cheaper for wealthy westerners
Arguably the largest benefits of globalization has been the global poor and not wealthy westerners. In some cases this has come at the expense of the western middle and working class (who are ~85th percentile globally) in specific sectors, which is why I think it is so contentious in the west.