Scammers prey on young Chinese desperate for jobs in bleak economy

> Dickens is normal for a large majority of the world population. Look around you.

...and why is that? Is it because everyone isn't working hard enough? Or is it because we have a system that needs less labor than it has, thereby dumping the price of labor unless we control this dynamic with policy interventions?

If you don't want to consider the division of labor as a natural experiment, let's dig into something else that you cited: the reconstruction era following WWII. It led to a golden age for labor, and not just in the US. Isn't that odd? The need for labor shot up, but instead of making labor more stressed it did the opposite, and let them partake in the prosperity. This dynamic isn't unique to WWII, and it isn't unique to events that negatively impact capital. Events that positively impact capital tend to dump labor. Germany after the Franco-Prussian war is probably the cleanest example, but the offshoring of the United States industrial base is probably the most familiar. This should be a hint: the disease perpetually afflicting labor is not laziness, it's bargaining power. Policy interventions that target laziness will tend to make the problem worse, and policy interventions that tend to improve bargaining power will tend to make the problem better.

That's not taking into account all the handcrafted goods: half the stuff we buy, would've been made instead, and that proportion would probably increase the further back in time you go. But the labour to buy stuff is counted as worked hours, while made stuff isn't. That makes some sense in the perspective of economic exchanges, but not for many comparisons.

People lived in literal reality bubble compared to rest of the world and were brutally naive in many aspects (just like you would expect North Koreans to be naive about many aspects of the rest of the world). That naivity hit hard when iron curtain fell, the concept of defending democracy and 'fighting' for whats good in life and society is simply too alien, even now. As long as you kept pretending all is good and you don't mind lack of basic freedom, system largely left you alone, you just couldn't travel or say what you wanted. But that pesky freedom is something you can't keep ignoring for your whole life.

But if any of your ancestors or even more distant family said or did anything even mildly perceived as non-alignment even decades ago, then your kids who could be brilliant students, were forced to do to worst trade high school (since they were mandatory just like employment) and banned from universities or many other aspects of society. This is story of my mother, 1st in economic university entrance exams, banned because my grandfather stepped away from communist party when soviet union invaded us in 1968, more than a decade before. Stories like this are everywhere if you care to ask, brilliance was punished as a threat to regime and mediocrity and bowed head was celebrated.