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Comment by websiteapi | Hacker News Reader

chinese (slave) labor. in fact, look at anything primarily imported from china - very cheap compared to 1990s. look at things that cannot easily be exported from china like housing or education. expensive.

the world has never been cheap, we're just better at arbitrage now.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w21906

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LOL, the blog gives a lot of detailed reasons, even summarizes it [1] and but some random stranger gives an outdated opinion from the '90s, which is not even wrong just plain humorous. If slave labor, how come everything else is also not so cheap.

   [1] Virtually all the major mechanisms that can drive efficiency improvements — improving technology and overlapping S-curves, economies of scale (including geometric scaling effects), eliminating process steps, reducing variability and improving yield, advancing towards continuous process manufacturing — are on display here

huh? it is all cheaper relatively. which exported good from china is more expensive now than the 90s adjusted for inflation?

it's literally what the graphs in the article say... increased efficiency and what I am saying are not in contention.

Why are you putting the onus on the commenter you’re replying to, to show you examples that disprove the point of the article when you’re the one being a contrarian?

TVs are super famous as the economic example of a good getting cheaper in nominal terms every year as they get better specs. Because it’s such a strange phenomenon. You looking for cheaper real goods, opposed to nominal, misses half (or more) of why TVs are so interesting.

Why don’t you show us some other goods that are cheaper in nominal terms compared to the 90s “because China”?

I included a link that explains this. Anyone who thinks things becoming cheaper without mentioning china is delusional.

You linked a macroeconomics paper. You’re asking for examples from microeconomics. Are you going to provide your example products or do you get off on disproportionately wasting other peoples’ time?

The article itself already provides them with the TV… you can use cell phones too if you’d like. A palm pilot vs a Xiaomi. Virtually any electronics junk that you’d find on Amazon is cheaper now. What’s the common factor…? China. Again, in the paper.

Basically almost anything electronic? Camera’s, microphones, wireless microphones, battery packs, etc.? Plethora of kids toys all made in china. Most of them are crappy throway, so whether they are really cheaper than the quality toys you can play with for longer…

Then, I noticed that some frozen salmon in our supermarket was mega cheap at €9/kg, as opposed to the more standard €14-16/kg, and the country of origin???? China.

I would say it the opposite ways, everything has become cheap, but in housing and education, there is now a huge profit lobby.

tfw the price of a thing which is basically illegal to create (housing) goes up

what did the ancient capitalists mean by this?

This is a very Reddit comment. You can move to Oklahoma and get a brand new construction house for under $300k. But you won’t, because you want to live within an hour or so of the same dozen major US cities everyone else wants to live in close proximity to.

The houses as a structure aren’t going up in value (any more than the price of construction materials and labor has). It’s the land that’s appreciating faster than inflation in most cases you’re complaining about.

Aren't their salaries and standard of living up a lot - higher than even places like Mexico? Or are all the videos of modern China on YouTube CGI/AI state propaganda? Also, South Korean TVs are cheap, too. Also slave labor?

> South Korean TVs are cheap, too

more expensive than chinese

as for salaries - yes indeed they are up. not every chinese laborer is a slave obviously, but many are - not usually for electronics directly though, more often for the inputs of such (energy and what not).

i'm surprised there's contention about this - it's all over the news.

> more expensive than chinese

How much more expensive? 5%? 50%? 200%?

One example is the Samsung frame vs Hisense canvas. $1500 vs $1000 msrp. You can see similar price differences across all Samsung vs tcl and Hisense.

I don't know about salaries in Mexico, but ~8 years ago the salaries in coastal cities industries for unqualified workers were above 600€/month if I did the conversion correctly at the time, which is 2 to 10 time higher than agricultural jobs.

That was an issue where I was visiting because basically 90% the non-retired adults were working on the coast, 2 days away, and let children with their grandparents all year round except for their vacations. Apparently that created a kind of 'lord of the fly' situation in some villages, but don't quote me on that, I didn't saw it myself. What I saw was the young there feeling abandoned and let down by the central and provincial government, and their parents.

We do have slave child labor somewhere in the chocolate production chain, yet chocolate is not cheaper every year.

cocoa is the main input for that and is subject to weather and crop failure, which - surprise - is why its' more expensive. however if you're talking about chocolate candies (not raw cocoa) it is indeed less expensive now adjusted for inflation. the problem is the quality of chocolate candies has reduced, so the equivalent chocolate bar is probably more expensive even though the similar one is cheaper.

ironically cocoa is a great example of my point though - it's not imported from china, so there isn't a huge cost reduction.

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