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Comment by yskchu | Hacker News Reader

Can you quantify this? HK has one of the best welfare systems in the world.

An agency colleague and I did volunteer design and marketing work for a Hong Kong food bank (St. James). At the time it was one of the few food banks in HK (I don't know if this has changed or not, but I'd be surprised if it has). Part of our initial work was research and I was pretty shocked that the HK govt didn't even set a national poverty line. Given a rough line of half median income, over a million HK residents were easily below at the time.

If you're talking strictly social security, even the government acknowledges it has a problem.

Here's a recent SCMP article where the welfare dept itself states that at least 40% of HK residents in poverty aren't covered by welfare.

http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1062025/700000-sl...

(mirror: http://goo.gl/GxyTw )

The good news is that the HK govt did, finally, just implement a standard poverty line (half median income). This is the first step and a long time in coming.

I think the problem in HK is the number of undocumented immigrants. No papers, no open borders, surrounded mostly by water, these people are easy to exploit. I was told that many of the construction workers' (building skyscrapers) wages barely amount to the cost of the day's food.

It's sort of amazing the people in these conditions care enough about quality of work to build buildings that don't fall down.

Cough, ahem, well, it was also explained to me that there may be some systematic labor-related problems with construction quality in those buildings. Not exactly related to worker pay-rate, but the gist is that they tend to pour the concrete too wet (because it is easier/faster to work). This is probably because of productivity-based bonus pay for foremen. The difference in strength isn't enough to cause a building to fail under nominal conditions, but catastrophic failure is more probable in some destructive event (weather, earthquake, explosion, etc).

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