Sign of the times?

[ellarien]

I did some electronics shopping this afternoon, mostly for storage/backup media. I was somewhat surprised, when I unpacked my purchases, to notice that none of them bore the once-ubiquitous "Made in China" tag; in fact, two out of three items were at least "assembled" in North America, and the third in South Korea. Fluke, or a side-effect of the dollar's bad year?

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Sign of the state of the economy, I think - having a large, uneducated workforce, low employer overheads and few rights for workers make a place attractive.

Remember the phase under Margaret Thatcher when Britain was attracting those low-cost jobs? And how, with the introduction of the minimum wage among other things (the minimum wage leaves you _below_ the poverty line!) those jobs left the country and went to places in Eastern Europ or India?

I, for one, wasn't sorry to see them go; and America should be wary of seeing them arrive. They're not jobs that fit very well with running a first-world country.

[ellarien]

If that is happening here, it doesn't seem to have come to the notice of the media yet, but the economy is well and truly messed up.

There's also the possibility of a backlash against Chinese products in particular, after last year's toxic petfood, toxic toys, toxic toothpaste ...

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

The media - and not just American media, everybody else as well - seems to have ignored the astonishing levels of poverty in the US for many years. During Katrina, they were briefly exposed, but nobody cares. I have to say that revelations that many people did not leave the city because they could not scrape together a tank of petrol _and there were no buses_ hit me deeply. The other major drain on the economy is the lack of health system: people work until they drop, and then they DO drop, and die or are majorly incapacitated, lose their jobs and lose their homes and all the stuff that comes after that - when much of it is preventable; and a lot of problems could be eliminated if people weren't too scared to go to the doctor _when they first needed to go_.

The Chinese thing was long in the coming. You cannot hand out jobs to the cheapest bidder without doing any quality controls and then being surprised that you're getting bottom-level stuff back. And of course if you're farmed out vast swathes of your economy to third countries in the hope that they'll exploit their people and keep your prices low, and those countries discover that creating pollution and maintaining poverty bring long-term disadvantages, and that doing so in order to keep America's prices low is rather silly, well, then you'll have A Problem.

Mind you, the British economy is pretty much in freefall as well. It's not so bad here in the South, but go further north, where there are no jobs, and manufacturing and agricultural jobs are run using a temporary workforce from Eastern Europe (because they don't demand a living wage and don't take health and safety as seriously as Brits, and they definitely won't be unionized, and as temps they can be fired any time - you might think you have three weeks' work, but if the line breaks down, you've only had a couple of hours - no, this isn't looking too well either.

[ellarien]

There are many pathological things about the American economy, to be sure. The most obvious, from where I sit, is the way the whole thing is built on the consumption of more and more stuff, most of it paid for on the never-never. I suppose it's not surprising that the middle-class media, funded by advertising or by the donations of the upper middle class, are more preoccupied with the concerns of the middle class than the poor.

I've seen it argued, in the last week, that the whole economy of Arizona has been built for years simply on new people moving into the state and needing new houses and all that goes with them, and I can believe it.