SubscribeAround the time that the young Sam Walton opened his first stores, John Kennedy redeemed a presidential campaign promise by persuading Congress to extend the minimum wage to retail workers, who had until then not been covered by the law. Walton was furious. Now the goddamn federal government was telling him he had to pay his workers the $1.15 hourly minimum. Walton's response was to divide up his stores into individual companies whose revenues didn't exceed the $250,000 threshold. Eventually, though, a federal court ruled that this was simply a scheme to avoid paying the minimum wage, and he was ordered to pay his workers the accumulated sums he owed them, plus a double-time penalty thrown in for good measure. Wal-Mart cut the checks, but Walton also summoned the employees at a major cluster of his stores to a meeting. "I'll fire anyone who cashes the check," he told them.
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.cheers!
Wal-Mart is pretty much evil, and I cannot believe the hostile response I get from people who learn that I simply never shop there. "But their prices on X are so good!" they say over and over. It's a kind of one-dimensional thinking which disallows for more cogent conversation.I usually counter that one with a suggestion that they check the serial numbers or product codes. Often the lower price is because they put the same brand name on an inferior version of the product than you'd buy elsewhere.
You'll get it in a box, that's it. Not set up, not tested, not with a demo of how to get the most out of it, not delivered and installed wherever you want it, and not with me as a local tech support resource.I think most people realize that "free delivery" isn't really "free." You're willing to go that extra mile for your customers willing to pay a premium price. At the same time, customers are willing to go the extra mile for themselves in order to save a few dollars.
If Africa, East Asia, South Asia, and Latin America each increased their share of world exports by just one per cent, the resulting gains could lift 128 million people out of poverty.
China’s immense economic transformation has involved terrible human and environmental costs. Of course, its apologists point to the fact that economic growth has allowed the average level of consumption to rise. They point to the growing Chinese middle class whose standard of living is comparable to their Western counter-parts and would have been inconceivable ten or twenty years ago. And they point to the 200 million peasants whose money incomes are now above the international levels defining absolute poverty.They don't put in in these terms, but it's often remarked (and probably by me elsewhere on MeFi as I tend to repeat myself!) that the famously feisty peasantry of China didn't rise up against Party rule during the Cultural Revolution, although governance had broken down in many areas and open armed conflict was taking place between Red Guard factions (i.e. the prior restrictiveness of the totalitarian regime was , but the 90s and onward have been characterised by an increasing number of 'mass incidents' and strikes. The social movement of 1989 that in the West is seen as for democracy was as much a reaction to the consequences of reform, for example.
Yet in less than a generation China has moved from one of the most egalitarian societies in the world to one of the least egalitarian. Although tens of millions of people have become substantially better off in material terms, the position of hundreds of millions have become worse. The ‘iron rice bowl’, which provided a minimum level of income security, free health care and education, has been smashed. Although people have more money, they have to spend more as state benefits in kind have been withdrawn. As we shall see, in the rustbelt regions of northeast China the devastation of old industries have thrown tens of millions out of work leaving them dependent on meagre benefits and on the precarious casual employment they can find. Millions of peasants have been driven off their land with little or no compensation. While in the booming factories of the south tens of millions of migrant workers are obliged to work extraordinary long hours in often atrocious conditions. At the same time, thousands of miners and construction workers are killed in work accidents every year because basic health and safety standards are ignored. If this was not enough, then the relentless drive to expand capital has meant that scant regard has been paid to the impact on the environment.
Broad participation in reform-driven agriculture sector growth played the key role in the tremendous two-thirds reduction in absolute poverty during 1978-84. Rural per capita income grew at an average annual rate of 15% in real terms during this period, and increased a total of more than 130%. The failure to achieve further reductions in poverty during the second half of the 1980s, despite modest agricultural growth and very strong industrial growth, is more difficult to explain. A number of macroeconomic developments stymied efforts to reduce poverty during 1985-90: (i) sharply increased prices for grain and other subsistence goods adversely affected the real incomes of the majority of the rural poor; (ii) rapid growth of the working age population exceeded the expansion of employment opportunities, contributing to a worsening of rural underemployment; and (iii) economic growth was greater in the higher income coastal prcvinces than in the lower income inland northwestern and southwestern provinces. (p. xi)
I think the lessons of the rural cooperative movement in China over thirty years thoroughly refute the notion that rural producers cooperatives are ultra-left, utopian, and lead in the long run to sharing poverty–”eating out of one big pot.” In the late seventies comprehensive studies carried out by the Central Committee’s Research Group on Agrarian Policy concluded that 30 percent of the collective villages were doing well, 40 percent faced serious problems but remained viable, while another 30 percent were doing very poorly and could not easily regroup. If these figures are true, and they match with limited observations made by me in a few localities that I knew best, then some 240 million peasants were truly prospering under collective arrangements, while another 320 million were at least holding their own. Such large numbers coping successfully hardly give support to a theory that agricultural production, by its very nature, is not suited to collective forms of ownership and management. If a further 240 million were faring badly it seems obvious that the cause was not a built-in mismatch between cooperation and agriculture but poor leadership, poor training, and poor policy implementation–pushing for higher levels prematurely, jumping stages, commandism, overcentralization, and other bureaucratic excesses...
The reform has, from the start, been a remarkably deft, well orchestrated and protracted campaign to do what all its covering rhetoric insists is not being done. Each stage begins by selecting some small, hard to defend weak link in the socialist policy or institution under attack and moves on to engulf and do away with the whole fabric that holds that link in place. The longer it goes on the clearer it becomes that what we are witnessing is no “feeling out” at all, but the inexorable unfolding of a grand design to tie China irretrievably into the capitalist system. And by what method? By transforming China into one vast free market hinterland, thus raising the question of who will be conqueror and who the conquered? For even a great dragon, it seems, cannot hope to match pearls with the Dragon God of the Sea and come out a winner.
'I only reached third grade, but my older brother is in his last year of middle school. His grades are better than mine. Two kids going to school put a really heavy burden on a family, and besides, my parents also favour my brother.As you can see, her initial motivation was to seek off-farm work to support a family burdened by new cash expenses that didn't exist prior to reform (school fees) and when away from home, she fell into sex work as if offered the promise of more money that waitressing.
'Right now, I can only send back a little bit of the money I make because I don't want my family to get suspicious, since I told my parents I was helping in a restaurant over here. And if I gave everything I earn to my family, what would happen when I need money and my family can't give me anything? It's better if I hang on to it. When my brother goes to high school, I can support my family a little. It'll be a lot simpler when he leaves high school and gets into university because then he can borrow money.'
Now, in so far as private income is only one of the influences on the achievements in reducing poverty, the first thing I want to mention is that even though in the poverty discussion most of the concentration tends to be these days on what happened since economic reform. The fact is that there is a very major lesson in what happened in China previous to that. I am not commenting on the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, I am not talking about the Chinese famine (from) ’59 to ’61 in which 29.6 million people died. There were all kinds of mistakes.It's not an income measure, it's a consumption measure, so it's equally well-suited to measuring socialist and capitalist poverty.
But the fact is that China was still the global leader as a poor country expanding basic education at a level which was very hard to imagine, as well as basic health care. All kinds of things came like “barefoot doctors” and so on. But the spread of health care across the country was quite remarkable. By 1979, when the economic reform came, the Chinese life expectancy was already 68 years; the Indian life expectancy was 54 years, 14 years behind it.
There are really major lessons there, and I might say also one of the unsung contributions of the pre-reform educational and health care expansion is, I believe, the radical economic expansion that took place in the 1980s. After the economic reform, it would have been very hard without the base of elementary education which China had and India did not at that time, which is still a factor which bothers India badly.
The difference between endemic high death rate among the (mainly rural) poor, and what is identified by most academics as "famine deaths", seems to be the fact that the first involves the poor dying at a rate higher than the average for the population, but slowly, unobtrusively and over a longer period of time owing to being chronically under-nourished and therefore being subject to higher morbidity; this higher than average death rate being considered nothing 'out of the way' given the existing distribution of incomes.
The second, which is considered not normal or usual and is termed "famine deaths", involves a sudden rise in nutrition-deprivation and hence sudden rise in morbidity and death rate, usually among segments of the very same group which is poor as a 'normal' state of affairs. In short, a sudden upward deviation from the prevalent death rate is thought of as "famine death"...
When we look at the estimates of death rate and birth rate for China made by US scholars during the years 1959 to 1961, we find that the death rate rose sharply in a single year, 1960, by as much as 10.8 per thousand compared to 1959. But because China in the single preceding decade of building socialism, had reduced its death rate at a much faster rate (from 29 to 12 comparing 1949 and 1958) than India had, this sharp rise to 25.4 in 1960 in China still meant that this "famine" death rate was virtually the same as the prevalent death rate in India which was 24.6 per thousand in 1960, only 0.8 lower. This latter rate being considered quite "normal" for India, has not attracted the slightest criticism. Further, in both the preceding and the succeeding year India's crude death rate was 8 to 10 per thousand higher than in China. Of course, each economy has to be judged in relation to its own internal performance; and no doubt the rise in the death rate during the worst years of output shortfall is a bad blot for China on its otherwise very impressive record of rapid decline and good food security...
"The limitation of RHS in the poverty evaluation. 1) it is limited to measure income/expenditure poverty due to the shortage of social indicators. 2) It is limited in evaluating the impacts of anti-poverty programs. 3)It is limited in estimating the poverty incidence by county."This has been the point I've been trying to make - there was a systematic underestimate of certain social goods under the old system.
The first and foremost objective of rural enterprises was to support agriculture; where conditions permitted, they were allowed to contract work from urban industries and to engage in production for export.
Export by rural enterprises originated from a number of coastal provinces, notably Guangdong, in the late 1970s. Prior to 1980, there were only 1,500 rural enterprises whose products were exported. By 1986, the number of export-oriented TVEs increased to more than 11,000, and their export earnings reached 4.5 billion U.S. dollars, accounting for 16 percent of China's total exportsI.e. only 11,000 out of millions of TVEs nationwide by the point when the major drops in poverty occurred; the still small (though rapidly growing of course) percentage of China's still small export earnings (around ten percent of GDP max IIRC) in no way enough to account for those poverty reductions, and in many ways a warning sign about the increased disparity between regions they were going to play a part of, as a policy favouring export discriminates against inland regions.
Broad participation in reform-driven agriculture sector growth played the key role in the tremendous two-thirds reduction in absolute poverty during 1978-84. Rural per capita income grew at an average annual rate of 15% in real terms during this period, and increased a total of more than 130%. The failure to achieve further reductions in poverty during the second half of the 1980s, despite modest agricultural growth and very strong industrial growth, is more difficult to explain. A number of macroeconomic developments stymied efforts to reduce poverty during 1985-90: (i) sharply increased prices for grain and other subsistence goods adversely affected the real incomes of the majority of the rural poor; (ii) rapid growth of the working age population exceeded the expansion of employment opportunities, contributing to a worsening of rural underemployment; and (iii) economic growth was greater in the higher income coastal prcvinces than in the lower income inland northwestern and southwestern provinces. (p. xi)"This was my point about you giving the impression of misreadings - how you take that to be agreement is anyone's guess.
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