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Re: The Limits To Growth



bds@ipp-garching.mpg.de (Bruce Scott TOK ) wrote:

>David Lloyd-Jones (dlj@inforamp.net) wrote:
  
>: Which reminds me: if we've got a population surplus, howcome the price
>: of labour is going up _everywhere_?
>
>In the Thai toy industry, it is going down, due to competition from
>China.  At least that was the case at the end of 1994.  China has
>hundreds of millions of itinerant surplus laborers.

This word "everywhere" is a great troll for instructive exceptions,
innit?  Anyway, I stand corrected, though not on Thailand.  Toy
assemblers will just move over to the next expanding industry, and
Chinese peasants will start oving up pretty soon.

>Labor cost has also dropped significantly in both the US and UK, due to
>erosion of social protection.  At least that is true for people who
>produce things.  I don't know about the service industry, but the
>anecdotal bits I hear from the US are not inspiring of hope.
 
Here I stand corrected, and it's a fun example: America does not have
a population crisis in anybody's books.  The white working class,
whose incomes were dropping in real terms for the decade ending second
quarter '96, are not even breeding at replacement rates.
 
                                    -dlj.



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