[ExI] undercover at Walmart

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 11:33 PM, Stathis Papaioannou
<stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/2/13 Rafal Smigrodzki <rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com>:
>
>> ### The labor of a worker in China is much less efficient, on average,
>> than the labor of a worker in America (whether it is a Chinese or
>> American worker is almost irrelevant here). This is the reason for the
>> low cost of workers in China - they offer little, therefore they
>> cannot demand much.
>
> If that's true then manufactured items from China would not be any
> cheaper than American produced items. It would take, say, twice as
> many Chinese workers each earning half as much as their American
> counterparts to produce items at the same final cost.

### This is indeed the case - or more precisely it takes 1.33 billion
Chinese to make 3.251 trillion worth of goods and services per year,
while it takes only 303 million Americans to make 13.84 trillion of
stuff (statistics by Google). It is absolutely true that on average
Chinese products and services are not any cheaper in terms of labor
per unit of value than American-made ones, in fact, they are much more
time-consuming to make, very roughly approximated by a factor of
(13.84 x 1.33)/(3.251/0.303), you do the math. Since they take so much
time to make stuff, they can't make as much stuff as Americans, and
therefore they earn less.

 Or, it would
> take several Indians in a call centre to solve your mobile phone
> problem when one American could have done it all by himself.
>
### Sometimes it does.

Rafal