Wal Marts Global Poverty Reduction Program - Road to the Middle Class

WHEN THE BOSTON Associates built the textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, they hired single young Yankee women right off the farm. When the farmer’s daughters went on to bigger and better things, the mills hired the Irish. When the Irish were too prosperous to work in textile mills the mills opened up in the rural Carolinas.

Now the textile mills are florishing in China. Many people don’t like the sweatshop wages and working conditions, Michael Strong writes. For sure, he says:

"China is the most populous country, with 1.3 billion people, most still poor enough to willingly move hundreds of miles from home for jobs that would be shunned by anyone with better prospects."

But the jobs at the sweatshops in the city pay more than twice as much as jobs in the country. Who wouldn’t travel hundreds of miles from home for that?

But for some reason, lots of people think that such disparities are a disaster.

D. Gale Johnson, an economist who studied regional inequality within China, described the enormous disparity between urban and rural workers as "the great injustice." Urban workers earn about 2.5 times as much as rural workers. Even after counting the higher cost of living in urban areas, urban workers make about twice as much. Not surprisingly, massive numbers of people are moving to the city to work in factories.

I guess that one man’s injustice is another man’s market signal.

And of course it is the demand for Chinese manufactures from the shoppers at Wal-Mart that generates the higher wages in the city.

So should we thank Wal-Mart for their global development policies and for raising millions out of poverty?

The fact is that people move off the farm into the city because they expect to make more money in the city.

And also, and this is a big deal for peasants used to working outside in rice paddies in all weather: they also expect to work inside. They really like that.

Sphere: Related Content |

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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