| > To have it made in China with semi-skilled labor was $1.60 per hour. | >
| > The exact same job here was $21.00 per hour. You do the 2nd grade math... | >
| > The point was made to me if I like being able to afford the things I own | > then they have to be made elsewhere. Period. No US manufacturer can | > touch that. Most everything you own was made this way. Tough luck if | > it's substandard. | | | isnt it more of a per unit cost? why figure it by the hour?
The cost in time is the first figure to start with. Once you know what it costs labor wise to manufacture an item, you then figure in the material and other stuff. Then the economics of scale and quantity start figuring in.
You're right that cost of labor is a place to start. But you can't stop there, even if you want to compare unit cost of production for identical runs.
--RC "Sometimes history doesn't repeat itself. It just yells 'can't you remember anything I've told you?' and lets fly with a club. -- John W. Cambell Jr.
On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 02:57:09 GMT, "carl mciver" vaguely proposed a theory ......and in reply I say!:
remove ns from my header address to reply via email
So you are against the Govt because it has tried to protect you against working as they do in Many Asian countries?
Think me out the policies that will let you keep working when those guys will work for a tenth of your wage (and less!) under appalling conditions. The people who employed you would willingly use you in the same way, if workers' unions and Govt did not stop them.
Unions are often WAY OTT, but let employers go and many of them would take everything they could get. Why do you think we _have_ unions and Govt?
I watched a few stories on great modern engineering marvels of the world. They took place in USA, Australia, Europe, and Britain. They all succeeded over the graves of many workers, and the backs, legs and lungs of many others. many of them were imported Asians. Payback time?
The Asians are not somehow "different" when it comes to greed and being able to abuse people.
The chinese government has sent large numbers of their best students to our colleges and universities to learn how to do exactly this. India is another major player. this is true for not only manufacturing/goods but also services, esp. in the financial field.
I look forward to the screams when our over paid CEOs discover they no longer have a job because all of the activities they used to oversee have been outsourced, and the companies involved have decided to go for the "long dollar" by eliminating their "services" and selling direct.
I don't see the unemployment i n mass as being high, think you are wrong here
Oh, and few older than high school work for minimum
Yeah, but do you want to live in China, next to that leather tanning plant.
Unemployment taxes in the peoples republic of mass run around 3 percent of the first 12k. Not in the top 5 of expenses. Only McDonalds et al care about such things, since they employ masses of cheap help.
Problem is that while this conjecture is plausible it is by no means proven.
For anyone that is interested in this conjecture, one of the ways to examine the relationship is to gather state unemployment rates and minimum wages across several years and perform what is called an analysis of variance or f-ratio test. This will show both the probability of a relationship and estimate the size of the affect of the relationship.
There are several possible outcomes.
(1) There is no statistically significant relationship at which point you can move on to something else.
(2) There is a statistically significant relationship but the practical effect is not significant. To use made up numbers for an example, it can be that increasing the minimum wage does indeed increase the unemployment rate compared to other states, but that a $1.00 increase increases the unemployment rate by
0.001%, which is not practically significant, at which point you can move on to something else.
(3) The third possibility is that there are both significant and practical correlations. The problem here is that high correlation does *NOT* prove causality. For example, North Dakota with the federal minimum wage may indeed have a lower unemployment rate than California with a state minimum wage $1.50 higher than the federal minimum, but only because all the unemployed people in North Dakota moved to California. Disentangling cause and effect, confounding and mediating variables is frequently the hardest part of any real statistical analysis.
This particular branch of statistics and economics is called econometrics if you are interested and want to do a Google search.
You can include the political party of the president and composition of the houses of congress if you desire. The analysis is then called political econometrics. By "shifting" the data forward and backward in time compared to the variables your are interested in, such as unemployment rate, inflation rate, current accounts balance of payments deficit, etc. you can determine if political parties make any difference, or if unemployment rates, etc. affect election outcomes.
I have generally found then the affect of time is included in the analysis, such as using the year as a variable, it generally "swamps" everything else, leaving no variance to be explained by any of the other variables, including political party control.
This indicates most of the current discussions and political activity are simply "Punch and Judy" shows, with no real effect on the results or outcomes, although these may be highly entertaining to the participants and spectators.
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