$7 a day

Nanjing – On an otherwise nondescript Wednesday morning earlier this year, 13 year-old Chinese national Zhou Fu Shi changed into a set of worn coveralls and headed to work. Earning the equivalent of seventy U.S. cents an hour, and working ten-hour-long days, Miss Zhou makes roughly seven (7) dollars a day fabricating cellphones and other electrical devices for export to markets in the Europe and America. “I used to spend summers working in my grandparent's rice paddies or tending the local communal forests and gardens with friends from school,” Fu Shi said while sprinting to the bathroom during her single, ten- minute-long daily break. “Things were better then, I think. It is hard to remember, even though it was not that long ago, but I think that despite having less physical money in hand, I was creating bonds with the land, with my family, and with the people in my community.” We continued to speak with Miss Zhou on her way home from work until a pair of censors overtook us, demanding to see our passports and grilling us about our involvement with an innocent factory girl. By the time the censors had left (taking many of our yuan with them), our new friend had vanished into an enormous tenement-housing block.

“I don't want to work, but the state forces me to work,” Fu Shi was saying just before the censors' arrival. “I don't want to work because I don't really need to buy anything. I see the new advertisements, I listen to them on the radio and television, but I don't need any of those useless things. And speaking of useless, who is buying all of the mobile telephones that my fellow workers and I are making? A friend of mine has an illegal, uncensored Internet connection, and he and I were looking up prices for the things that we make, and the phone we are making right now costs almost two hundred American dollars. Two hundred dollars? I assembled one hundred models after lunch today, for which I was paid roughly three dollars and fifty cents. Last week, when a friend was blinded at work by corrosive gases, she was fired, and is now very, very poor. Is there any justice in this world? Somewhere, someone is making a lot of money on the backs my factory-sisters and me.”

Upon reading our story, two American politicians – a Senator and a Congressperson, who both asked to remain anonymous – contacted us, saying derisively that the girls in our story should be happy that they have jobs at all, let alone paying jobs, and that they should see those jobs as stepping-stones of opportunity, and not worry so much about how much they might be getting paid right now, or who might be profiting immensely from their hard and continuous labor.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on dating & economics

  The intricate dance within a romantic relationship can be compared to the efforts of economists struggling to contain erratic market fluctuations. In either situation, the party that responds to the sweeping changes taking place in his counterpart will find himself on the losing side, forever racing to keep up, forever implementing new methods to bring to heel the unfathomable maelstrom he thinks he has the capacity to control. Whether this unfathomable maelstrom be the mind of a woman or the global crude-oil market, the economist, an outside observer inherently blind to the vast and incalculable influences that shape the mood of his counterpart, will enact measures he hopes will soothe the fury of that which he holds dear, often sacrificing long-term stability for the brief elation of short-term gain.
  I have learned one thing about relationships, one truth I have had to relearn time and again: the less you try to control your counterpart, the better off you both will be. When done with patient persistence, attempts to fathom your lover and to steer him in a direction you think best can indeed effect change; the nature of this change, however, will likely range from intensive introspection, over increased volatility, culminating in full-blown systemic meltdown. It is impossible to predict accurately how your counterpart will react to the pressures you have applied – any action will have an appropriate and equal reaction, but its full scope will forever remain known only to the reactive party.
  Imagine for a moment your closest friend, the innumerable events and countless little decisions that helped to mold him into the person you (think you) know today, the environmental and gentic forces that influence continuously the shaping of his being. Now imagine hundreds, thousands, millions of individuals of similar complexity who by going about their daily rounds become what we call markets, with every act shifting the fortunes of various businesses, with each transaction affecting the cycles of supply and demand, their every decision impacting and being impacted upon by unique and innumerable forces. It is all but impossible to know the mind of your closest friend – how could anyone claim to know the minds of thousands of strangers in thousands of different locations across the globe?
  Controlling your lover is a Sisyphean struggle full of complications that subside one day only to reappear the next, a cruel practice that will gut your lover's soul, leaving behind a mindless and docile golem content to do your bidding, within her no room for independent thought, no capacity for abiding Happiness, the dark promise of future abuse her only constant. The controlling lover exhibits deep insecurity and persistent self-loathing every time he endeavors to bend another to his will; the controlling economist exhibits appalling arrogance and damnable small-mindedness every time she endeavors to shape the course of markets influenced by forces far beyond her ability to reckon.
  Just as in dating, attempts to control the market are bound to cause unforeseen complications, new trials that slither forth from the stumps of those just severed, new issues that reduce the economist to the point of mindless docility, her energies sapped by the despair that comes with the realization that, as a single piece of an enormous, shifting puzzle, her actions are unlikely to have the desired affect. In a romantic relationship, the supposedly dominant party can achieve an approximation of control, whereas in the economic arena, a market will defy all attempts at subjugation, the sheer number of influencing factors contributing to its enduring volatility.
  Every economic theory, be it that of John Keynes or Adam Smith, Milton Friedman or Joan Robinson, has proven incapable of condensing the markets into manageable and predictable entities – invariably, each falls short of stabilizing that which cannot be stabilized, causing long term damage greater than the short term benefits with which it is credited. In the romantic as well as in the economic relationship, the method that promises the greatest liberty to the individual is that which disposes of all restrictions on thought and deed, the one that allows for the unfettered fluctuation of markets, the one preferred by humanity since we stood upright and learned to use our thumbs: anarcho-capitalism.

Ultima Ratio Regum - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp