I find the “sticker price” of a lot of things pretty shocking. Maybe it’s just because my main employment post undergrad (the couch surfing, world-changers of 2008!) has been working at or near minimum wage in restaurants, but the amount of money that is being thrown around in the US these days seems a bit absurd.
Commercials admittedly inundate my quasi-employed existence more than I’d like, and their barrage of numbers perplexes me. On sale at 399$. Only 799$ a month. Starting at 14,000$. Under 40,000$. Then there’s homes. My parents bought our house- the only one I’ve ever known- for 100 thousand dollars in 1986. It’s a modest suburban home, built in the 60s, sitting on maybe a quarter of an acre. This used to seem like an amazing amount of money to me. But now houses down the street just like ours are going for 500,000$ plus.
A half of a million dollars. That’s roughly 50,000 hours of washing dishes. Only 1250 weeks of full-time work, 24 years, to buy something I grew up seeing as a standard accessory to life.
As Americans, we have developed a scale in which we orient things as expensive or cheap. We are missing out on some real bargains though.
How about this one: Tajikistan! Now going at a rate of, per human, 2,083$ a year. A steal. Then there is of course, a step down but with great features: Bangladesh! At only 1,470$. Looking for a deal to save some hard-earned cash? Just a hunch, but I feel you might be able to talk the sticker price of Haiti down from 1,340$ to an even more attractive figure. Of course, it is a recession, and there’s surely a perfect fit for any budget in our African division. Ethiopia at 955$! Burundi at 401$! Finally in the true ‘people’s choice’ Zimbabwe! At an amazing 200$! (see for yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita)
Even a lowly dishwasher in the US, such as myself, possesses great economic power on the global level. Indeed many of my coworkers support large families in other countries on their paychecks.
Proponents of globalization as we know it today, in the form of absolute trade liberalization (bent by the rich and powerful, of course) say it is the best, nay, the only way to assure growth to everyone. That somehow at the end of the race to the bottom we are going to find that there is in fact no bottom at all, and that everyone’s house is worth half a million dollars, and everyone lives comfortably enough to enjoy a concept of bargain shopping.
Environmentally, economically, I don’t think this is possible. The world as it is can’t even handle the small percentage of us living this ‘modern’ lifestyle. I can’t stomach the idea that forcing people into no other path than doing menial tasks for us is in their benefit in any way at all.
To me, making the world a better place comes down to two questions:
In the third world: How can we live with more?
In the first: Can we live with less?
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Comments ( 1 Comment )
Byron commented on Feb 28 10 at 10:21 amGotta remember that inflation plays into this argument as well. In the 50s you could buy candy bars and milk shakes for a nickel; cars cost around 2000 dollars and a house maybe 20,000. That’s because the american dollar was strong. If you ever want to track the strength of the dollar compare it to the price of gold (which is a constant) when gold is cheap the dollar is strong, when gold is expensive the dollar sucks.