fatvegan

Neo-liberals will tell you that what's wrong with poor countries is that they aren't productive enough. The reason they are so poor is because they aren't good enough at growing things quickly and cheaply. And because they are so unproductive and western workers are so incredibly productive, it looks like there is this unfair income imbalance when really it makes complete sense.

That's what they'll tell you. But I'll tell you that it's all bollocks. They'll give you some nonsense about terms of trade and productivity growth curves. But it really comes down to the number of people making and growing stuff. Incomes aren't low because workers aren't productive enough. Incomes have nothing to do with productivity if you're in a competitive market, which poor world agricultural producers certainly are. Actually too competitive, by about $300 billion of European agricultural subsidies each year and a similar amount in the US. Here are our "unproductive and hence poor" poor world farmers, driving the whole rich world out of business because they are too productive. So the problem here is certainly not productivity.

I'd suggest that the reason poor countries can't make any money is because food is far too cheap. Or food is cheap because the poor world is poor. There are too many poor world farmers trying to feed the rich world, so the price you can sell something for goes down faster than the cost of growing it goes down. The main reason there are so many growers is because that's what rich world economists have been telling poor countries to do for several centuries.

There is no such thing as a correct price for something. Neo-liberals will say that the market price is the correct price, and that earning an income means being able to make something at that price or cheaper. But there is absolutely no reason why someone working a farm should earn less than a person in an office. One thing isn't any easier or harder than the other. I doubt the stress levels are that different. It's purely a matter of education. And if you're talking about what stuff we're going to value when the shit hits the fan, then it's going to be rice and beans, not financial services or marketing companies. I think that the reason education should be available to everyone is that a privileged education systems allows the privileged to forget that our incomes are mere flukes of history. The reason John Howard doesn't want to fund higher education is that it's supposedly a waste of money educating people who are just going to be cleaners or farmers. But the other unfortunate side effect is that many of the people who would have been cleaners are financial advisors, and many of the people who would have been financial advisors are cleaners. John Howard would say that we need cleaners. Someone has to do it. And what's the use of a cleaner with a degree? The big difference between a cleaner with a degree and a cleaner without a degree is the pay. A cleaner with a degree will get paid a shitload more than a cleaner without one because the educated cleaner is cleaning for the money, and not because cleaning is all they are able to do.

So if you educate everyone, the rich pay more for their cleaning to be done. And the poor pay far less for their tax returns to be done. And the lovely outcome of that is that after not very long it's hard to tell the well-paid poor apart from the low-paid rich. This needs to happen here in Australia, and in the rest of the world too. The other nifty thing is that if you did achieve equal incomes and broke down some of the cultural barriers to education, then you could have a private education system which only educated people as much as they wanted to be. John Howard might be up for something like that. The only real difference being that you wouldn't really have high- and low-income people the way you do now. So perhaps he wouldn't be that keen after all.