Posted by
john on Wednesday, December 03, 2008 11:03:40 AM
Is from Thomas Sowell, on minimum wage laws and human capital:
"How does removing one of the options of people with few options make them better off? Similar one-stage thinking is also apparent in many observers who wax indignant over low-wage workers employed in the Third World by multinational corporations. While the pay of such workers is often low by comparison with that of workers in more affluent industrial societies, so too is their productivity. An international consulting firm determined that the average labor productivity in the modern sectors in India is 15 percent of that in the United States...
"In other words, if you hired an average Indian worker and paid him one-fifth of what you paid an average American worker, it would cost you more to get a given amount of work done in India than in the United States. Paying 20 percent of what an American worker earns to someone who produces only 15 percent of what an American worker produces increases your labor costs, even though you are hiring 'cheap labor' and are virtually certain to be accused of 'exploitation'."
Applied Economics, Thinking Beyond Stage One, pp.40-41