Despite the US’s economic success, income inequality remains breathtaking. But this is no glitch – it’s the system

Despite the US’s economic success, income inequality remains breathtaking. But this is no glitch – it’s the system

The Chinese did rather well in the age of globalization. In 1990, 943 million people there lived on less than $3 a day measured in 2021 dollars – 83% of the population, according to the World Bank. By 2019, the number was brought down to zero. Unfortunately, the United States was not as successful. More than 4 million Americans – 1.25% of the population – must make ends meet with less than $3 a day, more than three times as many as 35 years ago.

The data is not super consistent with the narrative of the US’s inexorable success. Sure, American productivity has zoomed ahead of that of its European peers. Only a handful of countries manage to produce more stuff per hour of work. And artificial intelligence now promises to put the United States that much further ahead.

This is not to congratulate China for its authoritarian government, for its repression of minorities or for the iron fist it deploys against any form of dissent. But it merits pondering how this undemocratic government could successfully slash its poverty rate when the richest and oldest democracy in the world wouldn’t.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    9 hours ago

    The reform being talked about started in 1980, and didn’t become available to the broader population until pretty recently. Even today, children aren’t allowed to attend public schools outside of their ancestral home town

    A lot of that is simply issue of capacity and social management. The famines that everyone loves to blame Communism for in the 1960s came out of an urban economic boom that drew in peasant farmers without regard to the ecological consequences. We saw similar catastrophes in Europe and the Americas during early industrial periods, with a bad crop year spiraling into food riots and panics as farmers abandoned their crops in droves.

    The fundamental difference between Chinese commune policies and, say, American sharecropping or Cuban sugar plantations is that the workers had no title to their land, not that they couldn’t leave it.

    So if you were born in 2000 to parents who had moved to Shenzhen, they’d still have to send you back to whatever rural village your grandparents were from, and didn’t have access to schools or healthcare otherwise.

    Your parents would have moved to Shenzhen to take advantage of the enormous export boom out of Hong Kong. You’d be drawn into the factory system just like your parents, with minimal education and poor social services.

    But, as a consequence, Shenzhen enjoyed an equivalent dividend in wealth, resulting in the construction of new schools and clinics which were subsequently opened to the public as fast as the state bureaucrats could stand them up.

    Compare this to, say, London or Miami or Mexico City during this same period. Wealth wasn’t captured for the benefit of the working classes. Instead, the cities privatized their public amenities and inflated speculative real estate bubbles.

    Ten years down the line, people in Shenzhen had access to education, health care, and transit comparable to anything you’d find in the developed world. Meanwhile, Westerners were watching the Housing Crash erode their way of life and imposing brutal austerity measures on their local people.

    • booly@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      4 hours ago

      The fundamental difference between Chinese commune policies and, say, American sharecropping or Cuban sugar plantations is that the workers had no title to their land, not that they couldn’t leave it.

      I’m not talking about Chinese commune policies. I’m talking about the hukou system, and its effects on how children were raised in China between 1990 and 2010. As in, the lived experiences of Chinese people between the ages of 15 and 40 today.

      It’s absolutely relevant to people today, not least of which was the original comment you were responding to, a firsthand experience of what happened to that commenter’s migrant family in Guangzhou as recently as 2010.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 hours ago

        I’m talking about the hukou system

        A consequence of early communal capital allocation. The state had already built up a surplus of health and education inventory, having failed to anticipate rapid migration to the cities. Rather than overflow the existing system, they told people to return to their native villages for services.

        You can debate the ethics or efficiency of this system. Hardly the first time ranking bureaucrats failed to anticipate a sea change in social behavior and decided punitive measures would work better than short-term rapid expansion of social services. But the state bureaucracy quickly sought to rectify the system by expanding capacity in the cities, culminating in a reform of Hukou in '86 and another in '93.

        But this created its own crisis as people back in the rural communities recoiled at what they saw as an abandonment of the Communist ideals of the Maoist Era. So they flooded into the cities in protest, culminating in the famous Tienanmen Square riots and subsequent military repression. Any policy that has a negative consequence is a form of authoritarian villainy, without regard to the intended consequences or broader benefits. When you’re a communist. If you’re implementing unpopular policies on a restive public when you’re a capitalist, the rules are reversed.

        a firsthand experience of what happened to that commenter’s migrant family

        If I had a $1 for every person on the internet I ran into who had a “I just happen to have a first-hand account that proves I’m right, take my word for it”…

        Hell, I’ve got more than a few. I just don’t consider “my personal anecdote” irrefutable proof that an entire country is run by cartoon villains.