Comment by fzeroracer
9 months ago
In actuality the bottom chunk of the price pyramid being off limits is because of American business policy, not because of outside competition.
A staggering amount of Americans live around the poverty line and even more live paycheck to paycheck. They can only afford goods that are, effectively, priced at how much we value their labor in the US.
In order to solve this problem we'd need to actually raise the minimum wage and ensure Americans have more discretionary income to afford American products. But that'll never happen because businesses don't want to eat into their profit margins, so they just permanently lock themselves out of a market. It's a sort of tragedy of the markets issue.
Is the Chinese minimum wage so much better then, that China does not have this problem?
Nope. They just have more bodies to appeal to. Especially to western companies that already captured the US/EU.
Other factors include lower cost of living, cultural factors that reduce individualism, and a semblance of basic safety nets (the ones America sucks at and is actively trying to burn the remains of). Being poor in China (or Asia in general) looks nothing like being poor in the US.
I might be seriously mistaken here, but I don't believe being poor in China is better than the US. I mean, at the very outset, you can get "soft-arrested" when you are banned from travel for being in debt. And freedoms aside, there are more in poverty in China then the US.
https://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-system-p...