If I Hear About How We Use Slave Labor One More Time...

I love purchasing power parity. The concept (actually, reality) that what really matters is purchasing power, not the nominal wage a person is paid.

Now, your standard trophy wife sitting in the suburbs whose husband makes all the real money while she contemplates how to make her child psychology degree mean something, sits there and after watching "The View" looks around and says, "gosh, I'm pathetic. I haven't done anything with my life. But I must do something, because my 1970's brainwashing tells me to do so."

Of course most of us know that it would be best if she did NOTHING. That she didn't think, that she sat there innoculated from the rest of the world and continued on to eat her bon bons and leave the world be.

But oh no, they have to go on a crusade.

Now, one of these many crusades they decide to go on is fighting for the poorer people of the world. To fight against "slave labor" and to buy coffee from shops that pay a "living wage."

So with little thinking they read in Mother Jones or what have you that the "poor children of country X are paid 43 cents per decade and must eat shrubs to live" and it's all the fault of rich people in the US (of course they'd be paid NOTHING if it weren't for us, so I guess 43 cent is worse than nothing). Regardless, this is why there's this trend to go "organic" and shop at places like Whole Foods amongst the upper classes.

The problem is that when these wage figures are quoted, they are not adjusted for purchasing power. Yes, of course Akbar may make $3/day which in New York City will get you nothing. But in Indonesia it has the equivalent purchasing power of say $25. It's not too unlike

"how much will $10 buy you in Des Moines, Iowa" - Answer 3 heads of cattle, 40 acres of farmland, your own personal F-16 fighter plane and a keg of beer.

versus

"how much will $10 buy you in San Francisco." - parking for 20 minutes.

So to make purchasing power parity understandable, even to the suburbanite trophy wives that could never pass high school algebra, the good men and women at UBS put together this spiffy chart that shows you how long it takes to earn the money to buy a very standard and universal good;

The Big Mac.


I recall being a poo-shoveller making $3.15/hr in the 7th grade, which is about as long as it takes for your average China man to earn the same amount of money for a Big Mac.

"Slave labor" my ass.