But the point is, the whole rationale of globalization is that in modern times it is more economicially efficient to bring jobs and economic opportunity to the people rather than the people to jobs. Accordingly, jobs should be enecouraged to go inland, which as you know, is official Chinese policy now. The migration to HK and the Peal river Delta and other Specialist Econonomic Zones is caused by complex factors, economic opportunity is only a minor factor, the major being China's development policy between 1978-98. I have never suggested that the millions of individual migration decisions were irrational, but I suggest that the policies that cause them to have to make such individually rational decisions were not the best policies. Substandard working conditions and environmental abuse are not necessary ingrediants for attracting worker migration. People will also also come if the environment is pristene and the factories safe. So the tycoons in Hong Kong willl have 2 instead of 4 Rolls Royces each, its not a great sacrifice for clean air and water. My point is that abusive business practices will end only if they are forbidden by law. Business will always find a way to do business if everybody is subject to the same rules. The World Bank, instead of providing sophisticated apologies for pollution and inhumane labor conditions, ought to take economic and environmental human rights seriously and impose a global regime through whhich such practices will be illegal as well as unprofitable. It is not an economic issue, rather, it is a poltical issue. To argue such a basic issue on economic effieceincy and transtional neccesity grounds is simply misleading, if not suspect. It reminds one of arguing for slavery on economic efficiency terms.
Henry C.K. Liu
Enzo Michelangeli wrote:
> What about letting people choose what they prefer? Six million Chinese have
> moved to Hong Kong from PRC, and many more from the pristine, unpolluted,
> arcadic, socialist countryside to the "dark satanic mills" of Guangdong. Are
> they all crazy? No, Henry: they are rational individuals who, like their
> peers in other lands and other times, know very well where their best
> interest lies.
>
> Enzo
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Henry C.K. Liu <hliu at mindspring.com>
> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
> Date: Thursday, December 03, 1998 1:22 AM
> Subject: Re: World Bank memos
>
> >Brad Delong:
> >
> >Its not all that hard to figure out.
> >Take Hong Kong and the Pearl River delta, the environmental impact on
> public health and life expectancy, not even
> >counting "quality of life" cannot be compensated by the increase in "cash
> wealth" of the population. Even if HK and
> >China were to spend their entire combined foreign trade surpluses on the
> restoring the damaged environment, they cannot
> >bring it back to pre-1970 levels, not to mention losses in fisheries and
> agricultural production due to environmental
> >damage.
> >The so-called emerging economies or NICs can apply a simple Pareto Optimum
> test to evaluate policies and projects. And
> >if that should slow down "development", so be it. The difference between
> dying from hunger and dying from lung cancer
> >is academic.
> >Pollution for hunger is a Western strategy to shift a politically explosive
> condition (hunger leads to riots) to a
> >politically benign condition (pollution is debated in universities). It is
> a more sophisticated version of the
> >British's selling opium to 18th century China. The post-war international
> division of labor has degenerated into the
> >export of pollution and sub-standard working conditions from the developed
> economies. And it has to stop.
> >
> >By the way, Larry Summers has as little credibility in Asia as he does in
> Congress.
> >
> >Henry C.K. Liu
> >
> >
> >Brad De Long wrote:
> >
> >> >G'day Brad,
> >> >
> >> >You write:
> >> >
> >> >>> Go easy on Larry. Remember the papers that he and I wrote late in the
> 1980s
> >> >>> supporting a Tobin Tax...
> >> >
> >> >I risk going over old terrain here because I've had to resort to
> trashing
> >> >unread posts of late. Are we talking Larry Summers?
> >> >
> >> >That Larry is, it seems to me, a slightly more forthright and honest pig
> >> >than the pigs Patrick lists. He knows well enough that of which he's
> part.
> >> >As he did in the case of his oh-so-forthright-and-honest argument for
> >> >poisoning people in the third world. How did that bit of forthright
> >> >honesty go again? 'They're all gonna die soon anyway, so it won't
> hurt',
> >> >wasn't it?
> >>
> >> It wasn't, actually...
> >>
> >> In a lot of manufacturing industries, "dirty" production processes are a
> >> lot cheaper than "clean" ones. Since labor productivity in many
> developing
> >> economies is still very low, a demand that developing countries adopt
> >> first-world standards of pollution control may be a demand that they not
> >> industrialize--that they stay very poor.
> >>
> >> It's not clear what the right policy is. It is clear that taking
> expensive
> >> steps to reduce the risk of prostate cancer (the reference in your last
> >> sentence) which kills you a long time from now when you are old should
> not
> >> be a high priority as long as you still have amoebic dysentery and
> cholera
> >> in your water. And to the extent that industrializing faster in a
> >> cheap-and-dirty way gets your government the resources to clean up the
> >> water, industrializing faster is a good thing.
> >>
> >> Things are complicated--and this is why it is hard to figure out what the
> >> right thing to do is--by the fact that the beneficiaries from
> >> cheap-and-dirty forms of industrialization (the bosses of manufacturing
> >> firms, and those workers employed in them who aren't whomped by
> >> pollution-related diseases) are different from those who suffer from
> >> pollution (children who get lung diseases, and nearby residents poisoned
> by
> >> heavy metals). Will the profits from cheap-and-dirty industrialization go
> >> to cleaning up the public water supply? Or will they go to Swiss bank
> >> accounts?
> >>
> >> As I understand the context of Lant Pritchett's memo, it was written in
> an
> >> internal World Bank debate with a whole bunch of guys who were ducking
> this
> >> whole set of issues, and simply saying that no factory should be built
> >> anywhere in the world that does not use best-world-practice emissions
> >> control methods--and thus had gone overboard on the "Malthusian" side:
> >> arguing (implicitly at least) that the best policy is to keep people in
> >> developing economiespoor so they won't pollute very much...
> >>
> >> Brad DeLong
> >
> >