Graham,
I saw the Leeds family who moved production to China, and for the moment it seems to work. If we can manage to design and create, knowing our own markets better than the Chinese, then there is money to be made. We seem to have a balance of trade deficit with China along with most of the western world so how much longer we can expect them to work for us without being paid is a big question. How are financial services growing in Asia? Are we hoping they will never be able to run a bank or insurance company as good as us?
Jeremy,
Let's not get too downhearted. Some of us have lived through appalling wages and conditions. Forget canibalism, China might invade us on human rights grounds, because the rich would eat the poor.
If I need cheering up I just think of a two up and two down, outside toilet, rattling draughty windows, freezing cold beds and bedrooms, a coal fire with smog so dense you couldn't see a couple of yards, one cold water tap with a red stone sink, a tin bath that came out on saturdays. Diseases like scarlet fever, TB, polio, whooping cough, measles quite common. The whole family had flu and colds every winter. Coming home from school with no food in the house, waiting in the dark, maybe a candle, for my Dad to come home from work with some money. Meals of chips, chips and egg, chips and beans, chips and sausage, and toast and dripping for breakfast when I came back from my paper round at 8am, out at 6-30 am in the rain and the snow then out again in the evening with the evening papers seven days a week for just over a pound.
My mother longed for a council house but she never got one, my Dad caught malaria with the British Army in India and it seemed to flare up now and again. She did the weeks washing in a tub outside in the yard, scrubbing shirt collars with a scrubbing brush, and a kind of glass rubbing board, then she turned a big handle on a wringer to squeeze out the water.
They were happy, the war was over no more bombs and missing relatives, Uncle Tom was home with a bullet in his leg, Uncle Edmund had met a nice French girl. Dad's old home guard overcoat added to the bedclothes, and we never felt poor or badly off, in fact my Mum would go and help people she considered poor. That was life, we never thought of it as appalling or badly paid.
Let's see it as it is. Some jokers thought they would give lots of credit to anyone who wanted it, the media manipulated greed and jealousy to make people disatisfied with any level of living, even ten tellys, three cars, four holidays abroad, clothes & shoes & goodies galore but keep us hungry for more and more, a bigger telly, a smarter car, a more exotic holiday. It's gone too far, that's all. We're not going back to mud huts but we are going to manage with a bit less. It's all in your head, I've seen very happy people in the villages in Indonesia, and Malaysia, and didn't one of Onasis's daughters commit suicide presumably because she wasn't happy with her millions. We don't need an empire to be happy, we don't have to lead the world in science and technology or finance, what we need is contentment, mental peace.
Prof
Thanks for those understanding words.