资本主义的真相

• [已注销]

  2014-02-13
  Usually, a company becomes transnational and sets up activities in foreign countries because it possesses some technological and/or organizational competences that the firms operating in the host countries do not possess. These competences are usually embodied in people (e.g., managers, engineers, skilled workers), organizations (e.g., internal company rules, organizational routines, ‘institutional memory’) and networks of related firms (e.g., suppliers, financiers, industrial associations or even old-boy networks that cut across company boundaries), all of which cannot be easily transported to another country.Most machines may be moved abroad easily, but it is much more costly to move skilledworkers or managers. It is even more difficult to transplant organizational routines or busines...
• [已注销]

  2014-02-13
  Country A: Until a decade ago, the country was highly protectionist, with an average industrial tariff rate well above 30 per cent. Despite the recent tariff reduction, important visible and invisible trade restrictions remain. The country has heavy restrictions on cross-border flows of capital, a state-owned and highly regulated banking sector, and numerous restrictions on foreign ownership of financial assets. Foreign firms producing in the country complain that they are discriminated against through differential taxes and regulations by local governments. The country has no elections and is riddled with corruption. It has opaque and complicated propertyrights. In particular, its protection of intellectual property rights is weak, making it the pirate capital of the world. The country h...
• [已注销]

  2014-02-09
  Since no one was allowed to own any means of production, virtually all enterprises were run by professional managers (with minor exceptions such as small restaurants and hairdressers), preventing the emergence of visionary entrepreneurs, like Henry Ford or Bill Gates. Given the political commitment to high equality, there was a clear cap on how much a business manager, however successful, could get. This meant that there was only a limited incentive for business managers to turn the advanced technologies that the system was clearly capable of producing into products that consumers actually wanted. The policy of full employment at all costs meant that managers could not use the ultimate threat – that of sacking – to discipline workers. Thiscontributed to sloppy work and absenteeism
• [已注销]

  2014-02-09
  China, being the birthplace of Confucianism, had the confidence to take a more pragmatic approach in interpreting the classical doctrines and allowed people from merchant and artisanal classes to sit for the civil service examination. Korea – being more Confucian than Confucius – adamantly stuck to this doctrine and refused to hire talented people simply because they were born to the ‘wrong’ parents. It was only after our liberation from Japanese colonial rule (1910–45) that the traditional caste system was fully abolished and Korea became a country where birth does not set a ceiling to individual achievement
• [已注销]

  2014-02-09
  the very fact that its PPP income is more or less the same as its market exchange rate income is proof that the higher average living standard in the US is built on the poverty of many. What do I mean by this? As I have pointed out earlier, it is normal for a rich country’s PPP income to be lower, sometimes significantly, than its market exchange rate income, because it has expensive service workers. However, this does not happen to the US, because, unlike other rich countries, it has cheap service workers. To begin with, there is a large inflow of low-wage immigrants from poor countries, many of them illegal, which makes them even cheaper. Moreover, even the native workers have much weaker fallback positions in the US than in European countries of comparable income level. Because they hav...
• [已注销]

  2014-01-28
  Wages in rich countries are determined more by immigration control than anything else,including any minimum wage legislation. How is the immigration maximum determined? Not bythe ‘free’ labour market, which, if left alone, will end up replacing 80–90 per cent of nativeworkers with cheaper, and often more productive, immigrants. Immigration is largely settled bypolitics. So, if you have any residual doubt about the massive role that the government plays inthe economy’s free market, then pause to reflect that all our wages are, at root, politicallydetermined
• xitchcock

  2013-01-30
  Both these countries are up to their necks in things that are supposed to hamper economic development - heavy protectionism, discrimination against foreign investors, weak protection of property rights, monopolies, lack of democracy, corruption, lack of meritocracy, and so on. You would think that they are both headed for developmental disasters. But think again.