It’s very interesting to think about where people might come from when they’re not Chinese and they’re in China. In front of me, it looked like there were maybe two families but which were close and almost like one family, and they were all non-Chinese except for a young boy who was definitely Chinese among them. The younger members of the family, one pre-teen boy and some teen girls and two sets of parents, were sort of passing the boy around. I wonder if he was adopted? Did the families move to Shanghai, did their non-Chinese kids grow up there and did they speak fluent Chinese? Were they just visiting for a little bit if they were adopting the boy? Who knows.
The singing in the church was rather good, and I enjoyed the Mass even though I arrived so late. It wasn’t as fancy on the interior as the Xujiahui church that I visited last week, but at least at this one I could understand everything. I’m hoping that towards the end of my stay I can return to the other church and hopefully understand a little bit more of the Chinese, and read some of the characters on the screens.
But on the way back I did find a place that makes those small fried dumplines, you could buy four (although the people there said “liang ge” despite the fact that you get four) for one kuai less than in the Shanghai No. 1 Food Store, i.e. for 3.50 yuan. I also bought a deep-fried dough thing, not knowing that it had a little tasty surprise inside. Took a photo for the blog.
(Street dumplings! Yummy yummy yummy!)
(Let's call it a Chinese beignet. Also very yummy.)
Found the foreign language bookstore on Fuzhou and stopped in today. The prices were somewhat high so I figured I’d just browse and maybe get some ideas. Then I went to get a coffee, and had an idea about US welfare: Is American poverty closely tied to an overuse of “political correctness” in America? In a way I strongly feel that “being PC” in the U.S. may be a euphemism for being ignorant of the real facts and real causes of a social problem, and as such people expend lots of money and time and other resources in trying to figure out a solution to a “PC problem” when the real problem, not-so-PC, is not getting anywhere close to being solved by their efforts. In a way, I feel like our government has become one to blame this on because it seems to encourage this type of thinking. It’s unfortunate, and it also makes me want to take the government to task in a very public way to be accountable for how it uses the money that the taxpayers entrust to it.
It also makes me interested in what the system is like in a place like China. What is Chinese social welfare? Does the government even have such programs in place, and if so, how effective are they? What is the unemployment rate in China, or if that figure is not reliable, for how long have poor people been unable to find any work that will sustain them? In the U.S., it seems tenable to me that some people may have disincentives to work and support themselves financially without governmental assistance because the responsibility for ensuring social welfare has been shifted from the people to the government. And my fear is that American liberals subscribe to this shift fully and are ready and willing to entrench it even deeper in our national consciousness and national obligations, meaning that perhaps the liberals will get the votes and win the presidency come November 2008, but the reality for the country is that, in a decade or two, this country will really be much worse off than it already is: the taxpayers will feel like they are getting nothing (compared to other countries such as Europe) for their taxpayer dollar, and this will erode confidence in the government and the country will undergo a social crisis of sorts, perhaps even a very real stratification of the population into those who are resentfully forced to give (by the government and tax codes) and those who are waiting to receive free resources. Of course, when you give something away for free, people flock to it if it is helpful to them; that is economics. I think that, besides corporate greed and governmental stupidity, it is this fact of economics that partially led to the implosion of the financial system. Clearly when you assure home ownership for those who in reality cannot afford to own a home, everyone will flock to the lender and take out a mortgage and buy a house that they cannot afford. And then who has a right to go crying to the government and say, “Don’t let the bank foreclose on my house! It’s the American dream for everyone to have a house.” Of course, the real problem may not lie in foreclosure but rather in the repercussions of the housing bubble (I take this from a NYT article that I read, annotated, and then distributed among friends today) in that the houses that were bought with loaned money were overinflated in price, and since the bursting of the housing bubble, that money can never be recouped, and so everyone loses except the sellers. Was the housing bubble a product of the mortgage mess, i.e. when demand went up for certain types of housing due to the availability of loans to the riskiest borrowers, it drove up home prices in an unsustainable way, thus creating a bubble which eventually burst? A real chicken-and-egg problem, I suppose. But shouldn’t the message, at least in this little corner of the financial system, be clear? Don’t promise a home to those who are unable to afford a home. Everyone will lose out in the end.
Of course I don’t mean to sound heartless. I just aim to be realistic in my critique of government action and inaction which has lead to this financial disease that grips us lately. Nothing in my argument states that it is impossible for everyone in the United States to actually own a home. But is does argue that it is impossible to expect a well-functioning economy when everyone who cannot afford a home is given one, particularly those not motivated enough in and of themselves to earn the money necessary to own one. If government does its job correctly, then we can be left with a vibrant economy where all people are motivated to work hard enough to afford whatever house they want: the government need not directly interfere by giving these houses away essentially for free to people who cannot repay – at times because they have no incentive to do so since it seems the government will do anything it can to avoid taking that house away.
My view is that government is supposed to be like a good, progressive manager for employees: your job is to be supportive, not to be overbearing. Use your position such that you make your employees as productive as they can be; in a way, it is almost as if you are performing a service to your employees in this managerial role, because it is your job to facilitate their work. This is an interesting model, where employees create the needs and the managerial role is to fill those needs. But right now I think that the government is stuck in a very bad model of “management,” where rather than facilitating a rise in productivity of the American people, the government is taking it upon itself to do the work for them. This is unsustainable and runs against what I think are the basic tenets of a market economy: that the economy works when incentives line up in such a way that people are motivated to look after themselves and make the best decisions for them. It is not up to the government to make those decisions for people; the government’s job is to align the incentives and ensure that the incentives – which is not synonymous with the resources – are fairly and squarely distributed.
I must end, though, with a crack at anticipating the beginnings of one potential counterargument: the theoretical possibility that any society ends up with most of its wealth in the hands of the few. I read this in an article somewhere and once I remember where I will post it or a reference of where to locate it. (It seems that researchers had developed a computer model of a society and, when they ran it under different starting conditions and tolerances, the model usually returned a society with most of the wealth concentrated in the hands of the few.) While I have some thoughts as to why this might indeed be the case – and from experience why it might be true – I still do not think that this “rule of economics” – which might explain a certain concentration of wealth – would also have as a necessary result in the need for mass redistribution of wealth in order to bring the living standards of the vast majority up above the line of poverty.
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