The August 10 & 17, 2015 New Yorker starts off with an article about a New York City public school, the Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women, where tax dollars are used to train students to think of themselves as victims:
“My girls are freaking awesome, but they’re trapped in teen-age bodies,” Kiri Soares, the school’s principal, said later. A year ago, she noticed that the girls “would have these really deep-seated feelings about unjust things that were happening to them, but they don’t always know how to identify or articulate it.” An activist friend named Cathy O’Neil suggested that Soares start the class, which they call Occupy Summer School. Union members, political economists, and organizers drop in to discuss protest strategies. … The initial idea had been to engage passersby with a bake sale at which men would be charged a dollar for a cupcake or a brownie and women would be charged seventy-eight cents. The girls hoped this would spark conversations about wage discrimination.
[Unclear if the students were also informed that if they want the spending power of a man holding Job X, the New York child support formula will enable them to obtain that by having sex with three men holding Job X. Or that, if they went to work for Hillary Clinton, they could earn 87 cents for every man’s dollar. Or even that an employee who starts off on the first day of work believing him- or herself to be a victim may have a lower value to an employer (increased risk of costly litigation, bad attitude on the job, victim attitude turning off customers, etc.).]
The same issue has an article about a country in which, at least for a manufacturing worker, there is no market-clearing wage for a man (under the 21st century draft horse theory). Some excerpts from Peter Hessler’s article on Chinese entrepreneurs in Egypt:
Lin quickly realized that people in Asyut cared little for pearls and they did not wear neckties with galabiya. But they liked women’s underwear, so he began to specialize, and soon his wife came over from China to help. In Cairo and northern Egypt, the network of Chinese lingerie importers and producers quickly grew, and eventually Lin and Chen rented a storefront in Asyut. They invited a relative and a friend to open the two other shops in town. While Lin and Chen were building their small lingerie empire, they noticed that there was a lot of garbage sitting in open piles around Asyut. They were not the first people to make this observation. But they were the first to respond by importing a polyethylene-terephthalate bottle-flake washing production line, which is manufactured in Jiangsu province, and which allows an entrepreneur to grind up plastic bottles, wash and dry the regrind at high temperatures, and sell it as recycled material.
“I saw that it was just lying around, so I decided that I could recycle it and make money,” Lin told me. He and his wife had no experience in the industry, but in 2007 they established the first plastic-bottle recycling facility in Upper Egypt. Their plant is in a small industrial zone in the desert west of Asyut, where it currently employs thirty people and grinds up about four tons of plastic every day. Lin and Chen sell the processed material to Chinese people in Cairo, who use it to manufacture thread. This thread is then sold to entrepreneurs in the Egyptian garment industry, including a number of Chinese. It’s possible that a bottle tossed onto the side of the road in Asyut will pass through three stages of Chinese processing before returning to town in the form of lingerie, also to be sold by Chinese.
… Here in Egypt, home to eighty-five million people, where Western development workers and billions of dollars of foreign aid have poured in for decades, the first plastic-recycling center in the south is a thriving business that employs thirty people, reimburses others for reducing landfill waste, and earns a significant profit. So why was it established by two lingerie-fuelled Chinese migrants, one of them illiterate and the other with a fifth-grade education?
“I just can’t hire men,” Xu Xin, who had started a cell-phone factory, told me bluntly. After many years with Motorola in China, Xu had come to Egypt in the hope of producing inexpensive phones for the local market. “This work requires discipline,” he said. “A cell phone has more than a hundred parts, and, if you make one mistake, then the whole thing doesn’t work. The men here in Egypt are too restless; they like to move around. They can’t focus.”
I met Wang Weiqiang, who had built a profitable business in eastern China producing the white ghotra head coverings worn by Saudis and other Gulf Arabs. After more than a decade, Wang decided to start an operation in Egypt. “I have very good-quality Egyptian cotton here,” he said. “My machinery is very modern. My investment is more than a million dollars for the factory here. But during these two years I’ve lost a lot. It’s all the problem of labor—the mentality of the workers. Our factory needs to run twenty-four hours a day; it’s not just for one shift. In order to do this in Egypt, we have to hire male workers, and the men are really lazy.” He continued, “Now I reject ninety per cent of the men who apply. I use only girls and women. They are very good workers. But the problem is that they will work only during the daytime.” He intends to introduce greater mechanization in hopes of maximizing the short workday.
Hessler is a great writer and both China and Egypt are exotic lands from our point of view. I would highly recommend the article.
Interesting articles and interesting contrast between the two. In modern America, we are supposed to believe that everyone is not only equal in dignity before the eyes of their Creator and the law, but that we are literally the same, men and women, people of all races – there are no significant difference between us in capabilities or work ethic, so that we all merit exactly the same pay. (I’m surprised that the idea of the UNIFORM wage has not caught on – since we are all the same, we should all earn the same pay). We are supposed to believe this despite any evidence to the contrary. In fact, even noticing any such differences or mentioning them in public may get you branded as “racist” or “sexist” so it is best not to bring them up.
The Chinese, on the other hand, are realists – they understand the world as it is, not as they would like it to be (they have tried re-creating the order of society as a utopia and it was a nightmare). That men and women, Chinese and Egyptians, have different qualities as workers is obvious to them from real world experience and no one has told them that they are not supposed to notice this.