Anomaly UK

Tim Bray at ongoing writes that

[The Chinese are] walking away from those “cheap labour” manufacturing jobs that have served as one of the main economic drivers of the last couple of decades. At the end of the day, cheap labour doesn’t stay cheap. And while there are probably some more “cheap labour” places for businesses to move—India, Africa—the consequences for China have to be profound. And I can see the day coming, maybe not in my lifetime but not that much further out, when the whole notion of moving businesses around the world so you can pay people less has become, finally, self-defeating. What happens then?

Of course, the first thing that happens then is that we celebrate the end of global poverty of the kind that exists today. It would be a shame to let that go by without marking the achievement.

The way I always look at this question is to compare Japan and Indonesia. Two chains of islands in the Far East. Indonesia is more than double the population of Japan and much larger. Japan is a high-wage economy, the second largest in the world. Indonesia is a low-wage economy, visible to us as an exporter of textiles and cheap manufactured goods.

What would happen to Western economies if Indonesia were to sink beneath the waves tonight? What if Japan were to do the same?

The first would be a blow; the second a catastrophe. Japan is more valuable to us than Indonesia. If Indonesia (and China, and India, and Africa) were to become like Japan, we would be richer.

To descend to the “micro” scale, the competition for cheap labour (as a whole) comes from more-productive expensive labour in more capital-intensive industry. Goods currently produced in labour-intensive ways will be produced in capital-intensive ways with less, but costlier, labour. Workers currently producing low-value goods will be producing more value.

Cheap-labour manufacturing has a “sweet spot” of goods that are easy enough to make that you don’t need highly skilled labour, but difficult enough that you can’t do it with virtually no labour. This is a moving target: I have heard (anecdotally) that socks are not made in places like Thailand and Indonesia; they are made in the developed world because the process is so automated that unskilled labour isn’t needed. As cheap labour becomes less cheap, the sweet spot will disappear.

“David Copperfield” (a policeman) explains the purpose of Schools in our society.

I’ve been reading the Equal Opportunities Commission’s report on young people entering jobs.

One finding highlighted in the press release:

67% of women, didn’t know when they chose their career, about the often lower pay for work mostly done by women and of these two thirds of young women said they would have considered a wider range of career options had they known.

In the general spirit of making up “just so stories”, without evidence, to explain why men and women might behave differently (not being an academic, I can participate in this diverting pastime), I have a new one:

Children are generally presented with a mass of propaganda to the effect that making money is nasty, and nice people aren’t concerned about such things. (I still wince at the memory of Roger Hargreaves’ “Roundy and Squarey”). My prejudice leads me to suspect that girls might be slightly more susceptible to this rubbish than boys, and that therefore boys would be more keen to identify and head for well-paid occupations than girls.

Just a thought. It would be interesting if the EOC, or whoever, were to ask a question along these lines in their next survey. My prejudices are all very well, but data would be preferable.

For the record, while I see no need to aim for exact equality of numbers of men and women in every occupation, and am suspicious of quangos like the EOC, they are clearly looking at a real problem. I am sitting here in a room with twenty-six other software developers, twenty-five of which are male, and we’re struggling to fill open positions…

(comments disabled on this post as having “Work” in the title seems to particularly attract spam)

According to page 14 of today’s Metro, transport tops weekly bills, with £60
spent per week on average.

That’s odd. If average income is £570, then on average we spend about £200 per week on government. That’s as much as on Transport, Recreation, Food and Housing put together. Since I suspect the ONS figures quoted actually include the VAT and other taxes on what we buy, the extent to which taxation dominates our household budgets is even more dramatic.

Tax tops weekly bills.

GMT. For about the tenth year, I am leaving my clocks well alone this weekend. There are defensible arguments for doing regular activities a bit earlier in summer, but changing the clocks twice a year just isn’t a sensible way of doing it. From an information systems point of view, it’s just bad data modelling. It would be much easier if we could assume that every day has 24 hours (give or take a second), that every day has a 1:30 am (and no day has two), and that clocks will run by themselves.

Most timetables get revised regularly anyway — train timetables, for example, usually change around the time of the clock shifts. Both at school and at one past job, we had summer timetables and winter timetables without causing any problems.

I don’t know what the average number of clocks per person is these days, but I don’t think it’s unusual to have one in every room, plus watches, cars, microwave ovens etc. etc. BST probably costs about 30-60 minutes of leisure time per person per year. Add about one programmer-day per medium sized business unit per year dealing with errors thrown up by the time shift. Add the cost of all the human errors introduced twice every year. Add the costs of those that need their timetables to stay regular, and therefore have to adjust them to compensate. (I wouldn’t like to be running an airline at this time of year). Compare to the benefits for people who would otherwise have to change their schedules to take advantage of the early mornings, but this way don’t.

If I were to pluck a figure out of the air, I’d say this insanity costs the country about a billion pounds a year. It’s going to get worse, not better. I don’t know how many people routinely have to know the time in more than one timezone, but it makes that much more difficult. Even if we bully the whole world to do the shift at the same date, half the world is still doing it the other way.

My refusal to change my clocks is a token resistance. What’s most frustrating is that most people agree it’s silly to do this, but nobody cares much. I try to keep the issue visible, to remind people what they’re losing.

All of the arguments in defense of the nonsense assume that people are totally incapable of noticing or adapting to the change of the seasons without the government tricking them into it. I have a higher opinion of my countrymen than that.

Update: via Stumbling and Mumbling, a study estimating the effect of clock changes on the equities market. I’m not really sure what to make of that — the author’s explanations are in terms of subjective effects on traders rather than effects on the actual companies being traded, so I wouldn’t count the devaluation detected as a “loss” per se. The author also mentions in passing increased accident rates following clock changes, which I hadn’t taken into consideration.

Speaking of subjective effects, I think that my habit of adjusting my timetable rather than my clocks helps me to adjust as regards sleep and so on. There’s no logical reason for that, but who knows what effect our belief as to what time it is affects our minds?

Also cited, an earlier item from Village Hampden. I’d meant to refer to that, but I couldn’t find it today. I see BST more as a symbol of government’s inflated self-importance than its tyranny — after all, legally everyone could do as I do and leave their clocks alone. It is worthwhile to demonstrate that the state doesn’t control the stars and the planets…

Update 2: Via the Risks Digest (in full, the Association for Computing Machinery Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems), Barclays’ cash machine network brought down for a day by the time change. Every spring and autumn brings similar news stories.