Not only does wal mart save American consumers Billions of dollars a year and employ over a million people, they are perhaps the single biggest alleviator of poverty in the world. By giving jobs to millions of CHinese, Wal Mart has significantly raised their standard of living. Let’s see… according to this article, Wal Mart is responsible for bringing about 460,000 people a year “out of poverty”. That’s a pretty general term, what do they mean? Try raising their income by two to two and a half times, day in and day out, all year long. That’s an enormous increase and it far outstrips anything that charity or the world bank could ever hope to do. “Yeah, but those jobs suck!” That’s what anti Wal mart, anti globalization, anti free trade people say about these numbers. It’s a damned good start, the more people that are working, the fewer that are starving, and the more that will move on to better jobs as their skills and experience improves. With several generations, you’ll see a life in China much like our own (prosperity wise). Think back to the so called “sweatshops” in Japan, Taiwan, etc back in the 50’s and 60’s. Life is much better there, those sweatshop workers are now either retired or nearing retirement and they are living far better than they would have if they never had those “awful” jobs. Economic growth takes time, allowing people to work instead of requiring people to live off of subsistence farming will move an economy along the right path. Here’s my favorite part of the article…
“The Nobel laureate economist Robert Lucas once said “Once you start thinking about economic growth, it is hard to think about anything else.” Non-economists, especially those associated with the environmental movement, regard this as evidence that economics is a form of brain damage, a cancer on our earth. But rural Chinese peasants surviving on less than a dollar per day do not regard economic growth, or Wal-Mart factory jobs, as a cancer. When a Mongolian student at a U.S. workshop on globalization heard U.S. college students denounce sweatshops, he shouted: “Please give us your sweatshops!”
Great stuff! Shop Wal mart! Save money while giving people jobs! It’s a win win situation!
Isaac