Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Simple math says that raising labor costs from $10 per iPAD by 20, to $200 would raise the total product price by 38%, to $690.
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Simple math may not be realistic here. When the device is manufactured in a lower wage country, work is done by hand that in a high wage country would be done by robots. Also, high wages lead to designs that have fewer but more expensive parts, thus taking less time to assemble.
Chinese factories are filled with workers, whereas today's American factories have a small number of workers tending large numbers of machines. Nothing wrong with that. It is, in the long term, impossible to have higher wages unless the workers are more productive.
Export-driven manufacturing is the most plausible means of lifting third world countries out of desperate poverty. It worked for South Korea and Taiwan, and now it is working for mainland China.
There is a middle ground here. If you take a buy American stance, rural Chinese lose an opportunity to better their lives. But without some Western pressure to mitigate sweatshop conditions, the positives described by HansTWN in #15 above are less likely to occur.
I suppose that if someone really believes in buying American or other first world goods, they would stick to paper books and not even be in this forum. Correct?