How Long Until Chinese Wages Surpass Kiwi Wages?

Most Kiwis take it for granted that they are much wealthier than the average Chinese. China is a place where people shit in the street, eat dogs and live in houses made of bamboo and polystyrene. The fact, however, is that China has made immense economic progress over the past 20 years, and if they continue at this rate they will soon catch up to New Zealand.

Most people vaguely understand that China has become richer recently. But most don’t appreciate how far this process has run. The general assumption is that China is no longer Africa poor, but is now Brazil poor. The reality is that the average Chinese is now wealthier than the average Argentinian and is getting wealthier fast.

Chinese wages have increased tenfold over the last 20 years. In 2000, the average Chinese wage was CNY9,371/year. By 2019, the average Chinese wage was CNY 93,383/year, which works out to $(NZD)20,910. The Chinese are well into the middle-income stage of development and are closing in fast on the rich world.

The average New Zealand wage is $33.37 per hour, and the average Kiwi works 1,762 hours per year. This gives an average Kiwi wage of $58,798. This means that Kiwi wages are, for now, 181% higher than Chinese ones. But the rate of increase of Chinese wages is much higher than that of Kiwi wages. Chinese wages will soon catch up.

As mentioned above, the average Chinese wage has increased from CNY9,371 in 2000 to CNY93,383 today, an increase of 997%. This is equivalent to a 12.2% increase every year since 2000, and means that Chinese wages double every six years or so.

The average Kiwi wage has increased from $17.50 in 2000 to $33.37 today, an increase of 91%. This is equivalent to a 3.3% increase every year since 2000. As this column has previously shown, this represents a drastic loss in living standards on account of that house prices have risen much faster than wages. But it’s set to get worse.

There is no guarantee that those rates of growth will maintain, but it’s apparent that the Law of Diminishing Returns has worked to increase Chinese wages much faster than Kiwi wages. Assuming that something like those rates of growth maintain, then it won’t be long before the average Chinese wage surpasses the average Kiwi one.

If we assume that Chinese wages increase at 10% hereafter, and Kiwi wages increase at 3% (the high growth model), then it will take no more than 16 years before Chinese wages are higher than Kiwi ones. At this point, both Chinese and Kiwi wages should be around $95,000.

If we assume that Chinese wages increase at 8% hereafter, and Kiwi wages increase at 2.5% (the medium growth model), then it will take around 20 years before Chinese wages are higher than Kiwi ones.

If we assume that Chinese wages increase at 6% hereafter, and Kiwi wages increase at 2% (the low growth model), then it will take around 27 years before Chinese wages are higher than Kiwi ones.

In any case, the maths suggest that it won’t be much more than one generation before the average wage-earner will earn more, in absolute terms, in China than in New Zealand. The average person reading this article should live to see a world in which Chinese wages are higher than New Zealand wages.

What that means for New Zealand is anyone’s guess. The real tricky questions will be faced by naturalised Chinese New Zealanders whose parents left China when there were much better opportunities in New Zealand. Some of those people might sit down, do the maths, and decide that there are now much better opportunities in China.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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Clown World Chronicles: Politics In Clown World

In The Republic, Plato laid down the facts about the political cycle. The political cycle begins with the introduction of an aristocracy by a class of educated philosopher-kings, then degrades into timocracy, then degrades into oligarchy, then degrades into democracy, which finally degrades into tyranny. It is at the junction between democracy and tyranny that we find ourselves in Clown World.

By 2020, the enlightened aristocracy is long gone. The timocracy ended with the World Wars. Oligarchy reigned for some decades, perhaps up until the 1990s, and since then we’ve been firmly in democracy. With the intensification of Clown World after the Global Financial Crisis, we’re arguably now in a state of tyranny.

Tyranny is when the rulers work to enrich themselves instead of working to enhance the common good. This state is characterised by an absence of reason among the ruling class. Not being reasonable, the rulers make decisions based on crude lusts and impulses. Usually these relate to gratifying their egos in some way, often at the expense of others.

When the ruling class gratifies their egos at the expense of the common man, the common man comes to feel as if he lives in a Clown World. He can’t find a job that pays enough to buy a house and raise a family, but political discussions in the mainstream media ignore such issues, focusing instead of trivialities. It all seems so callously absurd.

Callous absurdity is the hallmark of tyrannies throughout history, and that’s exactly what Clown World is – a kind of tyranny.

As Plato anticipated in his famous Analogy of the Cave, people who figure out that it’s Clown World are treated with violent contempt by those who think that it’s Normal World. Anyone who has a problem with the current order of things is marginalised. Although the numbers of the marginalised are growing, the Normies are still in control.

The general rule of Clown World politics is that everything is either the opposite of how it should be or a grossly corrupted form of it. Politics may have always been corrupt, but only in Clown World has it reached such a shameless, venal and shallow intensity.

In Clown World, we’re led by the worst of us. The American Presidential Election of 2020 will be contested by two very old men, both of who are very much past it. The challenger, Joe Biden, was the Vice President during the Barack Obama era, and so helped to oversee the destruction of Libya. This unprovoked war led to the murder of Muammar Gaddafi, the deaths of 100,000 Libyans and the reintroduction of slave markets to the Libyan capital – and Biden is painted as the good guy in this election.

In Clown World, politicians no longer have to know what they’re talking about. Obama constantly read from a teleprompter, relying on it so much that if it broke down he didn’t know what to say. Clown World politicians in general are barely better informed than the population they’re ruling over – and are frequently worse informed. They are no longer orators, performing feats of wit and memory. Instead they speak in soundbites aimed at the lizard brain.

Because Clown World politicians don’t work towards the greater good, they have no philosophical grounding, and therefore no principles. As such, they are whores who will jump into bed with whoever’s paying. This has led to some exceptionally strange alliances.

One such strange alliance is the one between fundamentalist religious Muslims and left-wing social justice warriors. The social justice warriors are strong supporters of homosexual rights, but the Muslims are strong supporters of homosexuals being thrown off rooftops. They appear to have allied on the basis of having a common grudge against middle-class white men.

Another strange alliance is between Antifa and the corporate elite. Antifa’s great enemies are the Nazis that supposedly lurk around every corner, and their strongest ideological point of difference relates to immigration. Antifa believe that the working class is international and should not be restricted by borders – but the corporate elite have exactly the same opinion. They love to be able to import cheap labour without restriction.

Yet another strange alliance is between feminists and the so-called transphobic. In Clown World, it’s possible to have your cock and balls chopped off and then play for a woman’s sports team. Many right-wingers are disgusted by trans culture, and in getting accused of transphobia they find themselves on the same side as the devotedly left-wing feminists, who want to keep trans people out of women’s spaces.

Perhaps the weirdest of all is the alliance between the fundamentalist religious who want to ban cannabis and the criminal gangs who currently supply the black market with it in the places where it is illegal. Fundamentalist Abrahamists, in particular, are against cannabis because it is a spiritual sacrament, and here they stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the criminal gangs who need it to be illegal to profit from it.

It can be observed, as Plato did so many centuries ago, that democracy leads to widespread bickering and resentment. Eventually this gets so bad that people come to support a tyrant in the hope that unlimited power will make it possible to clean away all the filth. Clown World is at the stage where people might support a charismatic dictator, should one arise. Our political situation is a tinderbox.

Unfortunately there’s no easy solution. A revolution of philosopher-kings seems unlikely owing to the fact that there’s no widespread agreement as to who the philosopher-kings would be. Although Plato described the philosopher-king as being motivated primarily by the love of wisdom, people don’t agree on what constitutes wisdom.

In Clown World, life has become so deeply politicised that every philosophical or scientific question is now divided by political camps. If a person identifies with the left, it can be confidently predicted that they agree with the climate change science but deny the human biodiversity science. If a person identifies with the right, the exact opposite is true. So every question of philosophical wisdom or the nature of reality is corrupted by political influence.

The only solution to the political problems of Clown World might be waiting for it all to collapse.

Politics is now total war, permeating every level of society. No-one can escape the new social justice Inquisition, which scours everyone’s mind for any sign of wrongthinking. Everyone must maintain a state of high alertness and watch over their every word, lest they inadvertently give their political enemies a boost. This anxiety can’t last forever – and it won’t – but it will last as long as Clown World does.

This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.

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Will The ACT Party Eventually Replace National?

The New Zealand National Party has been a monolith on the New Zealand political scene ever since 1936, when it was formed to safeguard the privilege of ownership and to keep wages low. Its enduring and dominating presence is taken for granted by most, but not in this article.

In Sweden, the neo-Nazi Sweden Democrats have gone halfway to replacing the original right-wing party, the Moderates. Opinion polls since the last general election have mostly put the Sweden Democrats ahead. In several polls, the Sweden Democrats even scored higher than the Social Democrats, Sweden’s de facto ruling party.

In the Netherlands, a similar far-right-wing populist party, the Forum for Democracy, came from nowhere in 2017 to become the most popular party a year ago. They have since fallen back to around 10% support, but continue to pose a threat to the mainstream parties.

In Germany, a similar thing has happened, but on the opposite wing. There, the Green Party has grown to a higher level of support than the social democratic SPD, who have ruled Germany for 36 of the 75 years since World War II ended. The Greens are now the most popular party on the German left.

The reason why new parties in Europe are replacing the old ones is because the old ones have let themselves get horrendously out of touch with the peoples they claim to be representing. Young people on both the left and the right are deeply dissatisfied with their rulers. Immigration is one of the major causes of this dissatisfaction.

The social democrats in Sweden and Germany both played instrumental roles in opening the borders of those countries to mass Muslim and African immigration, a move that has had severe and lasting consequences for the young people already there. Given the enormous number of sex and violence crimes that followed, many of the most affected young people have started to look for electoral alternatives.

New Zealanders, whose experiences with immigrants have generally been much more positive than European people’s experiences with immigrants, don’t really care about mass immigration. But there are other ways in which the New Zealand ruling class have neglected the will of their people.

As generations shift, moral values shift with them. Old prejudices fall by the wayside; new prejudices arise. The National Party moved with the times when it came to hating Asians and homosexuals, but they clung to their hate for cannabis users. This is a function of both the large number of Christians within the National Party fold and the intensity of the anti-cannabis brainwashing that Boomers endured in school.

This small-mindedness is motivated primarily by cruelty, and National don’t pretend otherwise. It appeals perfectly to the grossly narcissistic and sadistic sentiments of the average Boomer. But, at the same time, it revolts the younger generations who don’t share the viciousness of the Boomers. This has created a demand for a right-wing alternative.

The ACT Party has a different approach to issues like drug law reform. They do not overtly appeal to malice like the National Party does. David Seymour’s policy book, Own Your Future, is generally positive towards cannabis law reform, if cautious. This approach is much more in line with the values of younger generations.

ACT already appeal to the younger generations more than National do. This was shown by Dan McGlashan in Understanding New Zealand. In this book, McGlashan found significant positive correlations between being in younger age brackets and voting for the ACT Party, as well as significant negative ones between being in those age brackets and voting National.

The right wing is split, between the older voters who prefer National and the younger ones who prefer ACT. The problem for National is that their voters are dying off, and the young ones aren’t necessarily switching to them from the ACT Party.

As time moves on, and as cannabis inevitably becomes legal and as people inevitably come to realise that the War on Cannabis was a complete waste of human life, voters will remember that National moved to perpetuate the suffering of the New Zealand people, and that ACT moved to end it. This will lead them to see National as the party of bad decisions, and ACT as the party of good decisions.

This has already started to happen to some extent. ACT have increased to 6% in recent polling, while National is scoring around 27%. This contrasts sharply with the 0.5% and 44.4% that ACT and National respectively scored in the 2017 General Election. ACT have gone up some 5.5% since then, while National have gone down some 17.4%.

There are many reasons for the change in fortunes, but one of the major ones is National’s refusal to accept the argument for cannabis law reform. This column has gone as far as to argue that National cannot win while it’s their policy to oppose reform. Stubborn support for cannabis prohibition appalls a large proportion of young people, and they see a clearly less appalling alternative in the ACT Party.

As time goes on, many of the young people who got in the habit of voting for ACT instead of National because of the cannabis referendum will continue to do so. This will lead to ACT taking an ever larger share of the right-wing vote. If the examples of Europe are anything to go by, it’s possible that this might continue until the ACT Party grows to replace National as the default leaders of the right wing.

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The Bread And Circuses Are Winding Up

Panem et circenses is an ancient Roman phrase, attributed to the poet Juvenal, that means “bread and circuses.” The idea is that a degenerate society, once it has abandoned all higher values, has nothing left but bread and circuses. Take that away, and the society will fall apart. Our bread and circuses are in the process of being taken away.

The Roman Empire discovered that paying for public circuses was a great way of preventing civil unrest. If the people had an upcoming gladiatorial games to look forward to, they were much more likely to be content. When they didn’t have anything to look forward to, they tended to entertain thoughts of rebellion.

Eventually, the Romans found themselves unable to pay for more games, and that was the tipping point. The cessation of the circuses meant that the citizens got their entertainment from wrecking society instead, and that was the end of the Roman Empire.

The Western World appears to be going through a similar process.

Professional sports have replaced the circuses in the West, and most professional sports leagues have been severely impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. The English Premier League season lost three months, the Major League Baseball season lost 100 games, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, member of the White House’s coronavirus task force, predicted that running the NFL later this year would be impossible.

In New Zealand, there hasn’t been a single All Blacks match so far in 2020, and it looks like there won’t be. There hasn’t been a Black Caps match since March, and there is no news of upcoming fixtures (although a tour to Bangladesh has supposedly been planned).

Even worse, the increasing politicisation of professional sport has seen many turn their televisions off. NBA viewership is down some 20% compared to this time last year. Although the linked article suggests injuries to star players may be the cause of the decline, the truth is that many viewers are sick of having political issues shoved in their faces.

People watch sport to be entertained. They don’t care about the political opinions of professional sportsmen, any more than they care to watch Donald Trump play basketball. They know the sportsmen are not educated intellectuals who study history and human nature. As such, their political opinions don’t need to be taken seriously.

Compounding the problem are blatant double standards when it comes to the political issues being pushed.

In an NBA match earlier this month, Los Angeles Clippers player Montrezl Harrell called Dallas Mavericks player Luka Doncic a “bitch ass white boy“. Although a white player calling a black player a “bitch ass black boy” would be a worldwide scandal, it appears that Harrell is going to avoid sanction entirely.

There might be an inherent demand for entertainment once a person’s basic survival needs are met, but it’s hard to be a white person and keep watching a sports league when you know that league explicitly endorses anti-white racial abuse. It’s a direct humiliation, and many sports fans have found themselves switching off instead.

As in ancient Rome, the lack of easily-available entertainment has led to people seeking it elsewhere, in more destructive ways. There is a direct link between the winding up of the American circuses and the widespread civil unrest there. Instead of finding entertainment in sport, people are finding it in other people getting shot and beaten to death.

More worryingly, the bread is also winding up.

When Juvenal spoke of “bread” he was referring to the grain dole, another Roman invention for defraying rebellious sentiments. Because of the psychological effect of starvation, hungry populations soon become violent. The Roman masses were pacified with free grain, then free bread, wine and pork.

When this food dole wound up, people started going hungry, and this led to even more trouble than the boredom. A bored person can get entertained quickly by setting something on fire; a hungry person won’t be satisfied until they kill someone. For the Roman ruling classes, to not dole out bread meant the collapse of their society.

The West doesn’t have a grain dole, but we do have a system of social welfare which has much the same effect. It’s also being scaled back.

In America, negotiations for a second stimulus check are in doubt, because Republicans and Democrats cannot agree on terms. The first stimulus check was granted because the coronavirus pandemic had destroyed many American jobs, but those jobs are yet to return, and therefore the economic stress has not gone away.

In New Zealand, the COVID-19 Resurgence Wage Subsidy – designed to have a similar effect to the American stimulus checks – is expiring later this week. The likely outcome is a high volume of job losses. Already the New Zealand economy has been hit hard by the near-total annihilation of our international tourism sector; further major job losses would cause widespread despair.

It’s possible that Donald Trump and Jacinda Ardern will extend welfare benefits, at least for now. But the largesse cannot be continued indefinitely. The New Zealand national debt was $US 59.6 billion in March this year, but has already blown out to $US 81.1 billion by September. They can’t keep borrowing money to keep the party going forever.

When these special coronavirus payments are stopped, the inevitable result will be an increase in the number of people taking to the streets in protest. Given how ugly sentiments already are, with multiple protesters having been shot dead in America over the past week, a wider collapse of order is a very realistic prospect.

In summary, society is held together by bread and circuses, and both of those are winding up thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. This phenomenon is occurring across the Western World, which suggests that we’re all in for some difficult times over the next 12 months or so.

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