Water seeks its own level...

For years I’ve been saying that when a worker makes $30 per hour in America or in Germany and only $1.00 or $2.00 in some developing nation, something will have to give… What does that mean? Simply that China and the rest of the developing world are quite likely to see their standard of living rise while America, Europe and Japan’s may gradually go down until pay scales, like water, seek their own level. This also means that for developed nations, things will become increasingly painful while conditions may get ever so slightly better in the rest of the planet. Cheap telecoms, widespread internet, containerized shipping and all other globalization tools have now leveled the playing field, and rich and poor nations alike are now headed to meet at some middle - perhaps more modest - ground, instead of ostentatious wealth for some and abject poverty for others. We’ve already started to see that sea change everywhere; foodstuff is much more expensive than it used to be, cost of energy is going up, simply because more people on the planet have access to these commodities and keep on wanting more of them. In the entire western world everyone now complains about a much higher “cost of living” and the only action we can take against it is consuming less. During the successive “oil shocks” of the seventies, rebounding was easy because the earth population was almost half of what it is today and the “third world” as it was called then, had not yet tasted consumption. Today, the situation is drastically different. The earth is overpopulated and all of its inhabitants want to consume more, so it’s quite unlikely that cost of key commodities will ever go down. As all this growing population becomes more educated and able to compete more effectively on the world’s labor market, competition for jobs will also stay on the rise. By accepting to see our real incomes as well as our standards of consumption and living go down a bit, we may finally be forced to do what we’ve talked about all along, but never really done: Sharing.