More RMS-bashing
10:18pm, 15th November 2006
Copyright and globalization in the age of computer networks
[The following is an edited transcript of the conclusion of Richard Stallman’s talk. A transcript of the complete talk including the question-and-answer session is also available.]
RMS is a God, but so is Huitzilopochtli, demander of human sacrifice. One wants to tie you to a slab and cut your heart out and the other was worshipped by Aztecs.
Anyway.
RMS is a good guy in the copyfight, but I’m going to have to tug his beard for this:
We have to recognize that the existing copyright system does a lousy job of supporting musicians, just as lousy as world trade does of raising living standards in the Philippines and China. You have these enterprise zones where everyone works in a sweatshop and all of the products are made in sweatshops. I knew that globalization was a very inefficient way of raising living standards of people overseas.
Wait, what? World trade has done a lousy job of raising living standards in China? I’m not sure which version of emacs he’s been smoking, but every available indicator over the last 30 or 40 years reveals China to be in the midst of the greatest industrial revolution in history. You might legitimately complain about the environmental results of this, but you absolutely cannot question that the Chinese people are better off for it. Real statistics are hard to come by, but with population up by 30% and GDP up by 300% from 1978-2000 it’s mindbogglingly counterfactual to suggest Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms haven’t raised living standards.
As for “sweatshops”, there’s a dirty little secret that $20/hr first-world workers don’t want you to know: sweatshops are good for the poor and the people that work in them like working in them. Speaking of which…
Say, an American is getting paid $20 an hour to make something and you give that job to a Mexican who is getting paid maybe six dollars a day, what has happened here is that you’ve taken a large amount of money away from an American worker, given a tiny fraction, like a few percents, to a Mexican worker and given back the rest to the company. So if your goal is to raise the living standards of Mexican workers, this is a lousy way to do it.
Is it really a lousy way to raise the living standard of the Mexican worker when he’s getting $6/day and was previously getting nothing? It sounds like he’s $6/day better off.
Aside from $20/hour being a gross overestimate for unskilled labour (US minimum wage is $5.15/hour), and $6/day being a gross underestimate for outsourced labour (”sweatshop” wages in Honduras are more than twice that, not even taking into account differences in purchasing power), the suggestion seems to be that wealth has been destroyed because the $160/day job has turned into a $6/day job.
In fact, wealth has been created. If you only have to spend $6 on labour, you can spend the other $154 on other things. RMS seems to believe that “giving back the rest to the company” somehow causes it to disappear, but I imagine this is just his unfamiliarity with what companies actually do with their money. That extra $154 can now be productively invested in further enterprises which, on the whole, will generate further wealth, and very likely further jobs.
One might ask whether this makes the $20/hour American feel any better about losing his job, and the answer is obviously no. He might not care to hear Bastiat explain the situation either. But the fact is, for all his loss, everybody else is better off. The Mexican is better off because he has a job. The company is better off because it can invest in new projects (or return the money to its shareholders, who will invest it themselves, or maybe just blow it all on strippers). The rest of the world is better off because it can buy widgets for $6 plus parts rather than $160 plus parts.
This last benefit is important. Would you have a computer if it cost £10,000? Would you have a car if it cost £100,000? How long would you spend talking on the phone to your friends if it cost £10/minute? Every penny shaved off the price of consumer goods is an improvement in your - and everyone else’s - quality of life.
RMS goes on to say:
So I think I’ve said most of what I want to say. I’d like to mention that tomorrow is Phone-In Sick Day in Canada.
And he wonders why $20/hour workers are being out-competed by Mexicans.
That’s from Richard’s recent GPLv3 speech in Tokyo, at http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3/tokyo-rms-transcript.en.html#q8 of course.