"How do you think Jinghong workers compare to the guys in Dali Old Town?"
The businesses in Dali Old Town keep running all day long. I haven't had anything to complain about while being there, apart from the fact that some restaurants use the water from the street canals to wash vegetables.
In Jinghong, they sleep/nap all day and slowly wake up when the lights turn on after 18:00 and start packing up from 21:30, all that while overcharging you for everything from Lao Beer in a normal store to a 5min taxi ride.
In terms of service, there are 4 basic types I've come across. In descending order of desirability:
1) hardworking/efficient and polite/pleasant
2) hardworking/efficient but not particularly polite/pleasant
3) kinda lazy but polite/pleasant
4) kinda lazy and kinda rude
No.1 is rare in China, but common in some countries with developed service sectors.
No.2, 3 & 4 are common in China, but less common in other countries.
To go beyond being a smokestack nation and boost domestic spending (in a country with the lowest spend percentage in the world - just 50% of income - so there is large scope for greater spending), China needs to focus on getting more establishments with workers delivering the No1 style service. Apart from improving the economy, it will also make a virtual cycle of pleasantness, politeness, and warm fuzzy feeling!
OK, but I haven't found 1) terribly rare, although I think hardworking is more common that efficient.
I think boosting spending is only a good idea if the things to be purchased are really worth the necessary labor to produce them - a lot of crap is produced everywhere, and putting people to work to produce them means not putting people to work at jobs that are actually more important to see done - but the rich must have their toys, and can arrange to have them produced by employing people to do the jobs that don't help the poor, simply because they have the wealth/power to do so. Some people may call this economic justice, but I have a few doubts about whether it produces social justice.
Right - a diversion from the OP, mea culpa.
Not only a diversion, off topic and unrelated, but it also makes little sense. Who decides which jobs are more important? How can creating more jobs not help the poor? What is economic justice? 致富光荣
@Geezer: At present the rich & powerful decide which jobs are more important, and they usually decide those that satisfy their desires are important, because they can. I won't attempt to decide what economic justice is because I don't see why that decision should be left to me, but my opinion is that what we've got is not it, for the reason stated above. What's your opinion?
Gee, I get stuck on just who the "rich & powerful" are. I think you might mean Capitalists but I'm not sure?
It is a good thing Socialist countries like China do not have the "rich & powerful" to demand poor folks work at unimportant jobs. They just might import their toys like cars and stuff.
'Socialist' countries indeed have the powerful, and usually the rich as well. Something wrong with the model, perhaps.
Perhaps indeed! But at least the Capitalists have fled, been jailed or executed.
You are right. Capitalism is pretty natural as along with the self interest it requires voluntary cooperation and mutual benefit to succeed and prosper. Socialism requires force to make folks to live and work for the benefit the state and forgo anything extra so the lazy and inefficient can share the equally.
