Manual Labor
This man is manually sifting this sand to make it fine enough to pave a nearby sidewalk.
We think it is always worth noticing how many activities make sense in a low labor cost environment that you cannot imagine in America. In China, when we see these types of activities, it reminds us a Milton Friedman anecdote.
WSJ.com: “At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: ‘You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.’ To which Milton replied: ‘Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels’.”
