State of the Union 2014

[citizen k]

I believe there are elements of faith and wishful thinking to all ideological systems. 

[DontSayBanana]

This picture is just crying out for me to edit Colonel Sanders into it.

[Eddie Teach]

I believe that's just the voices in your head. 

[Ideologue]

I think the graphic is just a depiction of our growing disillusionment with facial hair.

[Admiral Yi]

I believe it's a very clever marketing campaign by Coca Cola.

[CountDeMoney]

Mao looks like he just pushed out one of those little burpie farts, the quick and quiet kind that sound like a party favor.

[DGuller]

And Berkut knows anger.  He's on his third keyboard this month, yet another victim to his Oven Mitts of Malice.

Having Molotov cocktails thrown at his head surely didn't help his mood.

[Jacob]

Or are you looking for statistically rigorous breakdown of changes in purchasing power and consumption of uneducated Chinese rural poor people in the last four decades?

Or even an unrigorous one.

Okay

So here's a site that discusses the economic achievement of lifting several hundred million Chinese out of absolute poverty, defined as living on $1.25 or less a day. This has been reduced, so there is only about a dozen million Chinese (about 6%) who remain below that poverty line: http://filipspagnoli.wordpress.com/stats-on-human-rights/statistics-on-poverty/statistics-on-poverty-in-china/

I think it's fair to say that the 12 million or so (18 million according to other sites) living on less than $1.25 today have not seen an improvement in their standard of living compared to the (admittedly more numerous millions of) Chinese who lived on less than $1.25/day in 1984 just in purely economic terms.

I didn't claim that. I claimed that having millions of kids growing up without their parents is not a good thing by most definitions, even if economical pressure makes it the rational choice. If you do read some of the stories and sentiments of migrant workers separated from their kids, it certainly seems to cause significant anguish.

Since you mentioned in the context of defending the claim that rural, uneducated Chinese are worse off, I figured the point about separation from children had, you know, something to do with the topic.

It does. The claim you advanced - and which I did not make - was that I "know better than a billion Chinese". I don't claim to, but you seem comfortable speaking on behalf of them.

My point was relevant. Being "better off" or "worse off" is not purely an economic matter; being almost permanently separated from your parents as a young child is not "better off", it's "worse off". It may be a necessary choice to have imposed on you given economic realities, but if that leaves you at the same standard of living as someone comparable two decades ago, but when young families were not separated as a broad social phenomenon, then you are in fact worse off in comparison.

They have access to an entire array of consumer goods that they did not before.  They're living in a country that has experienced gigantic income growth, and, as part of that growth, has seen increased demand for agricultural products.  That would tend to drive up farm income.  They're also living in a country that has spend vast sums modernizing its transportation infrastructure; that would tend to drive down the cost and time to get goods to market and also increase farm income.

From Wikipedia on the rural-urban divide in China:

in the period 1986-1992, investments to urban state-owned enterprises (SOE) accounted for more than 25% of the total government budget. On the other hand, less than 10% of the government budget was allocated to investments in the rural economy in the same period by the state despite the fact that about 73-76% of the total population lived in the rural areas. However, the burden of the inflation caused by the fiscal expansion, which at that time was at a level of approximately 8.5%, was shared by all including the rural population.

This report on rural poverty in China - http://www.ruralpovertyportal.org/country/home/tags/china lists the following key causes and characteristics of rural poverty in China:

- Increasingly frequent natural calamities, especially floods and droughts, caused by extreme weather conditions that are associated with climate change
- Remote locations with poor community infrastructure and services, such as paved roads, markets and safe drinking water
- Depleted natural resources and decreasing farm sizes
- Lack of skills and capacity, and a disproportionate incidence of illiteracy and poor skills among women
- Limited access to inputs, financial services, markets and value chains
- Reliance on traditional farming techniques.

So yeah, the rural poor - who still rely on traditional farming techniques, who do not have access to value added chains and do not see a benefit from the increase in agricultural producs, who deal with fewer natural resources and smaller farms, who live in the parts of the country that has not seen huge infrastructure spending (and most of that spending has been urban), and who face fairly rapid inflation especially compared to their incomes given the preceding factors may in fact not be better off then the Chinese rural poor of preceding decades.

Yes, China has seen gigantic income growth. It is, as I'm sure we're all aware, not evenly distributed. Some people - especially some of the worst off rural poor - have seen no growth in their income, but they have seen significant inflation and deteriorating environment in which to earn a living. On $1.25/day, the number of new and exciting consumer goods they can purchase does not necessarily outweigh the increase in food prices (and they're going up quite quickly).

[Admiral Yi]

I think you just made my case for me Jacob. 

[DGuller]