[CtEkM8Vq]

Yes, but that situation was standard throughout the world.

That is not the case today.

My point exactly

Capitalism (and for that matter Industrialism) was introduced to Westen culture in the mid to late 1700's. Considering that it took Western civilization 150 years to adapt the workplace standards that are in place today, China is really not far if at all of the mark in that regard.

[ovH9wfSJ]

^
My point regarding your point: There was no enlightened consensus of behavior for the U.S. (or any industrialized nation) to aspire to.

Today, China has moved into the community of an industrialized, capitalistic country. There is an established standard for behavior within that community for China to aspire to.

That they are further along than we were 150 years ago is a poor excuse.

[pertikuss]

I am not suggesting otherwise. Go back to my original point, i.e. that I am not suggesting that the Chinese are not living well. Nor am I making excuses for persecution and lack of freedoms. I do not aspire to live in a Chinese society. I am only suggesting, that economically they are making substantial gains relative to developed western standards, and within 10 years will become a Global powerhouse economically. By that time, indvidual wealth standards in China will have substantially risen, and China will no longer need to look abroard for markets to channel their consumer goods. They will become less economically dependant on the West, but we may still have a great dependency on them as a creditor. And i am sure that wealth will bring military strength in short order.

China is not an ally to the West. We play nice with them, but we have divergent geopolitical interests and we compete for energy resources. And they are gaining economic leverage on us even today.One reason you do not see our govts pushing them on human rights violations is we just do not have the juice ... we are too dependent. And our dependency on them is going to get worse before it gets better, if it ever does.

[joOEMcheapSOFTWARE]

Pianoman: as I mentioned in another thread.... your method of discussing things....

You give us a list of FACTS (in caps no less) but no sources.

Why bother? What's your point?

Just an example about wages...this from the Columbia University Press ....fact? I don't know... but it sure contrasts with your unidentified sources:

"In the United States, wages increased fivefold between 1860 and 1960. Adjusted for inflation and expressed in 1982 dollars, the typical weekly wage of a U.S. worker increased from $262 in 1960 to $298 in 1970, but increased foreign competition and slower U.S. economic growth forced weekly wages down to $274 in 1980 and $255 in 1991."

http://www.answers.com/topic/wage

[ssupermegatone]

I am not suggesting otherwise. Go back to my original point, i.e. that I am not suggesting that the Chinese are not living well.

I understand your overall position, but I was responding specifically to the statement I quoted, which seems to rationalize China's present society with an observation of the industrial past of the West.

[nvmrfgopyy]

Yes I do stuff like that from time to time... chalk it up to my contrary argumentitive personality

Seriously, it was a bit of a tongue in cheek (but not entirely so ) response to suggestions that the westerners have this stuff nailed. While I realize it dilutes the main point, I do think there is a point to be made here as well ...personal freedoms are coming to China.. slowly too slowly in fact .. but it is coming. See my post on Justice in China as an example.

[Konidurase]

One of many responses that I will have to write out in this thread. Makes me wish I hadn't been away from my computer for the past 30 hours or so.

Please cite your source for these facts:

Sources, listed in the same order as the facts that were provided:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...toryId=5525283

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passeng..._United_States

http://www.csun.edu/science/health/docs/tv&health.html

http://www.internetworldstats.com/top20.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone

http://www.usda.gov/factbook/chapter2.htm

http://www.unt.edu/northtexan/archives/p00/duds.htm

http://www.forbes.com/economy/2006/1...017median.html

The only statistic I mentioned that does not come from any of the above websites is the one about supermarkets. That comes from a book:

Lindsey, Brink. The Age of Abundance. New York: Harper Collins, 2007.

I hope that, in failing to provide these citations immediately, I didn't cause anyone to suspect that I was making these up, or taking them from obviously biased and/or unreliable sources. Since doing research on these things itself takes up a lot of time, and there's no single trusty source on the Internet that provides all of these statistics in one place, I was pressed for time.

[opelonafqe]

@ pianoman... certainly not me.

[Breevereurl]

Pianoman, I'm not wearing my moderator's hat when I make this suggestion:

A person who cites statistics as often as you do needs to take an advanced statistics course. You need to know when to cite an average, when to a cite a median, and when neither figure has meaning. You need to master analysis of outliers, margins of error, confidence intervals, degrees of freedom, variances (the chi-square type), and beyond. Choosing appropriate statistical software packages for each applicaton, (and mastering them, is essential.

Acing a beginning statistics course, (if you did this), is enough for a message board, but not enough for the business and academic communities.

If you take my advice, you will look back at the posts where you had cited statistics, and you will be slightly embarrassed.

I make this recommendation from a position of extreme academic and "real world experience" strength, but I don't want to brag unless I'm put on the spot.

A few things, Rapunzel:

I submit that I've taken intermediate courses in Statistics and Econometrics, both of which have taught me how to do real data analysis. I know formulas for things like confidence intervals, how to do chi-squared tests, and well-proven approaches to testing a data set for lack of integrity. I am aware that when citing data, there can be any number of spurious and/or confounding factors that either render the data inconclusive, or simply suggest a relationship between two or more variables that doesn't exist in reality.

Having said that, I have two problems with your "suggestion". The first is local. How would me knowing statistics at an academic/professional level have influenced my list of facts? Most of them (save the ones about average income) are pretty much indisputable (unless you accuse the sources of outright lying). They were presented as a response to lofter's request, and the responses of disbelief given by other forumers about my admittedly modest claim. Here it is again:

The legacy of [capitalism], as demonstrated over the years in a country like the US, is that it has created an average standard of living that's high enough to put aside the worry over the most basic of necessities to survive - food, clothing, and shelter.

Frankly, I was shocked that people here could construe that statement in such a manner as to label it as some sort of blasphemy, akin to being (deliberately, shockingly) out of step with reality. Therefore, I looked again at what I wrote, and attempted to use facts to show that my statement was not only correct, but truly modest in scope. Not only has America, as a country, solved the elemental problem of "human survival," but we seem to have overdone it. With regard to food: I think most people already know we are among the fattest people, on average, in history. There is no shortage of food here. In fact, there's so much of it that we have difficulty making choices when we go grocery shopping, since there are so many products, and a very large portion (nearly 1/3) of our food supply is wasted. With regard to clothing: this was a tough one to find numbers on. Even notwithstanding the fact I presented, I don't think it's a stretch to claim we spend incredible amounts of money on clothing here. And indeed, a lot of it is often wasted, and/or given away to the Salvation Army, etc. And with regard to housing: doubtless people who frequent this forum know of how strongly real estate has performed recently. New homes are being built at sizes previously thought ridiculously large. Home ownership rates are on the rise, giving many families access to hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential equity. We own something like 17 trillion in combined residency real estate. Most estimates put the percentage of homeless in America at slightly under 1%.

Now, I'd like you to step back, take a look at my facts and analysis, and tell me, straight-faced, that my statement was not only incorrect, but that it was ridiculously so. If I've done a bad job at explaining, and this goes for all the other forumers out there as well, then maybe you should have a look at the book I cited. The author does a good job there of explaining the same phenomenon. And to show you just how much I think other forumers already suspect I make up facts/and or post inaccurate ones, I declined to use an incredibly rich presentation of facts in that book in my post, because I know probably no one out there also has a copy, and could independently verify where I was getting my information from. That's why I used sources on the Internet, making me waste more time writing out stuff I already know, and find very difficult to explain any other way.

Sorry this is taking so long, but here's the second of my problems that I mentioned earlier. This one is global: forgive me if I'm being touchy or defensive, but I feel like you've been specifically pointing out my inconsistencies and errors in presenting information recently on this forum. It started with the paper I posted about zoning history. It carried into this thread. (And, BTW, I'm curious as to where else you've noticed me presenting statistics with lack of academic rigor.) Frankly, I think the standards you're encouraging me to use on this forum are unnecessarily strict. This is a forum for debate, where most people in the discussion are not directly involved in what they're discussing. In any thread, this can lead to suspicion that someone doesn't know what they're talking about. And, when this occurs, that person may have to step up and prove what they know in a more intelligent and formal manner.

That being said, I can tell you I rarely make generalizations on this forum on topics that I have no, or little background knowledge on. When I realize I might be in error, I try to prove it to myself by finding outside sources. I cannot speak on behalf of other forumers, but I have a feeling there a lot of them that don't take this approach. For you to step in and, quite forcefully, suggest I adopt professional-level standards in arguing something on a forum that tries to be casual and conversational, is asking a bit much, I think. I'll never be an expert on a lot of these things, and neither will anyone else on this forum. I submit that no one should have to be held to this strictest of standards for two reasons:

1) It's time consuming. This forum is an outlet for leisure for most people, and for many others, it's a dissemination of mainly non-technical information that wouldn't require the interpretation of an "expert." To ask for those standards is to require a lot more independent research and verification, to be truly up-to-par. Honestly, I don't think there's that much of a place for that on this forum

2) It sets up a dangerous precedent. If a certain few were to adopt these standards, and portray to the forum that they truly are experts and their arguments are irrefutable, then you run the risk of quelling intelligent back-and-forth debate. Then, you either have disgruntled forumers that feel they can never disprove another forumer's point, or you start encouraging the kind of time-consuming research that would put everyone on a level playing field.

To end, I just want to make clear that none of the above was meant to be directed maliciously or arrogantly to you, because I think you're an intelligent forumer, a capable moderator, and a well-meaning person when you make these suggestions. I'm entrenched in academia for the bulk of the year, so I can recognize when someone (like you) is posting respectable, informed material. And I really appreciate that this forum is, for all intents and purposes, one of a disappointingly few outlets on the internet where intelligent discussion plays a large role. I only hope that it remains this way, without getting bogged down too much in nitty-gritty technical stuff, which has its rightful place in the professional and academic world. I also hope that everyone's posts are evaluated with the same standards of fairness and unbiasedness, as they deserve to be. And finally, I realize I could have (and maybe should have) written all of this in a PM. But going back to some of our previous exchanges, I think both you and I would have preferred to have this written out in the open.

[kennyguitar]

True, but at the time this country was founded this continent was viewed as having a vast supply of resources and huge tracts of land were given away to homesteaders moving westward. The founding fathers didn't and couldn't envision how this country and the world at large would cannabalize itself. Human beings are parasites on earth and "pure capitalism" is the lifeblood of the vermin.

No, really.

And nor was I arguing that that vision should have persisted without some refinements. Many resources aren't renewable, and intelligent management is called upon. I hope you realize that my response was to lofter's point about liberty/capitalism in the Constitution. For the Founding Fathers, the two were inseparable in their vision of creating the ideal political economy.

Getting too deep into the specific economic policies of the "founding fathers" will only lead you into a quagmire.

Well, I'm sorry for bringing it up, but in reality you were the one who brought up the founding fathers. Undoubtedly, their vision of capitalism isn't what has developed over time in the US. In many ways, neither has their vision of liberty.