Shanghai Saturdays

Today my friends Mark, Special J, and I continued our diplomatic mission of spreading baseball to chinese people. For the second day in a row, we spent a little over half an hour teaching girls how to throw and catch. But once our new friends had to leave, we decided to swing the bat a few times. Keep in mind that all of our equipment is China made.

I hit first, and after making contact with one ball three times, my friends and I were left with this result: It wasn't raining, the bat wasn't "wonder boy," and there was no sudden flash of lightening, but you can call me Roy Hobbs anyway.

Seriously though, this brings up something I've been meaning to write about for a long time. The reason the ball fell apart wasn't because of my incredible power (I know, hard to believe). It wasn't because the seems on the ball were incorrectly stitched. Why then did the ball fall apart? Instead of having a wound-yarn core like most baseballs, this ball was filled with packed dirt. When the ball was hit, the dirt would shift, and before I dealt the ball it's fatal blow, one side was completely flat from shifting sand. I conjecture that on the third hit, the sand moved with such force inside the ball that the seems gave. Although the ball was made in China, at about 50 U.S. cents, it was the cheapest ball I could find (compared to the most expensive ball at a little over 3 bucks).

What's the point? It's that while China produces most of the low costs goods in bought in America at a certain quality level, it produces good sold here at lower quality level or outsources production of goods for consumption here to countries with lower labor costs. This is an important distinction that most Americans fail to recognize; although China's labor cost is very low, it's not the lowest in the world. Instead, China offers a combination of low cost labor with high efficiency in producing high quality products.

This combination has driven the production machine that the U.S. taking adavtage of. At the same time, it has driven up the costs of high quality domestic goods for the average Chinese citizen. For some, increased income more than offsets this phenomena, but it seems to me that the wealth disparity gap is growing at quite a high rate, leaving many to settle for baseballs that fall apart when there hit.

This pic has nothing to do with the story, I just think it looks funny. That's why I made it bigger. Remember keep that my friend Albert Scovel once told me, "Gordon, you'll never be an economist" (or something like that) and I have no hard data to back this up, only my personal observations and discussions with locals. Oh yeah, and a little classroom experience in studying the Chinese economy.