Low living costs are perhaps the only thing we, as consumers, can take pride in. A few coins can send a fresh-graduate delivery rider to fetch your food, sometimes even up the stairs. But then I think — what if I were that rider?
Modern commercial society is skilled at hiding the production process. The mechanisms laid out before us — slash-a-price deals, rock-bottom pricing — and abstract terms like “one-tap order” and “lightning-fast delivery” paper over an entire labor chain. A single food delivery involves the labor of multiple producers — sourcing, processing, packaging by the merchant, and finally the delivery rider — all for just a handful of yuan.
When these producers earn their meager pay and come home from work, they too enjoy the proxy power that money grants in a consumer society, spending just as little to order someone else to make coffee and deliver it to their door. This is why consumption feels comfortable: “the customer is king” grants you a brief, lofty sense of power, erasing the pain you felt on the production side.
After the traditional blue-collar Lewis turning point was crossed, the mass expansion of higher education created a new labor reservoir in white-collar and knowledge work. Compounded by the rise of AI, wages for intellectual labor have been suppressed, and university graduates have seen their bargaining power severely diminished — left to fight over scarce resources and spiral into involution. As long as there is a steady stream of people willing to accept lower hourly wages just to survive, companies have no incentive to raise compensation or upgrade.
In developed countries, the expense of plumbers and manual labor is the classic Baumol cost disease. Right now the bottom-tier labor pool is deep and costs remain cheap. If a region’s service industry stays dirt-cheap, it means the area’s overall wage level has not been effectively lifted, or that a large pool of lower-tier workers cannot enter higher-paying industries and can only cannibalize each other in the low-end service sector.
Human labor cannot be equated with industrial goods. A TV is cheap because of industrial automation, technological upgrading, and economies of scale; but three hours of a person’s labor being dirt-cheap can only mean that person’s time is worthless. It means the devaluation of a person’s time and dignity.
Most people are both consumers and workers. For those blinded by survivorship bias, it is understandable that others find it hard to sympathize.