I used to yearn endlessly for the world my left-wing friends portrayed, but it collapsed in the face of the facts. In the short time after high school, college, and graduate school, I worked three part-time jobs in my hometown, a city with a trillion dollar GDP in the north, hawking food, working as a waitress, and working part-time as an arena caretaker. This experience as a laborer at the bottom made me deeply appreciate that any statistics, literary descriptions and social theories that stand for and endorse them are all pale and powerless.
For the laborers at the bottom, it is not only the physical work they have to do, but also the mental fatigue that comes with it. Not only do Chinese laborers lack adequate protection, but the long working hours, which are generally in violation of labor laws, make it necessary for them to spend some of their energy on family and life matters in the even shorter non-labor time, with compressed personal rest time. The elderly are sick and hospitalized and need to go to bed with them, the children are fighting at school and need to interview with teachers, the central heating pipes burst at home in winter and need to go home to repair ......
This situation makes it difficult for them to learn through their free time and thus improve their possibilities to add value in the labor market. To make matters worse, an inordinate market and a laissez-faire government can make this situation even worse. Take for example a vendor making cooked food that opens in a tourist attraction. Even if he can get more foot traffic and revenue, the overall rent is going to be 30% of the total revenue, plus 20% of the management and service fees, and about 20% of the cost of goods, he will probably only make 30% of the profit. In fact, I observed that since this is a coastal city in northern China, the temperature is still very low in March after spring and there are strong sea breezes from time to time, it costs more to cook the food and keep it warm; and the government not only seizes the land grant revenue through the outsourcing of the development of these commercial streets, removes the responsibility of supervision, but also satisfies the political tasks constantly assigned by the top. From time to time, it will ignorantly launch all kinds of inspection activities under the name of "health inspection", "fire inspection" and "safety inspection" to interfere with the operation or increase the cost of operation.
However, this is not the worst case scenario, because all of the above is still done on a market basis. Customers, costs, benefits, etc. can be observed, in other words, any worker can make some rational decisions based on the actual situation. The worst case scenario, however, is that the government actually holds a lot of social resources but does not participate in the market allocation, a lot of land revenue is not invested in the provision of public goods and services, and a lot of market information is only maintained among the elite with ties to government bureaucrats and is not disclosed to the public.