New York Manhole Covers, Forged Barefoot in India – New York Times

In the revealing story above, the NYT reports on the manufacture of the New York’s thousands of manhole covers, which it turns out come primarily from a foundry in the Indian state of West Bengal. An NYT photographer discovered the Indian factory, and his photos prompted the report here:

Eight thousand miles from Manhattan, barefoot, shirtless, whip-thin men rippled with muscle were forging prosaic pieces of the urban jigsaw puzzle: manhole covers.

Seemingly impervious to the heat from the metal, the workers at one of West Bengal’s many foundries relied on strength and bare hands rather than machinery. Safety precautions were barely in evidence; just a few pairs of eye goggles were seen in use on a recent visit.

In AP Economics, we have begun learning about resource markets, where firms hire the productive resources needed to produce their output. Land, labor, and capital are all needed to produce any output; the combination of these resources a firm will use depends on several factors, including the productivity and the prices of the resources. When the price of labor is low, firms tend to use more labor and less capital. In developing countries, especially those with a large, unskilled workforce (like India), firms are likely to specialize in the production of labor-intensive products, such as the manholes found in American cities like New York.

The scene at the Indian foundry sounds like something from the Middle Ages:

The temperature outside the factory yard was more than 100 degrees on a September visit. Several feet from where the metal was being poured, the area felt like an oven, and the workers were slick with sweat.

Often, sparks flew from pots of the molten metal. In one instance they ignited a worker’s lungi, a skirtlike cloth wrap that is common men’s wear in India. He quickly, reflexively, doused the flames by rubbing the burning part of the cloth against the rest of it with his hand, then continued to cart the metal to a nearby mold.

Once the metal solidified and cooled, workers removed the manhole cover casting from the mold and then, in the last step in the production process, ground and polished the rough edges. Finally, the men stacked the covers and bolted them together for shipping.

Why are New York’s manhole covers being made over 8,000 miles away, anyway? Wouldn’t it make more sense for American cities to buy such items from firms making them right here in the United States? To understand this question, we need to consider the principle of comparative advantage, which says that a nation should specialize in the production of the products for which it has the lowest opportunity costs.

Manhole covers manufactured in India can be anywhere from 20 to 60 percent cheaper than those made in the United States, said Alfred Spada, the editor and publisher of Modern Casting magazine and the spokesman for the American Foundry Society. Workers at foundries in India are paid the equivalent of a few dollars a day, while foundry workers in the United States earn about $25 an hour.

Bengali laborers working in India’s foundries most likely face the trade off of an agrarian existence or maybe another factory job in the pre-industrial economy of the impoverished region, alternatives presenting a much low opportunity cost than American workers whose alternatives include jobs offering much higher productivity. The productivity of a worker depends on the quality and quantity of capital available, the level of training and education of the worker himself. Clearly, Indian workers have less access to capital, lower quality capital, and much less training and education than their American counterparts.

The result is that jobs that require large inputs of low-skilled labor, such as the manufacture of manhole covers, end up being “off-shored” to remote corners of South Asia. The added cost of shipping thousands of ton of iron around the world is more than made up for by the lower resource prices (thus costs of production) in the West Bengali foundries.

Discussion Questions:

1. Why do the Indian foundries use such large inputs of labor, and relatively little machinery?
2. What factors might reduce the demand for labor in the Indian foundries?
3. How does a firm know if it’s using the right combination of capital and labor in its production?

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The following post was written by an AP Economics student at Zurich International School

We all know about market failure on the product side: A good or service is under or over produced in the free market because of externalities that cause the marginal social benefit (MSB) to no longer equal the marginal social cost (MSC). Instead, the good or service is at another equilibrium where the MSB is equal to the marginal private cost (MPC). In such a case, the government may intervene by either taxing or subsidizing the good or service, or even by taking control of production in order to bring the values to the social equilibrium point (MSB=MSC).

Now let’s take a look at how this plays out in the human resources market.

In the human resource market firms tend to pay close to the same salary to people of the same rank or position. This can lead to market failure. An employer might have positive or negative externalities. Their location may be near public transport and in a beautiful location. Or it might be situated right next to a sewage treatment plant. When firms offer the same salary for the same position, their externalities may lead to labor surpluses or shortages, i.e. to market failure.

A firm with negative externalities will have a shortage of workers since the qualified workers can work elsewhere for the same amount. A firm with positive externalities will have a surplus of applicants. The number of people will want to work at such firm will exceed the positions available. The firm could profit from this situation by becoming more selective, accepting only those candidates of superior quality. However, there can also be additional costs to the company if its externalities attract a surplus of applicants. There would be additional costs for processing and reviewing the many applications received. In a world of perfect competition where employee qualifications would be the same, the firm with positive externalities would reduce the wages it offers. This would reduce labor costs and decrease the number of applicants, reducing thus administration costs too. A firm with the negative externalities would have to do the inverse: raise wages in order to increase the number of workers. In reality of course, employee qualifications differ and the firm with positive externalities may get a flood of applications from candidates even those with insufficient qualifications.

There are many examples of positive and negative externalities, not only location. These can range from a positive (or negative) brand to a positive (or negative) reputation in how the company treats employees, such as by having flexible hours or supplying recreational or sporting facilities. When a person is looking for a job, externalities can play a decisive role.

Case Study: John the Consultant

Let us look at John the Consultant as an example. Like most applicants, John is looking for a good salary but he also wants to enjoy his work environment.

John gets three job offers: One from a fairly standard consulting firm, one from a tobacco company, and another from a sports TV network (with great offices with fabulous views).

When he was originally applying, John thought he would jump at opportunity to work at the sports network. The network had been his favorite since he was a child. He loved the thought of working in sports and television.

But then he took a closer look at the actual offers. The sports network offered him a salary that did not even come close to his expectations. The consulting firm’s offer was like its offices: just the standard fare. On the other hand, the tobacco company’s financial offer was mind-blowing.

Why is this so?

The tobacco company’s labor market might look like this:

Here, due to ethical concerns with the product, too few people would be interested in working at the tobacco company if it paid the average wage. Its cost to hire an additional worker (let’s call it the Private Marginal Resource Cost (PMRC)), is higher than the market average (AMRC). This is why it is necessary for the firm to increase wages in order to increase the quantity of labor to the optimal level. To be noticed is that their new quantity of labor is still below the market average. If the firm wanted to raise labor up to the market average, it would have to further increase wages, which would be extremely inefficient since there will be a point at which the cost of the additional workers will outweigh the value they represent.

A sports network company might look like this:

The sports network company, if it offered average wages, would have a surplus of workers. Here the AMRC is higher than the PMRC. In such case, the economically wise action is to decrease wages, thereby decreasing the quantity of labor to the optimal amount. To be noticed again is that its optimal amount is still higher than the market average. If it further decreased wages to reach Q_A there would be a dead weight loss. (Pragmatically speaking, the firm would not hire a surplus of workers; it would stick to Q₂, but even then normal wages would be inefficient, since it could get the exact same quantity of labor at lower wages.)

Now John has the choice of taking less money along with the positive externalities, or more money when there are negative externalities. The externalities turn into opportunity costs. And this creates a dilemma.

Firms have long known the gist of this concept. Most large corporate firms have made serious efforts to increase employee satisfaction in the hope that it will become a positive externality. Yet since the vast majority of employers have done similarly, various types of extra benefits have become standard for the market. However there are still companies that stand out from the rest. For example Google has placed a high priority on creatively generating employee satisfaction and creating a work environment conducive to cooperation and innovation. It has excelled in these domains by so much that their employees are glad to take a lower paycheck than the market average for the privilege of working there.*

Now all this is a prime example of how externalities are corrected through the profit incentive. In contrast to the product market (where a company may not bear the full cost of a negative externality it causes, such as pollution, and government intervention can become necessary), no government interference is usually necessary in the human resource market. There it is the firm that notices and corrects the difference in employee wages in relation to externalities. Most companies have learned to put a price on externalities, and equilibrium is restored.

*As an example, according to the Financial Times Feb 7, 2011, Google now receives an astonishing 75,000 applications a week.

I feel like I’ve been here before. Gas prices are rising, approaching $4 per gallon. American drivers are freaking out, demanding the government “does something” to halt rising fuel costs. The next thing you know, people start buying bikes and riding them to work. Just like that, Americans change their lifestyles, abandon their cars, and reinvent themselves as bike commuters!

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The economics of this phenomenon barely requires explanation, but since this is an Economics teacher’s blog, I suppose I should explain it. A major determinant of the demand for a product is the price of related goods. In the US right now, fuel and cars are related goods; in economics terms, they are complementary goods. “You can’t have one without the other”. As gas prices rise, demand for driving cars begins to fall, since it becomes more costly to drive. The other good related to cars in this picture is a substitute mode of transportation, bicycles. The more expensive it becomes to drive a car, the greater the demand for bicycles.

Now, allow me to take my econ teacher hat off and put my avid cyclist hat (or helmet?) on. Bikes are way more than just a substitute for cars. The fact that every time gas prices approach $4 per gallon bicycle sales start to spike is bewildering to me. Do consumers really not know that riding a bike is always cheaper than driving a car? Why does it take slightly more expensive gas to motivate consumers to think about buying a bike?!

Okay, economist had back on now: You see, operating a car involves monetary costs that far exceed the price of gas. When I last had a car in the US, I paid nearly $200 per month in insurance (young males always pay the most), far exceeding my expenditures on fuel. In addition, there’s the fixed cost of the car itself, which once spent is a “sunk cost”, so should not affect an individual’s decision to drive or not to drive when the price of gas changes.

In addition to these explicit, monetary costs, however, there are also external, invisible costs of operating cars that make them an even less perfect substitutes for bicycles. More traffic on the roads, more accidents, more air and noise pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, environmental impact of the production and ultimate disposal of the car itself: these external costs are not even born by the driver when he or she decides to drive to work every day, rather they are born by society, taxpayers, and the environment.

My point is, making the decision to switch to commuting by bicycle should not require a 25% spike in fuel prices. The cost of filling your tank is in fact the least significant cost associated with driving a car when you look at the whole picture, and include not only those explicit, monetary costs paid by the driver, but include the external, social and environmental costs born by society as a whole.

Maybe I’m just on a bike high right now, since I got my new 29 inch wheeled fully two weeks ago and have ridden the 30 km round trip to work nearly every day since! Then again, maybe it really would make more economic, environmental, physical, spiritual and social sense if more people would park their cars and hop on a bike tomorrow morning!

That’s right, February 2007 marked the beginning of this great experiment in “learning the wiki way”. If all you’ve ever known is this blog, then you probably don’t know why it’s called “Wikinomics”. Before the blog was born, this project consisted only of a Wiki where my AP Economics students shared their understanding of the subjects we studied. Not long after the wiki got started, I created this blog, where in the last four years I, along with several guest authors, have written countless posts covering every topic from introductory Economics course imaginable!

Now on our fourth anniversary, I thought I’d take a moment to look back at where Welker’s Wikinomics has come from and then give you a brief idea of where it will go in the future.

First, as an Econ teacher, I love stats, so I thought I’d share some here.

The wiki, which eventually gave birth to this blog, has actually had more visits over the last four years than the blog has, and continues to turn up near the top in Google search results for countless economics terms.

Where Welker’s Wikinomics has come from:

Here’s the latest data on the wiki:

• Total visits since February, 2007: 545,468
• Average number of visits per day over the last four years: 944
• Number of subscribed users: 1092

And for the blog:

• Total visits since February, 2007: 388,207
• Most visitors on a single day ( March 1, 2011!): 1,013
• Number of posts: 550
• Number of reader comments: 6,275
• Number of categories: 193
• Number of registered users: 1,369
• Number of people subscribed to the weekly email newsletter: 298

All told, the eyes of nearly 1 million economics students, teachers, and others interested in the subject have have scanned the content posted on this blog and on the accompanying wiki!

What the future holds for Welker’s Wikinomics

For those of you who visit this site regularly, you will have noticed that over the last year, I have written far less frequently than I did in the past. I do have a good excuse for this, however, as I have been consumed with writing my soon to be released IB Economics textbook for Pearson. But as that project winds down, I plan to once again turn my attention to the resources offered by Welker’s Wikinomics. Some of the projects I plan to embark on in the next year include:

• A complete re-design of this blog
• Updating the “brand image” of all of Welker’s Wikinomics resources (wiki, universe, etc…)
• Re-designing and updating Welker’s Wikinomics Lecture Notes and Study Guides for use with the new IB Economic syllabus (to begin in August 2011)
• Designing and releasing in the iTunes Store a digital, iPhone ready study guide for AP and IB Economic students

This last goal is one I have had in the back of my mind for quite some time. It has gotten the thumbs up from my tech-equipped students here in Zurich, and once I have the time, it is something I seriously want to pursue. Don’t worry Android users, I myself have switched to the Google platform, and any app I develop for the iPhone will be made available for the Android as well!

Thanks to all you loyal readers and contributors who have kept coming back to the blog, wiki and other resources offered by Welker’s Wikinomics over the last four years! I will always remember how excited I was the day so long ago I got my 1,000th visitor on this blog! (I am pretty sure it took about three months to reach 1,000 visitors). Now, four years and almost one million visitors later, I am still as passionate as ever about creating and sharing great content for the high school economics student and teacher.

As always, if you like what you read here, and think you have something to contribute, add your comments or contact me at welkerswikinomics@gmail.com if you wish to become a contributing author!

So, thanks to you all for everything!

-Jason