Job Discussion Forums

[mark_in_saigon]

When I was here in the south a year ago, I felt the shops were not having the sales levels needed to support them. Now, a year later, the same shops are still in business, plus new ones continue to be established, they seem to be a bit busier, yet I still see so much of the work as shuffling product around, just like the main economic activity seems to be driving motorbikes to and fro. It seems a lot more work is going on than is needed for the sales they produce. I feel that way about most of retail here. Yet, it is very hard to get a fix on what that means, when you can have a college educated young person mind the store for a dollar an hour, or whatever it is. If we had this kind of labor cost in the U.S., we would go crazy setting up businesses just on the chance they might work. I know I would. The more I look at the actual economic activity, the less I think I understand it. Recall that with all our education and control our own system shot itself in the foot, and almost brought down everyone else in the process, and even Greenspan admitted he had no clue. I hate to say that a thing is �unknowable�, but in my opinion, one can make any kind of argument he wants for the future of this economic system, and have good arguments to back it up, and one guess may be as good as another. The crazier guesses may come closer to the truth, just because they rely less on accepted conventional wisdom, not because they have some great insight.