We’re told, with a sense of horror, that sanitation workers in developing countries have pretty crappy jobs in terms of conditions and pay. The only surprise there, for the informed among us, is the horror with which this is regarded. This is what poverty means, having to wade through crap to gain that bowl of rice a day.
That is, this is what actual poverty means, not the kind complained about in this country, where it seems to mean having only one pair of Air Jordans.
The report comes from Water Aid and some associates, and it’s telling of what those sanitation workers have to endure in their labor in certain developing countries. Scooping out cesspits by hand doesn’t entice us. And it doesn’t, to be frank, produce much merriment among those who do it. So, why do they do it?
The answer comes from Adam Smith, who pointed out that in the round and overall, all jobs requiring the same level of skills and effort are going to pay about the same. His actual example included “noisesome” jobs, which is 18th century English for smelly. Such work will attract more cash because the job itself is horrible — more cash than, say, a nice job tucked away in a library reading interesting things, where a goodly part of the pay is nice conditions and interesting work.
So, why do they do it? While the amount they gain is a pittance by our standards (perhaps two or three dollars per day), that’s a goodly amount of cash in those places at this time. We’d all like to do something about this, of course, and so the head-scratching begins: What should be done?
Support capitalism and free markets. Those are the things that kill crappy jobs. No country has ever become rich without a decent enough dose of those two. Places that have lost them have become poor again in our own lifetimes — Venezuela and Zimbabwe come to mind. Sure, we’ve got sanitation workers in developed countries. But the workers have pumps and trucks and siphons and protective clothing, as well as those noisesome wages (yes, you do get more for cash for working in this sector, even today) to do the work with. It’s now regarded as an impolite or unfashionable job, but it’s not a crappy one.
One useful definition of a rich place is whether it can afford trucks and siphons and pumps, another definition is whether the addition of such capital equipment to human labor is what raises productivity and makes a place rich. It’s a bit of a circular argument, possibly even a tautology, yet true all the same. It’s only those places that have adopted capitalist free markets that have generated the wealth to make all jobs, not just those in sanitation, less crappy.
Do not be distracted down the byway of culture or think that this is something to do with anything other than economic riches. Our own societies used to be just like this. Samuel Pepys’s diary makes several references to the clearing and overflowing of basement cesspits by dunnikin divers and gong diggers. The reason why? England then was about as poor as Bangladesh or India are now. We can explore Angus Maddison’s numbers to prove that too.
People wade through crap to afford a scanty meal these days because they are as absolutely poor as our own forefathers were when they did the same. The solution is economic development leading to wealth and riches for the average worker. In modern money, the past paid maybe $3 a day, what those foreign sanitation workers are getting now. Just minimum wage alone, flipping burgers, is 15 to 20 times that in our own society.
There’s only one form of socioeconomic organization that’s achieved this: capitalist free markets. That’s why we really all need to be capitalist free marketeers. Not for us, or our greed, but so that people no longer empty cesspits by hand.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at the Continental Telegraph.
