It amazes me how economists always miss the big picture on this when they write about it. China's and India's middle classes are thriving because they can dependably rely on a Dickensian peasant class two billion strong thrust irrevocably into wage slavery.

The CIA estimates that Chinese population estimates are off by 40% or more. It's likely that the 300 million "middle class" Chinese are part of a population of 1.4 to 1.5 billion people. They're largely agrarian, 3rd-world poor, and lead nasty, brutish and short lives. Between 5 and 10 people die in Chinese coal mining accidents every day, for example.

China and India are experiencing the success they are because they're reliving the Industrial Revolution. They're in the age of Robber Barons, the era shortly before the US experienced the IWW and Pinkerton riots. To call it an unfair labor balance is to call Debtors Prisons detrimental to consumers.

And then we get giggles like this:

Echoing Bhagwati, Frost mentioned the positive outcomes for American consumers, like the way that foreign competition forced the domestic auto industry to pay attention to quality and to stop producing “crummy cars.”

The domestic auto industry faced pressure first from Germany, wholly rebuilt via US dollars in The Marshall Plan, then Japan, rebuilt 65% with US tax dollars. India and China didn't figure into it at all - the industrialized nation of the United States faced pressure from the industrialized nations of Japan and Germany, both of which modeled their economies after the US and Britain from 1890 onward.

Fucking economists.