6/24/2011 PERMALINK
In what country are net-savvy people the most desperate and willing to do work for the least money? To find out The Daily Beast (formerly Newsweek) offered a job on Mechanical Turk, an online work contracting site that allows you to specify the labor you'd like to hire by country. In the experiment, they went country by country, lowering the price offered until they could no longer find at least three takers for the job at that price. Digital workers in Italy, the Netherlands and Egypt demanded the highest pay at $5/hour. Germans wanted at least $3/hour. Pakistan $2.50/hour. The Philippines $2.25/hour. Both Australia and the U.K. came in at $2/hour, while Canadians would do the job for only $1.25/hour. Workers in India and Romania tied for second lowest at $1/hour. While the lowest hourly wage demanded, only 25 cents an hour, was found among digital workers in the good old USA. The Mechanical Turk wouldn't tell them who the individual workers were, but my guess is that the three Americans willing to do an hour's work online for just 25 cents were probably recently college graduates.
Poor and desperate people exist everywhere, but only American college kids start off their work life saddled with a massive $1 trillion in student loan debt. This is more than all Americans owe collectively on our credit cards. Moreover, student loan debt is the only debt in the civilized world, which can NEVER be discharged in bankruptcy. By piling all that inescapable student loan debt onto their backs. The bankrupt old order has reduced America's college grads to the most desperate debt slaves to be found today anywhere on the planet. After gorging itself on American taxpayers for the last few years, the American political/financial Leviathan has now begun to eat our kids.