Careful now - why does a cosmetic surgeon in London s exclusive Harley Street earn £1,000,000 while a doctor restoring sight and correcting cleft palate and fistula in Africa earns 5% as much? Do you think their work is worth less?
The point I'm making is that the £1m came from somewhere. Now yes sometimes it came from a Mafia sex slave operation or whatever, but those are minuscule edge cases on the scale of say the UK economy. We're talking about the economy in general and what makes on economy more valuable than another one in economic terms.
A hundred billion here, a hundred billion there, after a while the money laundering starts to add up: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/uk-losing-fight-money-l...
The UK economy offers a unique mix of commercial fairness and predictability, achieved by a comparatively incorruptible commercial court system, with disinterest in where the money actually comes from provided it isn't UK crime.
Whereas in China, for good and ill, billionaires are not above the state and can get clobbered when they become politically inconvenient. Such as Jack Ma.
(A question nobody is asking in this thread: what's the relative price of a taxi in, say, Lowestoft? What does that say about the regime there?)
That's less than Roman Abramovich paid for one Chelsea player. There's probably been more than £10m of donations to the Tory party alone from oligarchs. Try again with a more realistic figure.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/sep/21/tory-donors...
Look, you can bring up minuscule footnotes in Appendix F of what matters to the UK economy as much as you like. Yes these things suck. No they are not even remotely consequential to why a taxi driver in London, or Londoners in general earn what they do or how a modern economy functions.
The more time you spend obsessing over incidental edge cases, because they are things you can get enraged about and get a good adrenalin buzz over, the longer you will be mind blastingly uninformed about how the word really works.
Assuming it’s not illegal money and no coercion was involved, then by definition the customers must have believed that the cosmetic operations were worth it, at least at the point of purchase. Since cosmetic surgery is much less burdened by regulation, externalities, and so on, I would say the prices charged are reasonably close to the market clearing price.
The surgeons in Africa may or may not be subject to greater distortions depending on the local market.
Though I imagine cosmetic surgeons specifically in Africa are paid about the same relative to their skill level, staffing level, and facilities?
Spare me the Econ 101, Harley Street is a status symbol, the doctors there are not more highly paid because they're objectively safer or more skilled.
I guess we could call Africa's history of conflict, exploitation and colonialism, and usurious loans from the World Bank to leaders who aren't interested in their citizens' welfare, a distortion of the local market.
This goes for loads of stuff. I would wager a $30 meal to be fresher than a $5 meal on average. I'm not saying there aren't any $5 meals that are fresher than some $30 meals, but just that the $30 has a lot lower chance to make me sick.