Just you wait.

I.M. Pei, legendary designer of cultural and institutional architecture, designed his first-ever museum in downtown Syracuse, New York. Constructed in 1968, the 60,000-square-foot Everson Museum of Art was a brutalist building that broke the mold on traditional museum design.

Vicky Chan, founder of the design firm Avoid Obvious Architects, has a sideline in teaching architecture and design skills to schoolchildren. He’s instructed thousands of kids over the past 15 years, starting when he was a freshman at the Pratt Institute in New York City and taught low-income students at a local elementary school. After he moved back to his native Hong Kong, he continued teaching architecture weekly through his voluntary organization, Architecture for Children.

Arching rooftop walkway and garden tops West Kowloon Station in Hong Kong

People are invited to climb the curved, plant-covered roof of the new train station in West Kowloon, Hong Kong, designed by Andrew Bromberg at Aedas.

Waterfront Art Gallery Lacime Architects

Prices of goods do differ between global North and South but the difference in wages dwarfs the difference in apparent “cost of living.” Typically, the wage difference is at least an order of magnitude greater. For instance, according to the World Bank, average price levels in Bangladesh tend to be around 2.5 times lower than in the United States. However, the lowest paid workers in Bangladesh make about 70 times less than minimum wage workers in the u.s. Even textile workers, who have comparatively “high” wages and employment protections, make around 10 times less than u.s. minimum wage workers. The ostensibly “lower cost of living” makes little difference. In other words if the poorest Bangladeshi’s $0.10 per hour is really more like $0.25 per hour, there’s almost no difference to the analysis of wage differentials.

Someone mentioned the relative price of the Big Mac. It’s not a bad measure because the Big Mac is nearly the same commodity everywhere, so noting price differences is a decent yardpost for how average price levels are affected by region.

However, looking at price levels separately from wages is actually a poor measure of “cost of living,” at least from a communist perspective.

The price of a Big Mac in South Asia tends to be around $2.50 whereas on average it’s about $5 in the u.s. But going back to Bangladeshi textile workers, if they make $0.40 per hour, they must work for 300 minutes to afford a Big Mac. A u.s. worker making $7.50 an hour can buy a Big Mac in 40 minutes. Bangladeshi textile workers, again among the comparatively “privileged” workers in the country, must work about 10 times longer than *minimum wage* workers in the u.s. to acquire the same purchasing power. What takes the poorest in the u.s. a year to attain takes Bangladeshi workers 10 years or more.

So when looking at it from the perspective of how much of their lives workers have to expend to attain basic necessities, the cost of living for Southern laborers is actually *higher*, again by an order of magnitude at least. Then, when you take into account the fact that certain commodities like oil have the same price everywhere, and that electronics (increasingly a necessary component of day to day life) actually have higher prices in the Third World (not just relative to wages but in absolute terms) there’s really no argument to be made that wage differences are explicable or justifiable based on “cost of living.” In fact to say otherwise is to repeat the propaganda of imperialist development theorists that the Southern workers “really don’t have it that bad.”

10 tricks you didn’t know you could do with your food.

Of course! Im gonna be posting books, articles, and videos to help explain what Cuba stands for and why it should be supported.

Fidel Castro, Biografia a dos voces (x)

Communist Ruled Cuba Holds First Transgender Mass (x)

Cuba Says NO to Homophobia and Transphobia (x)

Representative Government in Socialist Cuba (x)

Cuban Democracy Fact Sheet (x)

How to Visit a Socialist Country (x)

Cuba Begins State-Sponsoring Sex-Change Operations (x)

(From this point onwards tumblr desktop screwed up the link embedding function no matter what I do so I’m just gonna paste the links directly)

The World’s Most Sustainable Country: What? Cuba? (http://www.dailyimpact.net/2015/02/09/the-worlds-most-sustainable-country-what-cuba/)

Cuba: Defending Socialism, Resisting Imperialism (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxFPZaurHZA )

20 Reasons To Support Cuba ( http://www.invent-the-future.org/2013/07/20-reasons-to-support-cuba/ ) 

Cuba: Champion of Children’s Rights (https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Cuba-a-Champion-of-Childrens-Rights-UNICEF-20180312-0011.html ) 

How Democracy Works in Cuba ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aMsi-A56ds&feature=youtu.be ) 

Cuba Reaches Lowest Infant Mortality Rate in History ( http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2018-01-02/cuba-reaches-lowest-infant-mortality-rate-in-its-history-four-per-1000-live-births )