L/K

In Hawaii, the Polynesian Cultural Center is an opportunity for
tourists to be exposed to an exotic culture. I don't mean the floor
show and luau buffet. Though entertaining, these are mere shadows of
the real thing and evoke more 1960's kitsch than genuine island
customs.

The exotic culture I mean is Mormon culture. BYU-Hawaii in Laie runs
the Center as way to finance the school. The first thing you notice
when you visit is the unique preponderance of labor. Students are
required to work at the center and there are lots of them. This makes
for some very interesting and dynamics in the way the Center is run.
Labor is often used in ways you'd never see in enterprises that pay
even modest wages.

China has a lot of the same features. There are jobs here you might
have forgotten existed. At one blind corner on a road near the campus
of NENU, three uniformed workers signaled cars when they could make
the turn. Caroline reported this morning that she had seen a worker
removing individual leaves from a running track. And at the airport,
there are large banks of employees there to help you navigate the
check-in kiosks.

As you would expect, labor-intensive goods and services are far
cheaper here than in the U.S. Restaurant food is approximately half
the price of a comparable in the lower 48. And an hour massage is a
mere $10.

Reading Tyler Cowen's "Average is Over" during this trip has certainly
cast these issues into another context. The students I speak to here
can hardly imagine what all these workers will do as increased capital
renders them obsolete. And this is despite having the West's
experience as an example.