My private Gilded Age

SHANGHAI -- Two numbers -- 1.2 meters and 75 cents -- define the successes and limits of China's generation-long economic boom.\nThe first number is 1.2 meters (about four feet), the average height of Chinese five-year-olds. Fifty years ago, five-year-olds in China stood only 1.1 meters tall (about 3-foot-7). \nLi Hui, senior physician at the Beijing Municipal Children's Studies Institute, told the official news service Xinhua last week the increase is due to better living standards, nutrition and prevention and control of disease. That is, children in China are healthier than ever before because of the country's improved economic performance.\nMost of China's growth has come since the institution of pro-market reforms by Communist leader Deng Xiaoping in the late 70s. In flat contradiction of orthodox Communism, Deng decreed that "to get rich is glorious," and began dismantling the vast bureaucracy that had managed the economic life of China since the 1949 Communist Revolution.\nAs the increase in average childhood height shows, the benefits of the new economy are making their way to a great many people in China. Today, nearly everyone has enough to eat. That's a stunning turnaround from the Great Leap Forward during the early days of Chinese Communism, when millions -- perhaps as many as 30 million people -- died of famine.\nSince Deng's time, China's per capita GDP has at least quadrupled, and today the streets of Shanghai, Beijing and other prominent Chinese cities boast new BMWs, Volkswagens and Buicks. The people look prosperous, too: The drab, unisex and uniform "Mao suits" of the pre-reform era have been replaced by a variety of styles, from chic businesspeople in Versace to ordinary people in blue jeans. And at times I think every other store is selling cell phones and laptops.\nAmidst this prosperity, though, China has had to accept levels of economic inequality like those that led the people to accept a Communist regime just 55 years ago. Those businessmen in BMWs on their way to work in Shanghai's shiny new financial district live in the same city as our maid, who will never be able to afford a car.\nThe second number is the six kuai -- about 75 cents -- per hour my roommates and I pay a maid to clean our rooms, wash our clothes and hang them to dry. \nAssuming our maid works six-day weeks and cleans three apartments per day, that means she's earning about 1100 kuai a month. In dollar terms, that's about $135, which works out to $1700 annually.\nIn reality, her pay goes farther than that. Using the economic concept of "purchasing power parity" -- the amount of money needed to buy the same amount of goods and services in different countries -- it turns out our maid is "really" earning what about $8,000 could buy in the United States.\nThe economic theory I learned in Wylie Hall says I should be perfectly happy with the deal. After all, the maid entered into her employment voluntarily, and as a rational agent she should know the market value of her services.\nIt's one thing to believe in the efficiency of markets when dealing with lines on graphs. It's another to hold firm in those beliefs when you wake up to find a bent-over, middle-aged woman, her teeth and face marked by poverty, scrubbing your floor.\nThere isn't much Americans can do to fix China's social ills. But my roommates and I -- a Georgetown University junior with a copy of Ayn Rand on his desk; an investment banker and newly-minted MBA; and myself, an economics minor -- can do one small thing, even if only to salve our consciences. We have decided to drastically increase our maid's pay. It may not be economically rational, but it is entirely just.