If I said to you right now "you can get amazing quality clothes for $10, a new, fast car for $5,000, and nearly-free seafood of any type you might desire", would you want me to tell you that I was doing it by beating and killing enslaved people, dumping toxic waste in to rivers, giving kids in poor countries asthma, and destroying the life support networks people will rely on for the next century?
Modern life is pretty damn great but let's not kid ourselves that it's basically theft from the poor and the young.
When the industrial revolution brought things like power looms to the UK, it wasn’t exactly fun times for all. It was still a step up from the previous condition of serfdom and subsistence farming.
Sweatshops are a bad thing which we should work to replace, but just shutting everything down makes the workers worse off, it doesn’t give them 21st Century middle class G7 lifestyles.
The good news is, China has been going through those same growing pains much faster than the British did.
As far as I can tell, globalization allows the western management class to enrich themselves at the expense of the western working classes. Similarly, the poorer countries' management class gets rich while their working class remains poor. And of course, the environment suffers because the countries we deal with have no scruples about polluting (we in the west hardly have such scruples). And none of this is to speak about slave labor (suggesting we can't shut it down because it would harm the workers smacks a lot of "we can't end slavery for the sake of the slaves"--I don't think that's what you mean, but I think we have to address why globalized slavery is different than localized slavery).
If we really want globalization, we should hold our business partners accountable to the same standards that we hold ourselves to: humane working conditions, environmental practices, etc. If a country wants to do business with us, they can't win our business by artificially lowering their costs. For example, with respect to carbon emissions, this could look like a carbon tax with a border adjustment--Chinese products are taxed at the border in accordance with their pollution.
Businesses want to pay as little as possible, but are in competition with each other for labour who want as much as possible, so it doesn’t feel like it’s merely “at the expense of” workers to me (that said: trade union effectiveness is not a constant).
Also, while freedom of movement for workers is clearly less than freedom of movement for businesses and goods — and the difference favours businesses over workers — I’m not clear how much of that is anti-migrant sentiment rather than globalisation.
Regarding slavery: you’re right, that isn’t what I mean. I am of the opinion that forced labour in USA prisons counts as slavery, and I oppose this unequivocally and do not expect its immediate and permanent termination to cause any problems for the slave-prisoners.
When it comes to “mere” poor working conditions and low pay, that’s when it gets more complicated, because that’s when shutting down the relevant business can have non-zero negative consequences for the workers. And, as you say, even then I would prefer to uplift the conditions rather than shrug and say it’s just how things are. Likewise a carbon tax on imports.
> Businesses want to pay as little as possible, but are in competition with each other for labour who want as much as possible, so it doesn’t feel like it’s merely “at the expense of” workers to me (that said: trade union effectiveness is not a constant)
Right, but that labor comes from abroad and is plentiful. The US manager who exports jobs overseas is reward handsomely for saving the company money precisely because it means laying off the more expensive US labor. So rich get richer and poor get poorer, by design.
> Also, while freedom of movement for workers is clearly less than freedom of movement for businesses and goods — and the difference favours businesses over workers — I’m not clear how much of that is anti-migrant sentiment rather than globalisation.
As far as I can tell, we're not talking about migrants, we're talking about outsourcing jobs overseas.
> Regarding slavery: you’re right, that isn’t what I mean. I am of the opinion that forced labour in USA prisons counts as slavery, and I oppose this unequivocally and do not expect its immediate and permanent termination to cause any problems for the slave-prisoners.
Granted (or at least I'm not particularly interested in opening up a debate about whether prisoner labor is meaningfully 'slavery'), but how does foreign slave labor compare with domestic slave labor i.e., pre-abolition American slavery. Why is it wrong for people to say "abolishing slavery [in the US] would be bad for slaves" but not wrong to say "abolishing slavery in China would be bad for [Chinese] slaves"?
> When it comes to “mere” poor working conditions and low pay, that’s when it gets more complicated, because that’s when shutting down the relevant business can have non-zero negative consequences for the workers.
Pro-slavery Americans used to argue that slavery provided slaves with room and board, and that abolishing slavery would deprive them that. That's certainly a "non-zero negative consequence" argument, so how does the globalized slavery case differ?
> And, as you say, even then I would prefer to uplift the conditions rather than shrug and say it’s just how things are. Likewise a carbon tax on imports.
However, you can't do these things (taxing pollution or poor working conditions) without making it harder for e.g. China to compete with other labor, which in practice means moving jobs out of China and the "non-zero negative consequences" for the Chinese worker (it's economically infeasible for China to pay its workers better and keep the west's business--the whole reason so much stuff is "Made In China" is because the prices of Chinese products are artificially low because of slavery and pollution).
It does allow the management class to enrich themselves, but I've observed it enriching the foreign working classes tremendously. The reason 'slavery' level wages are able to compel foreign labor to come to cities and work in abhorrent working conditions is because it's better than what they had before. And as they gain experience and education, it's always cheaper to train the locals than it is to fly in the Western experts.
I'm a controls engineer who installs industrial automation for manufacturing and testing. Most of my customers have headquarters, R&D, and some manufacturing in the Midwestern US (especially Detroit automotive companies) but many have expanded to add Mexican or Chinese factories. I've worked with, trained, and socialized with a ton of operators, technicians, engineers, and translators (my Spanish is passable, my Mandarin is abysmal) in those countries just as I've worked with their equivalents in the US. My observations have been that when American companies add overseas manufacturing, sure, the American management siphons off what they can, and I'm extremely dubious that this money is legitimately proportional to the value that they add to the stream instead of the wealth that they have power to extract, also, there are some growing pains of exploitation and pollution - but the overwhelmingly more powerful effect is the growth in the foreign town where the new factory is installed.
Time and time again, I've talked to people whose parents or grandparents were practically subsistence farmers, but now they're happy to be English-speaking engineers, members of the global economy, possessing more wealth than many generations of their ancestors could have dreamed of. You're familiar with the American phenomenon of disenfranchised Millenials still living with their parents with (or without) a minimum-wage job and college debt who are unable to afford to live on their own... In Mexico and China, the opposite is true - the parents have no money, and have never had money, instead, whole extended families are living with their children who have foreign money and modern luxuries like medicine, air conditioning, and automobiles. It is true that this unimaginable wealth is initially earned by the children at something on the order of laborers at $5/hr and engineers at $20/hr, which would be criminal in the US, but (1) those salaries grow far more rapidly than American minimum wages as the workforce gains education and experience, and (2) the purchasing power of that amount of money is far higher in those countries.
Their living conditions have gone from that of villages that wouldn't be unfamiliar to someone on the 17th century American frontier, to something more like the 'bad part of town' in a 21st century American city. I agree that it would be better if they were in conditions like the good part of town. I agree it's inhumane to take more than your fair share of the revenue out of the hands of people making $10k/year. I agree that we could do better to ensure this doesn't happen with slavery and pollution taxes. But I also have first-hand communication, albeit in my second language, that the resulting situation is better than erecting barriers to trade and leaving them alone.
> Time and time again, I've talked to people whose parents or grandparents were practically subsistence farmers, but now they're happy to be English-speaking engineers
I don't think this is the "working class" and certainly not the slavery conditions people are talking about. No doubt globalization affects different people differently, however.
> When the industrial revolution brought things like power looms to the UK, it wasn’t exactly fun times for all. It was still a step up from the previous condition of serfdom and subsistence farming.
Serfdom effectively ended in the UK and France somewhere around the 1300s, with the Black Death probably being the single biggest impetus towards ending Serfdom. Queen Elizabeth outlawed serfdom for good in England in 1574, well before the Industrial Revolution.
Intriguingly, while serfdom was dying off in Western Europe, it was starting in Central and Eastern Europe, where it was only killed off by the Revolutions of 1848. But, as we all should know, the Industrial Revolution had its birth not in Germany but in Britain.
I'm not an expert on the Early Modern economy in the UK, but I also think that subsistence farming would be an adequate description for the UK rural economy in the 18th century. A lot of people would have been employed in the putting-out system for fabric manufacture. Given that farming itself being mechanized doesn't happen until the late 19th century, well after we see the rise of the industrial factories in concentrated cities, there had to be enough agricultural surplus from the rural areas to sustain large urban centers, so that doesn't seem like it would be subsistence agriculture.
Of particular importance was a combination of increased productivity and decreased labor requirements. Yes, this happened before mechanization thanks to factors such as larger fields from enclosures combined with better plows. The result of the enclosures in particular was a wave of poor people migrating to the cities. Those became the desperate poor who provided a workforce for the Industrial Revolution.
Democracy, Human Rights, and then by extension Worker protection & Environmental protection, etc.. are not a sure things occuring naturally from industrialisation and far from a given.
When people fought for societal changes, for instance in France during the Revolution or May 1968, the ruling class did not have a complete control of the means of communication, powerful automated censorship, pervasive facial recognition, a dystopian social credit system, etc...
It appears that significant social change, only occurs when things get really bad for the majority of people and a revolt, or threats of it are raised.
Otherwise what seems to happen throughout history, is that people gain power and use that to extend their leads indefinitely. Technology seems to make this process even more efficient and with a resulting inequality that is millions of times greater than what could be achieved 1000 years ago.
Now there seems to be no hope for better social conditions, because the powerful can isolate themselves almost completely while retaining their power with automated tools. In addition, we are in the age of constant distraction and stimulation (panem et circenses). The future of the average person doesn't seem very bright.
The world for nearly everyone is vastly better today than 1,000 years ago. The poor in America today live better lives, at least materially, than the aristocrats of just 200 years ago. It is a great irony that one of the biggest problems facing modern society is obesity-- food is plentiful to excess and labor-saving devices in every household.
Yes, but that is not what I meant. I meant that the difference in power between the most powerful and the least is growing. The counter to that, seems to be rapidly disappearing. Without a negative feedback, and with greater automation, the super powerful won't have any incentives to keep the average person happy. Our tools of power (revolt and production of goods and services) are disappearing. That could lead to a very good future or a very bad one.
> It was still a step up from the previous condition of serfdom and subsistence farming.
It's actually debated as to whether it was better at first.[1]
It seems for a for the first 60 years or so the standard of living may actually have fallen until the initial shock was over and working conditions etc. improved.
You are right though that modern industrialising nations may be able to leapfrog some of those difficulties allowing for a much more rapid arrival at decent living standards.
I don’t think the argument in this thread is to shut it down. It’s that more manufacturing should be done domestically. Offshoring manufacturing allowed us to revive those sweatshops after unions and regulations had done away with them and created decent paying blue collar jobs. If we had kept it domestic we’d probably be a lot further along to full automation since that’s the only other cost cutting option.
Yeah, this is a completely false choice. The choices are not "let unregulated capitalism externalize all its harms or go back to a fuedal system".
We have plenty of examples of modern production that doesn't externalize its harms and still produces a modern lifestyle. Often for not much more than that which does externalize.
For example, take some time to read up on Mondragon - a worker owned and operated behemouth that provides much of the economic output for an entire region of Spain.
China is doing much better than Britain did, from several points of view.
Britain had a safety-netless trickle-down economic model that gave rise to huge economic inequality and combined it with a nearly uninterrupted hard gold standard and a very laissez-faire financial sector. This is the regime that gives a certain kind of right winger wet dreams, but it depended on resource extraction on a vast scale from the colonies for its success and still was hugely unstable, with five major economic crises hitting London in the C19th, with one deeper than the Great Depression.
China's interventionist model has some serious issues, but I think in terms of equity, stability and self-sufficiency its last 40 years compares well to any period of the British Empire.
China has no social safety nets, no freedom of movement (trying to move to a big city from a rural province to get a job, and you are effectively an illegal immigrant).
Its last 40 years has been one of decreasing centralized economic control, and increasingly capitalistic engagement. The wealth gap between the few richest and the many poorest is far greater than the UK's- Britain looks practically egalitarian in comparison.
If it is not clear, I'm comparing China today with C19th Britain. Britain's safety net back then was mostly driven by private and Church charity, and covered very basic health and education services and the existence of workhouses. Starvation was rare in mainland UK, but extreme malnutrition was common, and the military complained consistently about the dreadful health of recruits. China is far ahead of this.
China has inequality today, but it does not have a rentier class, which dominated C19th British politics.
The pandemic has made it very clear that "accept some minor inconvenience or somebody you've never met is added to the death statistics" is a very appealing position. Only by giving the affected people a voice and real political power can it really be averted.
> Only by giving the affected people a voice and real political power can it really be averted.
I'm not sure what this means concretely (are you suggesting the poor Chinese worker need representation in western politics, or does the west need to topple the CCP and install a suitable democratic government?), but if we in western countries hold our business partners accountable to our own worker protection standards (and environmental standards) then we can solve lots of problems at once without toppling the CCP or giving non-citizens voting rights in western countries.
Premodern life wasn't exactly better, at least from the dawn of agriculture on. Hard work tended to rest on the shoulders of those who couldn't resist being yoked.
At least in 2021 a lot of the hardest and dirtiest work was "outsourced" to machines and robots.
Edit: -1 for a comment that does not contain anything controversial as far as I can see.
Moving manufacturing jobs to poorer countries provided more jobs, and generally better jobs, than they had before. So I don't think characterizing it as stealing is really fair.
I'm sure in many cases companies should be providing their workers in these countries with better working conditions, and maybe we should put more pressure on them to do so. But if people are voluntarily working at companies like Foxconn (for example) because it is better than their other options, it's not "theft", its objectively better for them because it gives them more options.
I dont think this is the only perspective. Without those outsourced industries, the economies of those countries might be worse off and people might have better air and water but face poverty, umemployment and other crises. It'll be better for the West to bring back jobs no doubt.
Countries that have a significant outsourcing footprint, do you think they do it because they're foolish/greedy? if it is so bad for them? There is a pressure especially in overpopulated nations to create jobs and the local economy is not mature enough to create enough jobs nor value to pay well.
And if you ever wondered why you effectively get a resounding "yes!" by action from people who claim the opposite in in words: market participants who do what you describe by successfully maintaining the illusion that they don't will outcompete those who actually don't. Hard. In the end you get a choice between honest exploiters and dishonest exploiters.
Manufacturing doesn’t require exploitation. Generally there is a tradeoff with automation where the amount of labor required to make something is quite flexible. However, the more you automate the more important the remaining workers become. Which generally means the less automation the more exploitation you end up with.
Automated manufacturing that doesn't care about emissions will still outcompete automated manufacturing that does.
OT: Generally you tend to end up with locations that are only competive with automaton narrowing down their output to products that can have production runs nearly unchanged for years while stuff that is subject to fashion or fast innovation goes elsewhere.
Sometimes, for example lumber mills that pollute more don’t get some inherent advantage from doing so. They are an example where increased efficiency means reduction in pollution, though of course in other industries toxic waste products are inherent to the manufacturing process.
Industrialists often suggest that dumping waste is the only viable option, but frequently it’s pinching pennies with minimal economic benefit.
Then I'd say you that while it's nice that you seem to care deeply and are empathetic, your highlighting only the problems is not constructive in aiding the very people you care about. I'd say that you need to educate yourself about how economics works and how societies have historically escaped poverty. That while consumers in rich nations should most definitely try more to minimize the problems you describe, that overall (and long term) international trade is probably the best way humanity has found thus far for helping the poor around the world. And that it has thus far helped to raise literally billions out of abject poverty.
It's not that bad really - the people making clothing and cars mostly have decent lives too. The fact that there are some bad actors beating and killing etc is a different issue.
We all are aware of that. It has been widely publicised for decades by those who expected that, by making people aware, they would change their spending habits.
They didn't. Nobody cares. And that has to be the end of that argument.
Nobody cares? It’s not like “we” are presented with a clear choice.
It’s totally unclear whether some product is produced ethically or not. Some ultra cheap products are likely to be unethically produced but a bit more expensive and there’s no way to know except for doing extensive research.
Nobody has time for that shit. Many don’t have the money to buy ethically because they themselves are working on the low end.
Sure you might buy the slavery free coffee bones and the fair phone 2. Good for you, but what about all the other stuff everyone buys day after day?
Exen extensive research doesn't help, the manufacturers will lie and cheat to present their practices as 'proper' and many bulk commodities are untraceable - you wont know where the materials came from
Sure, 'nobody' is an exaggeration, but people still smoke, people still drive unnecessarily wasteful cars, people still fly when there are alternatives. People in general just don't care. Only if political leaders care enough and can fix things without a big impact to their constituent, this stuff gets solved. If the impact on daily life is too big, nobody wants to make these hard decisions. Just look at how little is actually happening to combat climate change or plastic waste in the grand scheme of things.
Well, yes. But parent is equating people not putting their money where their mouth is with "nobody cares so we shouldn't try and change anything", which is wrong IMO.
Of course this goes through regulation. Nobody complains about seat belts anymore (and those who do are being Darwined away so that takes care of itself), yet everyone only started wearing a seatbelt once regulations were introduced.
Your argument is on point but it lacks the two that will drive the century to come:
- clothes are cheap because they are mined/manufactured/transported mostly with energy coming from fossil sources, and the IAE itself says that Oil has reached its peak. If energy goes down, production can only go down (yes, processes have been more efficient, but the efficiency has only transformed into even more stuff produced. That's the Jevons effect)
- clothes are cheap because their pollution, chief among them CO2 emission, is "free". But it's the kind of cost we'd rather not be paying
Modern life is pretty damn great but let's not kid ourselves that it's basically theft from the poor and the young.