I don’t think the central point of money is that it’s the best motivator. The great advantage of a market economy is that the amount of resources that get spend on useless projects that nobody is willing to pay for get’s reduced.
For all the talk about eradicating poverty and income inequality, there’s something that some people want, that you cannot get in a relatively egalitarian society: bargaining power. You cannot get a child who isn’t starving to work in a sweatshop.
I don’t buy that argument. The West doesn’t really need sweatshops at current labor prices. Labour costs are only a tiny element of the price of our products.
Instead of jeans from China I would much rather have a computer doing the work and creating a jeans that matches my own size.
(After all, it would be inefficient for a government to demand payment in physical goods or in labour, for much the same reason as barter is inefficient.)
Various countries have a draft and the US has jury duty which asks for payment in labor.
The payment that German had to pay because of the treaty of Versailles was in physical goods.
The West doesn’t really need sweatshops at current labor prices.
That’s… better news than I hoped for. I had a hunch that extremely cheap labour is not so much a necessity than a preference of the producers, but not that the practice could be eradicated altogether.
You ever been to a village with a “sweatshop”? I have. They’re the highest paying employers in town. The kids working at the “sweatshop” have more food, more clothing, and ultimately more education than their peers. These “sweatshop” factories result in more social benefit than all of the foreign aid that flows into these countries.
This is important. On an absolute scale, sweatshop jobs are not great jobs. But they are better than many of the jobs that most of humanity has worked over the centuries, both in terms of labor and reward.
Many people are enthusiastic about eliminating sweatshop jobs. Eliminating bad options does not create better ones. If a sweatshop job is the least bad option around, and you eliminate it without creating a better option, you have just worsened someone’s life.
I wouldn’t want to work in a sweatshop. I don’t want anyone to need to work in a sweatshop. But we should recognize that bad options are the best options available when all the other options are even worse. You can’t just get rid of bad things. You must also create something better to replace them.
Even if Nike wants to have it’s T-Shirts manufactured at a higher hourly wage, it’s not as easy for them to do so because they don’t own the factories in which the T-Shirts get produced.
There were attempts by Western companies to pay workers more money but the factories owners simply lie over the wage they pay the workers. That wages also often is still over the average wage in the region.
I don’t think the central point of money is that it’s the best motivator. The great advantage of a market economy is that the amount of resources that get spend on useless projects that nobody is willing to pay for get’s reduced.
I don’t buy that argument. The West doesn’t really need sweatshops at current labor prices. Labour costs are only a tiny element of the price of our products.
Instead of jeans from China I would much rather have a computer doing the work and creating a jeans that matches my own size.
Various countries have a draft and the US has jury duty which asks for payment in labor. The payment that German had to pay because of the treaty of Versailles was in physical goods.
Yes, the Chinese should just stick to pre-industrial age agriculture.
That’s… better news than I hoped for. I had a hunch that extremely cheap labour is not so much a necessity than a preference of the producers, but not that the practice could be eradicated altogether.
You ever been to a village with a “sweatshop”? I have. They’re the highest paying employers in town. The kids working at the “sweatshop” have more food, more clothing, and ultimately more education than their peers. These “sweatshop” factories result in more social benefit than all of the foreign aid that flows into these countries.
This is important. On an absolute scale, sweatshop jobs are not great jobs. But they are better than many of the jobs that most of humanity has worked over the centuries, both in terms of labor and reward.
Many people are enthusiastic about eliminating sweatshop jobs. Eliminating bad options does not create better ones. If a sweatshop job is the least bad option around, and you eliminate it without creating a better option, you have just worsened someone’s life.
I wouldn’t want to work in a sweatshop. I don’t want anyone to need to work in a sweatshop. But we should recognize that bad options are the best options available when all the other options are even worse. You can’t just get rid of bad things. You must also create something better to replace them.
Even if Nike wants to have it’s T-Shirts manufactured at a higher hourly wage, it’s not as easy for them to do so because they don’t own the factories in which the T-Shirts get produced.
There were attempts by Western companies to pay workers more money but the factories owners simply lie over the wage they pay the workers. That wages also often is still over the average wage in the region.