I’m pretty sure that the people running the work house in Oliver Twist are supposed to be the bad guys. When Oliver asks for more gruel, you’re probably not supposed to think: “What effect would that have on operating costs?” Although…seriously, what effect would it have? If you give one kid more gruel, then all the kids have to get it. And soon, “more” becomes the standard portion, plus now the kids know they can push you around, and next thing you know you’re basically running a free restaurant full of fat little orphans stuffing their chubby little faces with gratis gruel. I would have said “no, and you’re fired for illegal union activity.”
I’m 96 percent sure that’s not how you’re supposed to react. But I wonder what tweaks Dickens might make to the story if he had seen these two charts that made the rounds on Twitter last week:
These graphs are merely the latest in a long string of data showing that global poverty is plunging. Now, if you’re a socialist, this is terrible news. One of Twitter’s funniest running gags is socialists trying to pretend1 that global poverty isn’t declining. But, tragically for them, it is. Of course, if you’re not deeply committed to a 19th century ideology hatched by a misanthrope who thought that he could predict the future because he read a bunch of books, then scores of people living better lives is outstanding news.
The progress comes mostly from east and south Asia, especially China and India. We could debate whether these gains are more due to market liberalization or state-sponsored industrial policy, but let’s not (also: it’s clearly a mix). Those questions are important if you’re a head of state in an emerging economy, but I am not that, and barring some kind of Freaky Friday-style body switch, I never will be. I’m more interested in how I should feel about what’s happening as an American. And the relevant point is that the growth in Asia comes largely from export-oriented strategies that include lots of foreign capital.
A lot of Asian people are working in factories, and it’s making them less poor. Americans worry about how our policies affect people in other countries, or at least we claim to. And if Americans are interested in the well-being of people in other countries, then shouldn’t we embrace the jobs that are helping them escape poverty? Perhaps we should, but even a cursory awareness of our political dialogue on this topic reveals that we’re definitely not. This column asks: “Why not?”
When Americans talk about foreign manufacturing, it’s usually to say that it’s bad and shouldn’t happen. This is part of the basis for my claim that Americans care about how our policies affect people abroad — the standard response to “another company is moving operations to Vietnam” is to shake your head in disapproval. If you’re liberal, the tongue-clucking in this context can become deafening — “goddamned greedy corporations!”, we’ll say. Sometimes we throw whatever we’re holding against the wall to emphasize our point. We might even feel guilty enough to make a donation to Oxfam, though we’ll definitely make that donation on a phone manufactured in a foreign country.
For conservatives, the motivation is usually different. I don’t think I’m casting aspersions when I say that some conservatives have a nativist streak, and some of them don’t like the idea of anyone anywhere else doing well. A few are even dumb enough to think that if foreigners have more money, then we automatically have less — one of these people was president for four years. Plus, xenophobia aside, some conservatives dream of a country populated by burly men doing manly factory jobs that involve sweat and grease and tools and hard hats and a hell of a lot of sparks. They basically want the economy to be a 1980s heavy metal video minus the homoerotic undertones.
Democrats also fetishize burly, manly factory jobs. We like the idea of someone else working in a factory. I mean, we would never, ever work in a factory ourselves — factories don’t let you take your dog to work, and Bubble Tea Tuesday is virtually unheard of — but we like the idea of someone else working in a factory. Also, many unions calculate that — even though trade might be good for working people, generally — trade is bad for their members. And unions are an important part of the Democratic coalition, if for no other reason than to allow us to imagine that we’re not a party of effete, bubble tea-drinking pantywaists. Which we mostly are, but we don’t like having that fact rubbed in our faces.
Liberals are uncomfortable with the wages and working conditions in foreign factories. I think this discomfort is mostly sincere, and also good; all joking aside, you should not look at a teenager working at a Foxconn factory and think “better making the phones than spend all day looking at them.” Many foreign workers put in long hours doing monotonous jobs for low pay, and few Americans would choose to trade places with them.
But I think we often don’t grapple with the fact eliminating a foreign factory worker’s job would almost certainly leave that person worse off. They did, after all, choose to take that job.2 I think it's hard for some Americans to understand how working 12 hours a day gluing the eyeballs onto a Rock & Rhyme Elmo3 could constitute an improvement in anyone's life, but that might be because we lack an understanding of how many people live. A lot of people's lives are really, really hard. That's especially true in rural areas -- the story of human history is very much a story of humans migrating from rural to urban areas. People are currently migrating from rural to urban areas in China and India in massive numbers. Moving to the city and taking a manufacturing job is a choice that people have made and continue to make and there must be a reason why they do that.
I sometimes feel that some American liberals’ priority is to merely remove their personal involvement with the harsh realities of poor people’s lives. I don’t think that’s their intent, but it can be the effect of their actions. If the left actually succeeded in moving all production stateside — which isn’t remotely feasible but let’s just imagine — it would be possible to use your iPhone without thinking “this was made in a factory whose conditions would really bum me out.” But it would also be bad for poor people in other countries. The benefit to poor Americans wouldn’t counterbalance the hit to poor foreigners, because our labor markets are tighter, our poor people aren’t as poor, and there would be an increase in the price of goods that everyone buys. Basically, some of the poorest people in the world would be worse off, but wealthy Americans wouldn’t have to think about it so much. I find that fucked up.
It is also, unfortunately, not the case that we can say “keep the foreign factory, but bring wages and conditions up to American standards.” Asia is a manufacturing hub because costs are low — if you remove that reality, you also eliminate the jobs. Now, I’m not an absolutist on this issue; I do think it’s appropriate to expect some basic standard of non-horribleness in factories. I don’t feel comfortable telling someone in another country how many hours they can work or what wages they can accept, but I do feel comfortable saying “there needs to be egress in case of a fire.” We don’t need to go all the way back to the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. But we can’t have our cake and eat it, too; the jobs that help people escape extreme poverty will inevitably have lower wages and worse labor conditions than what we expect in America.
But despite all these uncomfortable truths, the happy reality is that we seem to have found something that works. You can lift large numbers of people out of poverty through an industrial policy that makes heavy use of exports and foreign capital. We have lots of data on this — it’s worked before, it’s working now, it could work again. True: It will not be pretty. It will offend the sensibilities of those in the West who would like the world to be simple and clean and happy and nice. But if your goal is to help people move from Donner Party-level desperation to mere Dickensian grinding poverty — and hopefully beyond that in short order — we appear to know how to do that.
To the extent that Westerners are uncomfortable with the harsh realities of foreign manufacturing, I think we’re mostly uncomfortable with the harsh realities of life in other parts of the world. American purchases of foreign products connect us to those realities, but they don’t cause them; in fact, they almost certainly ameliorate them. There is now a large amount of evidence suggesting that’s true, so I think it’s time to get comfortable with foreign manufacturing. It would be great if poor countries could skip straight to the Teslas-and-goldendoodles phase of post-industrial wealth, but they can’t, so we should embrace the sewing-machines-and-company-sponsored-gruel phase as a necessary intermediate step.
I understand that politics focuses on the people who do the voting. You can’t run for Mayor of Little Rock saying “I’ve got a plan to help rural Cambodians!” — people want policies that address their needs. So, I get that the American conversation about foreign manufacturing will inevitably focus on the American end of things. If you want to convince Americans that free trade is good, then you need to convince them that it’s good for Americans. Our politics puts our interests front-and-center, and that’s not weird.
But political thinking is different from moral thinking. And the equal worth of all people is a fundamental moral concept — it’s also an idea that I think most people more-or-less accept. Opposition to foreign manufacturing is often expressed as an outcome of that belief; people feel bad about people in other countries working shitty jobs. And — let me say this one more time — I think that empathy is good. But I also think it misunderstands the situation. What we should feel bad about is that people live in situations so dire that they’ll jump at the chance to take a shitty job — that’s the problem that needs to be fixed. And I think there’s a large amount of evidence showing that taking a shitty job today puts people in a position to hold out for a better job tomorrow. I know it’s weird to think of sweatshops as a sign of progress, but they sort of are.
I think this reality needs to be part of our calculus when we think about trade. Is trade good? Is it bad? Who wins? Who loses? These are all debatable questions, but I feel that the “who wins?” part has to include the more-than-a-billion people who escaped poverty in the last three decades. More than a billion people. That’s not nothing. Our dialogue should stop pretending like it is.
This link goes to a Guardian column by Jason Hickel, who is a prominent columnist, and not some Twitter rando — I feel that linking to Twitter randos is bad form. I don’t know if Hickel explicitly identifies as a socialist, but he frequently argues that socialism has outperformed capitalism.
Exempting, of course, any case where a worker was trafficked. But, obviously, most people who work factory jobs are not trafficked.
I do not actually know anything about where or how the Elmo Rock & Rhyme plush toy is manufactured. But I’ll bet it’s made abroad, because everything is.
I had a discussion not too long ago with a PHD educated relative. He is anti-capitalist, I am pro. I pointed out how beneficial investment, mostly foreign capital, is and how it has improved the lives of millions if not billions around the world. He to was of the mind that unless everyone has the standard of living of a North America or Europe, they are exploited by evil capitalists. I pointed out that better is, well, better. I am 100% sure people making four dollars a day now are much happier or at least more able to survive compared to when they made one dollar a day. That is progress.
Just to be horribly nit-picky, the word is "pantywaist", not "panty waste". A pantywaist is an old-fashioned child's undergarment.