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.
When people complain about sweatshops, they rarely consider the alternative, which is often being a very very poor farmer. I once heard an interview with a guy who was complaining about the very low wage sweat shop workers make in Cambodia. I called in to point out that, if that worker worked a normal US work schedule (40h/wk, 50wks/yr), they would make 3 times the national average income! There is a reason people move to cities to work in factories; the jobs are amazing compared with the alternative!
Yeah. Farming. Yuck. There’s this weird segment of both the left and the right that farming is somehow “noble”.
News for people. 90% of all technological advances for 10000 years was basically a race to do anything at all to make farming not totally suck. Human being have spent more time trying to avoid farming then they probably have anything else.
Farming SUCKS. But we need it. But it still SUCKS. It’s back breaking. Monotonous. And for a lot of these poorer countries it’s subsistence farming. Which sucks more!!
So yeah. Any alternative to farming is one we should applaud.
Let's turn the mic over to a couple of economists who performed the first randomized trial investigating this very question.
> Expecting to prove the experts right, we went to Ethiopia and — working with the Innovations for Poverty Action and the Ethiopian Development Research Institute — performed the first randomized trial of industrial employment on workers. Little did we anticipate that everything we believed would turn out to be wrong.
> To our surprise, most people who got an industrial job soon changed their minds. A majority quit within the first months. They ended up doing what those who had not gotten the job offers did — going back to the family farm, taking a construction job or selling goods at the market.
> Contrary to the expert predictions (and ours), quitting was a wise decision for most. The alternatives were not so bad after all: People who worked in agriculture or market selling earned about as much money as they could have at the factory, often with fewer hours and better conditions. We were amazed: By the end of a year only a third of the people who had landed an industrial job were still employed in the industrial sector at all.
> It would be easy to see this as the normal trial-and-error of young people starting out careers, but actually the factory jobs carried dangerous risks. Serious injuries and disabilities were nearly double among those who took the factory jobs, rising to 7 percent from about 4 percent. This risk rose with every month they stayed. The people we interviewed told us about exposure to chemical fumes and repetitive stress injuries.
Hahahahaha. It’s splainer again. Singling out people to “dunk” on.
I call bullshit. Because you’re usual zealotry is full of shit. I really love the cherry picking some here.
Not surprised a “holier than thou” Druid finds farming so fun. You would never do it of course being a white in America. You don’t have to. But you can find these fun cherry picked data points that confirm your bias that people are really happy farming.
Farming. Jesus.
I would rather not hear from a racist bigot like you Amy longer and I wonder why you even follow Mauer in the first place considering you seem to actively hate his positions. But hate comes east to people like you doesn’t it.
I'll ignore the desperate made-up personal attacks and ask about the closest thing you have to a counterargument:
> But you can find these fun cherry picked data points
As far as I know, this is the only Third World randomized trial of industrial employment's effect on working conditions, working hours, employment, and income. That is to say, I'm not cherry-picking — it's literally the only relevant evidence available with this level of rigor! Unless there's a bunch of other randomized trials you're not mentioning for some reason?
Dude you do this shit. You’re a contrarian tool know it all. I get it. The ‘tism hit you hard. Fair enough. So stop playing high and mighty like you’re not a spiteful self serving little shit. If Substack let me block people i would never hear from you again and be better off for it.
You are nonsense team sports ra ra bullshit to the core.
You’re not interesting. You are stale white bread. And yeah you are a bigot. And I would say it to your face. Trust me you wouldn’t do the same.
So, no, you don't have any other randomized trials to cite. OK, noted.
Let's review.
Jeff writes 2000 words, including footnotes, about how Asian Sweatshops Are Good Actually, and you didn't object to that as zealotry or racist or bigoted or contrarian or autistic...
Ted then writes about how Asian factory and sweatshop jobs "are amazing compared with the alternative" and admits to calling in to the radio to run PR about them, and you not only don't object but chime in to agree...
Finally, I link a survey of actual Africans' experiences of factory work, and THAT'S what you find zealous and racist and bigoted and contrarian and autistic.
Then of course later in there is a bunch of statistical math. Which I’m sure you understand implicitly. (I smell the tiniest whiff of p-hacking but at the same time it’s such an incredibly tiny study. 1000 people. That it wouldn’t even matter if there was. You might want to educate yourself on p-hacking. It’s quite important if you’re someone that “splains” things).
So out of curiosity. Do you have any “randomized” studies from any economists that didn’t go to Berkeley and studies more than 0.00083333333% of a countries population?
Also. By part 2 they basically hand wave away the fact that, if I’m reading this right, Ethiopia is much closer to 1940s American than 1890s America. Since the study was done at a very late stage and not say 30 years ago when Ethiopia probably had what we might more accurately call “sweatshops”. It seems Ethiopia was already on the other side of the studies Jeff cites in terms of development.
Which means that the study is not studying what you are claiming it is. It’s studying something adjacent. Ok. Going to finish easing after I get back from. You know. Working.
Please if you have any questions about this 1000 person self selected study from the mid 2010s please let me know in the mean time!
Wow page 4 paragraph 2. 1000 “applicants” self selected and checked to see that they have at least “some secondary education”.
Truly with numbers like 1000! (Way more then an like 500. And nearly 100,000).
The “randomization” in the trial is that they took 1000 (100% not random) Ethiopians who self identified as interested in industrial work and definitely had some education. And the “randomly” assigned them one of three options. Industrial work.
That’s the randomization. The groups they were put in. Not the people. The subjects were explicitly chosen.
But hey splainer. I am going to do you an absolute solid. I am actually going to read the study that you linked to a paywalled (and probably self fellating) times article by the same authors of the “study”.
1. Ooh. First thing I notice. Not peer reviewed. Not necessarily a sign of a poor study. But I’ll just add that one grain of salt. You. Of course didn’t probably even look that up first. Good reporting!
2. In the abstract it doesn’t say the study gave them the choice of a factory job or “go back to the family farm”. While the control group it says worked the factory job while looking for better work (shockingly in line with the idea defending sweatshops. That it provides options during bad times). We will see when I actually read the study, because I don’t take masturbatory articles as gospel, if the control group went back to back-breaking farming. Or just found different work that was now forced to be competitive by other options.
3. Busy week. See you again in 52 pages.
Read along if you think you can understand a study as well. I’ll get back to you with what the study, you know, actually says.
2 of the firms they contracted workers to. WERE FARMS!
And. Jesus. I’m 6 pages in. Are all 52 going to be like this.
All I can do is just copy paste the next few paragraphs since you sure as hell didn’t read them before taking them as gospel.
“”””The people applying to these low-skill, entry-level jobs were generally unemployed but educated young adults, mainly women, who lived nearby the firms. Most had had no work in at least a month, and outside the factories most local work opportunities were informal: casual labor, home enterprises, or agricultural work.
The comparison between the job offer and control arms indicates how the industrial job compares to the workers’ typical alternatives. The entrepreneurship arm, meanwhile, was designed to allow us to compare industrial work to the income trajectory, health, and other dimensions of greater informal employment rather than unemployment.5 Our reasoning was based on growing evidence that poor, young, credit-constrained adults may be able start or expand a profitable microenterprise with capital and some basic advice.6 The point is not to juxtapose a grant against a job (since a grant is unlikely to be a worker’s counterfactual) but rather simulate self-employment opportunities under fewer constraints.
There are obvious limits to what we can learn from five firms in one country. The same is true of any impact evaluation, where one program is usually evaluated in one setting. Studies comparing formal to informal workers typically use country-wide surveys of firms and workers. These country-wide studies have the advantage of comparing informal workers to formal workers across a great many more firms, but these comparisons typically rest on the assumption that informal and formal workers are similar after accounting for a handful of demographic characteristics. These studies also typically have data on only a narrow set of outcomes, such as earnings. Hence the health and other non-pecuniary consequences of different occupations is not known.
What this case study and experiment offers, besides a randomized design, is the oppor- tunity to measure a range of outcomes over time, including physical and mental health. Of course we need to be cautious about generalizing from five firms. At best our results speak to low-skill light manufacturing and agribusiness, in contexts where workers are essentially disposable from the perspective of firms. This is a common feature of light manufacturing and agribusiness in Ethiopia, and indeed we discuss how our results are consistent with pat- terns in more representative panels of young, unskilled Ethiopian workers and job searchers, plus (to some extent) early and middle industrialization in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.””””””
Okay. This is going to take forever since there’s a wow moment in every paragraph.
The industries they filtered these “random” (chosen) applicants into were almost all NEW factories or industrial jobs since they’re the only ones that could take on dozens of new workers at once.
As we all know plants that are just opening are always run much much better than plants open for months or years that have time to work out what are always weird growing pains.
Also. For fun. “””””random””””” with 10 quotes around it. No relation.
Yeah I am kidding. I always kid with a joke socially unhealthy person like you. You concern troll here. And year I bet you’ve actually read those studies cover to cover (you fucking haven’t. Liar). You talk down to people like a prick and your online attitude I’ve seen probably does mask a ton of undiagnosed behavioral issues.
I’ve watched you unabashedly be a dick to people here then the moment anyone calls you on it you drape yourself in this veil of “it’s just the facts, I’m being the adult here”. I’ve noticed certain things trigger you and you seem to like to go after a certain “type of person”.
You’re not the good human being you think you are and your presence here is very much making me think about unsubscribing to Jeff Mauer completely.
And I’ve been here since day one. You’re that much of a toxic prick.
Mar 30, 2023·edited Mar 30, 2023Liked by Jeff Maurer
I had similar thoughts when I heard union members say that globalization in general and factories moving abroad in particular hurt "the most vulnerable", that we needed "solidarity". They obviously meant 'among people living this country' and everyone understood it as such, but as a matter of fact, the event was *helpful* to the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world.
I've noticed this implicit chauvinism particularly in First World arguments about immigration. Commentators and politicians worry about immigration potentially raising inequality within individual rich countries, while ignoring how someone coming from a poor country to a rich country tends to reduce inequality globally.
Come to think of it...we're all consistent in our anti-chauvinism here, right? We all want massively expanded immigration from low-income and middle-income countries to ours, yes? We're not selectively using anti-chauvinism to justify capital mobility but not labor mobility, so as to score points off e.g. union leaders, hein?
Hey Jeff, I thought this was brilliant. I noticed you tried a slightly different approach here: there were slightly fewer jokes and a bit of an almost Freddie deBoer-esque directness, and I thought it worked really well. Don’t get me wrong: I think you’re a really funny comedian too. I just thought you might appreciate the positive feedback.
ok, sure. But I assume you also read Jason Hickel's argument, and aren't just taking the literal-billionaires at their word on all this? ...There's this old proverb, I think goes something like: "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime; make a man buy his fish or starve and he'll stick eyes onto a junky Elmo that we don't need in the world for 12 hours a day"
Obviously 'progress' is good. I just think there's a more nuanced take to be had here.
Yes, I thought it was cheap of Jeff to use Jason Hickel's column as an example of pro-poverty, data-denying misanthropy, when one of Jason's core critiques is that the usual poverty line that's used — $1.90 per day — ISN'T AMBITIOUS ENOUGH, and that data based on a more realistic poverty line ($7.40 per day) reveal more people living in poverty today than in 1981 (the start year of reliable global poverty numbers, according to Jason). Jason could well be wrong/lying about that stuff, but you wouldn't know it from Jeff — Jeff's rebuttal is a Brookings report that relies on the same $1.90 poverty line Jason criticized!
I'm of the opinion that a person's moral importance doesn't have anything to do with their nationality, and that decisions should be evaluated based on whether they make people's lives better or worse. However, I think these are both very niche positions. Most people care more about their countrymen than about foreigners, and most people believe that "avoiding sin" is a big part of morality. Convincing people to be globalist consequentialists is a very difficult task, and not something you can take for granted. Although, perhaps taking globalist consequentialism for granted is one way to shift the culture in its favor.
When I lived in Mexico, I remember visiting a city on the U.S. border at one point. We saw lots of the 'maquiladoras', which are basically foreign-run factories that can manufacture/finish and export products from Mexico duty- and tariff-free. Initially I thought it sounded kind of exploitative, but our Mexican hosts pointed out to me that people migrate *to* these border cities specifically for these jobs, which are relatively high-paying and coveted, especially factories that produce electronics and other high-end goods. Factories also compete with one another for the best workers, which incentivizes them to offer benefits and better conditions. I definitely had to adjust my perception.
Sometime about 30 years ago my workplace was visited by a salesman who had set himself up as a distributor of Korean computers. After we had stopped laughing, he explained they were a safe choice because they were actually a US design built under license by some weirdly named company called Samsung.
Today I work for a certain US CPU company, and Samsung's chips are going into our top-of-the-line products. And back at home the ladies are hooked on Korean TV shows.
But oh, I cry for Africa where it seems that people's opportunities don't get beyond the sweatshop stage (if they get there at all).
I don't want to get your hopes up, Jeff -- writing this article is obviously a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the Nobel (I believe Krugman did some other stuff as well) but you're now clearly in the conversation!
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.
It's true what they say: You're never done learning. Thanks!
As much as I'd like to try to get "panty waste" going (it has an internal logic!), I'll change it.
I mean, there are a number of people I could name who are wastes of the panty variety. It is a terrific insult!
I noticed that too but actually like “panty waste” better and think we should bring it back as an insult!
When people complain about sweatshops, they rarely consider the alternative, which is often being a very very poor farmer. I once heard an interview with a guy who was complaining about the very low wage sweat shop workers make in Cambodia. I called in to point out that, if that worker worked a normal US work schedule (40h/wk, 50wks/yr), they would make 3 times the national average income! There is a reason people move to cities to work in factories; the jobs are amazing compared with the alternative!
Yeah. Farming. Yuck. There’s this weird segment of both the left and the right that farming is somehow “noble”.
News for people. 90% of all technological advances for 10000 years was basically a race to do anything at all to make farming not totally suck. Human being have spent more time trying to avoid farming then they probably have anything else.
Farming SUCKS. But we need it. But it still SUCKS. It’s back breaking. Monotonous. And for a lot of these poorer countries it’s subsistence farming. Which sucks more!!
So yeah. Any alternative to farming is one we should applaud.
Oh sweet I can permanently hide peoples comments on Substack. Problem
Solved.
Let's turn the mic over to a couple of economists who performed the first randomized trial investigating this very question.
> Expecting to prove the experts right, we went to Ethiopia and — working with the Innovations for Poverty Action and the Ethiopian Development Research Institute — performed the first randomized trial of industrial employment on workers. Little did we anticipate that everything we believed would turn out to be wrong.
> To our surprise, most people who got an industrial job soon changed their minds. A majority quit within the first months. They ended up doing what those who had not gotten the job offers did — going back to the family farm, taking a construction job or selling goods at the market.
> Contrary to the expert predictions (and ours), quitting was a wise decision for most. The alternatives were not so bad after all: People who worked in agriculture or market selling earned about as much money as they could have at the factory, often with fewer hours and better conditions. We were amazed: By the end of a year only a third of the people who had landed an industrial job were still employed in the industrial sector at all.
> It would be easy to see this as the normal trial-and-error of young people starting out careers, but actually the factory jobs carried dangerous risks. Serious injuries and disabilities were nearly double among those who took the factory jobs, rising to 7 percent from about 4 percent. This risk rose with every month they stayed. The people we interviewed told us about exposure to chemical fumes and repetitive stress injuries.
— Chris Blattman and Stefan Dercon, "Everything We Knew About Sweatshops Was Wrong" (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/27/opinion/do-sweatshops-lift-workers-out-of-poverty.html)
Hahahahaha. It’s splainer again. Singling out people to “dunk” on.
I call bullshit. Because you’re usual zealotry is full of shit. I really love the cherry picking some here.
Not surprised a “holier than thou” Druid finds farming so fun. You would never do it of course being a white in America. You don’t have to. But you can find these fun cherry picked data points that confirm your bias that people are really happy farming.
Farming. Jesus.
I would rather not hear from a racist bigot like you Amy longer and I wonder why you even follow Mauer in the first place considering you seem to actively hate his positions. But hate comes east to people like you doesn’t it.
I'll ignore the desperate made-up personal attacks and ask about the closest thing you have to a counterargument:
> But you can find these fun cherry picked data points
As far as I know, this is the only Third World randomized trial of industrial employment's effect on working conditions, working hours, employment, and income. That is to say, I'm not cherry-picking — it's literally the only relevant evidence available with this level of rigor! Unless there's a bunch of other randomized trials you're not mentioning for some reason?
Dude you do this shit. You’re a contrarian tool know it all. I get it. The ‘tism hit you hard. Fair enough. So stop playing high and mighty like you’re not a spiteful self serving little shit. If Substack let me block people i would never hear from you again and be better off for it.
You are nonsense team sports ra ra bullshit to the core.
You’re not interesting. You are stale white bread. And yeah you are a bigot. And I would say it to your face. Trust me you wouldn’t do the same.
So, no, you don't have any other randomized trials to cite. OK, noted.
Let's review.
Jeff writes 2000 words, including footnotes, about how Asian Sweatshops Are Good Actually, and you didn't object to that as zealotry or racist or bigoted or contrarian or autistic...
Ted then writes about how Asian factory and sweatshop jobs "are amazing compared with the alternative" and admits to calling in to the radio to run PR about them, and you not only don't object but chime in to agree...
Finally, I link a survey of actual Africans' experiences of factory work, and THAT'S what you find zealous and racist and bigoted and contrarian and autistic.
Are you fucking kidding me?
So. You didn’t read the randomized trial study you’re “splaining”?
Circle one:
Yes.
No.
Then of course later in there is a bunch of statistical math. Which I’m sure you understand implicitly. (I smell the tiniest whiff of p-hacking but at the same time it’s such an incredibly tiny study. 1000 people. That it wouldn’t even matter if there was. You might want to educate yourself on p-hacking. It’s quite important if you’re someone that “splains” things).
So out of curiosity. Do you have any “randomized” studies from any economists that didn’t go to Berkeley and studies more than 0.00083333333% of a countries population?
Also. By part 2 they basically hand wave away the fact that, if I’m reading this right, Ethiopia is much closer to 1940s American than 1890s America. Since the study was done at a very late stage and not say 30 years ago when Ethiopia probably had what we might more accurately call “sweatshops”. It seems Ethiopia was already on the other side of the studies Jeff cites in terms of development.
Which means that the study is not studying what you are claiming it is. It’s studying something adjacent. Ok. Going to finish easing after I get back from. You know. Working.
Please if you have any questions about this 1000 person self selected study from the mid 2010s please let me know in the mean time!
Actually let’s do a running wow moment.
Wow page 4 paragraph 2. 1000 “applicants” self selected and checked to see that they have at least “some secondary education”.
Truly with numbers like 1000! (Way more then an like 500. And nearly 100,000).
The “randomization” in the trial is that they took 1000 (100% not random) Ethiopians who self identified as interested in industrial work and definitely had some education. And the “randomly” assigned them one of three options. Industrial work.
That’s the randomization. The groups they were put in. Not the people. The subjects were explicitly chosen.
Definitionally that is random.
Okay. Back when I read more!
But hey splainer. I am going to do you an absolute solid. I am actually going to read the study that you linked to a paywalled (and probably self fellating) times article by the same authors of the “study”.
1. Ooh. First thing I notice. Not peer reviewed. Not necessarily a sign of a poor study. But I’ll just add that one grain of salt. You. Of course didn’t probably even look that up first. Good reporting!
2. In the abstract it doesn’t say the study gave them the choice of a factory job or “go back to the family farm”. While the control group it says worked the factory job while looking for better work (shockingly in line with the idea defending sweatshops. That it provides options during bad times). We will see when I actually read the study, because I don’t take masturbatory articles as gospel, if the control group went back to back-breaking farming. Or just found different work that was now forced to be competitive by other options.
3. Busy week. See you again in 52 pages.
Read along if you think you can understand a study as well. I’ll get back to you with what the study, you know, actually says.
Sammie. Every sentence I have to stop.
2 of the firms they contracted workers to. WERE FARMS!
And. Jesus. I’m 6 pages in. Are all 52 going to be like this.
All I can do is just copy paste the next few paragraphs since you sure as hell didn’t read them before taking them as gospel.
“”””The people applying to these low-skill, entry-level jobs were generally unemployed but educated young adults, mainly women, who lived nearby the firms. Most had had no work in at least a month, and outside the factories most local work opportunities were informal: casual labor, home enterprises, or agricultural work.
The comparison between the job offer and control arms indicates how the industrial job compares to the workers’ typical alternatives. The entrepreneurship arm, meanwhile, was designed to allow us to compare industrial work to the income trajectory, health, and other dimensions of greater informal employment rather than unemployment.5 Our reasoning was based on growing evidence that poor, young, credit-constrained adults may be able start or expand a profitable microenterprise with capital and some basic advice.6 The point is not to juxtapose a grant against a job (since a grant is unlikely to be a worker’s counterfactual) but rather simulate self-employment opportunities under fewer constraints.
There are obvious limits to what we can learn from five firms in one country. The same is true of any impact evaluation, where one program is usually evaluated in one setting. Studies comparing formal to informal workers typically use country-wide surveys of firms and workers. These country-wide studies have the advantage of comparing informal workers to formal workers across a great many more firms, but these comparisons typically rest on the assumption that informal and formal workers are similar after accounting for a handful of demographic characteristics. These studies also typically have data on only a narrow set of outcomes, such as earnings. Hence the health and other non-pecuniary consequences of different occupations is not known.
What this case study and experiment offers, besides a randomized design, is the oppor- tunity to measure a range of outcomes over time, including physical and mental health. Of course we need to be cautious about generalizing from five firms. At best our results speak to low-skill light manufacturing and agribusiness, in contexts where workers are essentially disposable from the perspective of firms. This is a common feature of light manufacturing and agribusiness in Ethiopia, and indeed we discuss how our results are consistent with pat- terns in more representative panels of young, unskilled Ethiopian workers and job searchers, plus (to some extent) early and middle industrialization in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.””””””
Okay. This is going to take forever since there’s a wow moment in every paragraph.
The industries they filtered these “random” (chosen) applicants into were almost all NEW factories or industrial jobs since they’re the only ones that could take on dozens of new workers at once.
As we all know plants that are just opening are always run much much better than plants open for months or years that have time to work out what are always weird growing pains.
Also. For fun. “””””random””””” with 10 quotes around it. No relation.
Yeah I am kidding. I always kid with a joke socially unhealthy person like you. You concern troll here. And year I bet you’ve actually read those studies cover to cover (you fucking haven’t. Liar). You talk down to people like a prick and your online attitude I’ve seen probably does mask a ton of undiagnosed behavioral issues.
I’ve watched you unabashedly be a dick to people here then the moment anyone calls you on it you drape yourself in this veil of “it’s just the facts, I’m being the adult here”. I’ve noticed certain things trigger you and you seem to like to go after a certain “type of person”.
You’re not the good human being you think you are and your presence here is very much making me think about unsubscribing to Jeff Mauer completely.
And I’ve been here since day one. You’re that much of a toxic prick.
I had similar thoughts when I heard union members say that globalization in general and factories moving abroad in particular hurt "the most vulnerable", that we needed "solidarity". They obviously meant 'among people living this country' and everyone understood it as such, but as a matter of fact, the event was *helpful* to the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world.
I've noticed this implicit chauvinism particularly in First World arguments about immigration. Commentators and politicians worry about immigration potentially raising inequality within individual rich countries, while ignoring how someone coming from a poor country to a rich country tends to reduce inequality globally.
Come to think of it...we're all consistent in our anti-chauvinism here, right? We all want massively expanded immigration from low-income and middle-income countries to ours, yes? We're not selectively using anti-chauvinism to justify capital mobility but not labor mobility, so as to score points off e.g. union leaders, hein?
Hey Jeff, I thought this was brilliant. I noticed you tried a slightly different approach here: there were slightly fewer jokes and a bit of an almost Freddie deBoer-esque directness, and I thought it worked really well. Don’t get me wrong: I think you’re a really funny comedian too. I just thought you might appreciate the positive feedback.
I agree 100%. Laughed right out of the gate, then went on to ...think seriously, this is a brilliant essay. Well stated Jeff.
ok, sure. But I assume you also read Jason Hickel's argument, and aren't just taking the literal-billionaires at their word on all this? ...There's this old proverb, I think goes something like: "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime; make a man buy his fish or starve and he'll stick eyes onto a junky Elmo that we don't need in the world for 12 hours a day"
Obviously 'progress' is good. I just think there's a more nuanced take to be had here.
Yes, I thought it was cheap of Jeff to use Jason Hickel's column as an example of pro-poverty, data-denying misanthropy, when one of Jason's core critiques is that the usual poverty line that's used — $1.90 per day — ISN'T AMBITIOUS ENOUGH, and that data based on a more realistic poverty line ($7.40 per day) reveal more people living in poverty today than in 1981 (the start year of reliable global poverty numbers, according to Jason). Jason could well be wrong/lying about that stuff, but you wouldn't know it from Jeff — Jeff's rebuttal is a Brookings report that relies on the same $1.90 poverty line Jason criticized!
I'm of the opinion that a person's moral importance doesn't have anything to do with their nationality, and that decisions should be evaluated based on whether they make people's lives better or worse. However, I think these are both very niche positions. Most people care more about their countrymen than about foreigners, and most people believe that "avoiding sin" is a big part of morality. Convincing people to be globalist consequentialists is a very difficult task, and not something you can take for granted. Although, perhaps taking globalist consequentialism for granted is one way to shift the culture in its favor.
When I lived in Mexico, I remember visiting a city on the U.S. border at one point. We saw lots of the 'maquiladoras', which are basically foreign-run factories that can manufacture/finish and export products from Mexico duty- and tariff-free. Initially I thought it sounded kind of exploitative, but our Mexican hosts pointed out to me that people migrate *to* these border cities specifically for these jobs, which are relatively high-paying and coveted, especially factories that produce electronics and other high-end goods. Factories also compete with one another for the best workers, which incentivizes them to offer benefits and better conditions. I definitely had to adjust my perception.
Thanks, one of your best!
Sometime about 30 years ago my workplace was visited by a salesman who had set himself up as a distributor of Korean computers. After we had stopped laughing, he explained they were a safe choice because they were actually a US design built under license by some weirdly named company called Samsung.
Today I work for a certain US CPU company, and Samsung's chips are going into our top-of-the-line products. And back at home the ladies are hooked on Korean TV shows.
But oh, I cry for Africa where it seems that people's opportunities don't get beyond the sweatshop stage (if they get there at all).
Great article! Just as great as the same one by Paul Krugman in 1997, who then went on to win the Nobel Prize (https://slate.com/business/1997/03/in-praise-of-cheap-labor.html)
I don't want to get your hopes up, Jeff -- writing this article is obviously a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the Nobel (I believe Krugman did some other stuff as well) but you're now clearly in the conversation!
Just want to point out a search-and-replace error in your post:
You seemed to have inadvertently replaced the phrase "complete with" with the word "minus."