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Agreed. When people think they're doing the third world a disservice by buying consumer electronics, I point them to Paul Krugman's essay, In Praise of Cheap La

• kiliantics 9y ago
  This is just fancy apologetics for exploiting cheap third world labour. It completely ignores the brutal violence underlying the whole story. There are good reasons why people there can't have jobs unless we hire them for buttons. It's not the natural state of things that we are generously saving them from. There's a history of colonial domination in all of these places that was exploited to negotiate very one sided trade deals with western nations. So they are being paid buttons because we hold their governments hostage to get nice deals for our industry. And when they don't play ball, we send in the troops like that coup in Chile for a famous example.