> More productivity is not somehow a bad thing. I didn't say it was bad! I'm pro-productivity. My contention is simpler; that going from a pre-industrial econo

> More productivity is not somehow a bad thing. I didn't say it was bad! I'm pro-productivity. My contention is simpler; that going from a pre-industrial economy to an advanced economy has a path that's been well trod by the West and now by east Asia too. There's a give-and-take, or zig-zag path, between automating the old jobs and finding new jobs for people to do. You need to automate farming to free up farm labor to do more productive things, but you also have to have a large demand for jobs to absorb all those ex-farm laborers. Otherwise you just get urban slums full of the unemployed. India tried to jump directly from pre-industrial economy to a financial and technological services economy, and it's not working as well as China's model. India's GDP/capita is still a fraction of China's. The problem is that you can't take a billion subsistence farmers and turn them into the 10 million specialties needed to run a modern economy. Growing human capital is an organic process that takes decades and requires intermediate steps of sophistication. And for centuries now, garment production was a good stepping stone to more advanced kinds of manufacturing. It's like if you take the middle three rungs out of a ladder, how do you get to the top? You can't. The top is still there, but you're stuck at the bottom. Now maybe there's another path from Pre-IR to OECD-level economics that doesn't involve sweatshops, but if so, can you point to a country that's done it?