11 ms·

> I wouldn't say it's that stable or that the rest of Africa is instable, especially compared to Europe. It's just that Europe industrialized earlier and got to

• nottorp 7y ago
  <quote>It took suicide-level conditions in places like Foxconn to get us our gadget at <$1000.</quote> Not that I disagree with the rest of the post, but it's time the suicides at Foxconn story dies a fiery death. https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/07/10/apples-chinese-suicides-and-the-amazing-economics-of-ha-joon-chang/#327ffeca36a6 https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/07/10/apples-c... The juicy quote: At the time of that spate of suicides Foxconn had nearly 1 million workers in its plants. There were up to 14 suicides (it depends whose count you want to use) among that 1 million. The average rate of suicide in China is 22 per 100,000 people per year. That is, the suicide rate at Foxconn was under 5% of the general suicide rate of the Chinese population.
  • Sharlin 7y ago
    To be fair, you should compare to a demographic group similar to Foxconn workers. Comparison to the whole population may not be very informative due to confounders.
  • newsgremlin 7y ago
    The difference is those suicides at Foxconn are for one reason only, working conditions. Meanwhile the general suicide rate in China is for any number of reasons. Playing a pure numbers game with peoples lives is distasteful.
    • blackoil 7y ago
      Is there any reason to believe, Foxconn employees don't have any other personal/environmental problem causing them to suicide. While I am all for improving conditions of employees, it should be in context to the environment. If the whole country is working on 1$/day, expecting few companies to got 5$ just because they have global visibility is not feasible. It is not good for the company, economy and social dynamics of that region.
      • gingabriska 7y ago
        >Is there any reason to believe, Foxconn employees don't have any other personal/environmental problem causing them to suicide. It seems #1 reason for sucide is mental illness or chronic pain/disease severely impacting their quality of life. You need to ask can mentally ill people get employed at foxconn? They would be having interviews like for every other job, and probably the workers are selected based on their efficiency which can exclude a lot of mentally ill people. If not, then we've to remove the number of people who commit suicide due to chronic health issue or mental illness then compare the data again.
        • blackoil 7y ago
          Not my area of expertise, but someone with depression or similar disease should be able to interview and function well in company for most of days. Particularly someone very smart may have problem with communication intensive roles, but may excel in repetitive/manual tasks.
    • apexalpha 7y ago
      Really, do you have a source for that? Because that seems like an outrageous claim to just make up.
    • bayesian_horse 7y ago
      Would be interesting to know how they differentiated between different "causes".
    • Nasrudith 7y ago
  • pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    That rate seemed high, but apparently the UK rate is 10 per 100,000 - same O(). 15 per, for men.
  • baud147258 7y ago
    The first time I heard about Foxconn was in a French newspaper, Libération, on the day we learned about Jobs' death. Steve Jobs was on pages 2-3, Foxconn on pages 4-5. I don't know if it was a crazy coincidence or they were just keeping the Foxconn story on hand to publish the next time they had anything else to say about Apple.
  • wutbrodo 7y ago
    This is probably the thirtieth time I've seen this debunking over the last several years. The first was not long after the original Foxconn suicides news cycle. This is widely available enough information that if somebody references the Foxconn suicides and doesn't know the figures you mention by now, they have no interest in understanding the reality of the situation. I say this as someone who's considerably more negative about Apple than the median here. I just think you're wasting your breath assuming intellectual honesty from people repeating a canard years after it's been debunked (Note that I'm excluding people aware of the statistic who are interpreting Foxconn's suicides as still notable for whatever reason)
    • ryantgtg 7y ago
      This is the first time I've seen this debunking. And my head isn't in the sand, and I am definitely interested in understanding the reality of the situation. So, it's not a waste of breath at all.
      • wutbrodo 7y ago
        Thanks for the counterexample. I'm sincerely curious as to how you ended up in this position. When you read a claim (in this case, "Foxconn workers have an elevated suicide rate"), are you not in the habit of at least Googling it to verify whether the source you read is mistaken or lying? In this case, the very first Google result is a short Wikipedia article containing the debunking, for a grand total of thirty seconds of research required to get a clear picture of the truth of the matter. This isn't a rhetorical question,as I'm actually curious: taking you at face value as subjectively not having your "head in the sand", I don't have a model for how you'd end up believing the Foxconn suicide claim without being aware of the counterargument.
• bayesian_horse 7y ago
  "Exploitation" is a very subjective term. I won't argue that Europeans and their colonists did a lot of wrong. On the other hand, industrial growth isn't just exploitation. Whom is China "exploiting" right now? Sure they are trying to do this to a few countries, but with very limited success compared to European Colonization. There is no fundamental difference between the growth-rate in different developing countries, or between them and Europe during industrialization. In the final analysis, wealth can only develop through exponential growth. There is no sustainable short-cut.
• brlewis 7y ago
  > So who are African nations going to exploit? Each other? Robots
• whb07 7y ago
  You realize that the European powers of 17th and 18th centuries "exploited" the Americas to include the U.S and yet here stands the U.S head and shoulders above these "exploiters".
  • greeble 7y ago
    Good going USA. It's too bad Africa as a whole didn't manage the same. But you know, the people in the now USA who did the overthrowing were themselves Europeans. After all, the native Americans are not running things today are they?
    • bayesian_horse 7y ago
      It's harder to exploit people who have the institutional/cultural knowledge to fight back. And still, lots of natives in colonies managed to overthrow their exploiters, usually with higher technology or more ressources than their original hunter-gatherer culture had. Native Americans were outmatched by the population pressure from Europe. They didn't get the time to develop agriculture and everything to the point that they could compete in population density. And on top of that, a lot of violence, accidental harm and wrongful deeds have been done to them.
  • soperj 7y ago
    Do you actually believe that the US is head and shoulders above the Western European countries?
    • whb07 7y ago
      if we're talking geopolitically yes of course, if we're talking culturally yes of course. The other leaders at some point like Portugal, Netherlands, UK, Spain, all had their time in the sun. Now it is the U.S's, I'm not making the claim this will remain in perpetuity.
      • soperj 7y ago
        >geopolitically yes of course Currently your international relations with most countries are in shambles. You've got a nearly 20 year war going with Afganistan over a terrorist attack that wasn't sponsored by the country, and it doesn't look like the Taliban is going to actually disapear. Your other misadventure into Iraq completely destabilized the area, and resulted in creation of ISIS. >culturally yes of course Gonna agree to disagree on this one.
• barry-cotter 7y ago
  > Europe's industrialization as well as other Western countries heavily depended on the exploitation of third world countries in Asia and Africa, especially after WW2. If colonialism was necessary for industrialisation the European powers with no or smaller colonial empires would have had lower growth. Germany would have been behind the U.K. and France. Austria would have been obviously suffering compared to Germany. This didn’t happen. The evidence is ambiguous as to whether Empire had any effect on economic growth and what it had certainly wasn’t large. You can not detect decolonisation’s effect on historical GDP by eye. That’s how significant colonialism was to economic growth in the developed world. If actually being the government and in charge of other countries, being able to loot them more or less at will, and being able to direct their populations’ labour and economic development did basically nothing why would trade immiserate Asia and Africa? More to the point, literally every decade since WWII has been the best ever, on every continent, since WWII. Lifespan, healthy lifespan, education and literacy go up on every continent. Every continent but Africa sees growth in GDP per capita and they look like they’re joining that trend now too. As far as Foxconn goes they have a lower suicide rate than the general Chinese population. > ABC News and The Economist both have done some simple comparison— although the number of workplace suicides at Foxconn is large in absolute terms, the suicide rate is actually lower when compared to the overall suicide rate of China or the United States. According to a 2011 Centre for Disease Control and Prevention report, the country has a high suicide rate with approximately 22.23 deaths per 100,000 persons. In 2010, the worst year for workplace suicides at Foxconn with a total of 14 deaths, its employee count was a reported 930,000 people. The total number of Foxconn employee suicides in 2010 is unknown.
  • rjzzleep 7y ago
    > If colonialism was necessary for industrialisation the European powers with no or smaller colonial empires would have had lower growth. Which countries are you referring to? First of all borders in Europe were not the way they are right now 150 or 200 years ago. Second, an example for a tiny country that was exploiting an african nation well into the 20th century is Belgium [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_colonial_empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_colonial_empire
• iguy 7y ago
  > Sweatshops and slavery and cheap mass transportation of goods make our lifestyle possible. One of these things is not like the others! Cheap sea transport is a triumph of engineering. Sweatshop is just a term for a factory which the speaker disdains. Usually implying that the peasants should stay on their fields in picturesque poverty, and not make their own life choices. Slavery, on the other hand, is actually evil. Fortunately it's now confined to certain backward parts of the world which have very little to do with the modern economy. I mean how many things manufactured in Mauritania have you bought recently?
  • bayesian_horse 7y ago
    Mass transportation means you can profit from slavery or human rights abuses or whatever, while not seeing it because of the distance. Slavery is more common than you think, and especially because there are conditions equal to any definition of slavery, which are just not labeled that. There still is plenty of such slavery almost all around the world. Also, slavery is not the standard for exploitation. Subsistence wages alone may or may not be exploitative, but they don't constitute slavery. You need additional restrictions, for example on your movement, choice of work, human rights, etc
• usrusr 7y ago
  > Europe's industrialization as well as other Western countries heavily depended on the exploitation of third world countries in Asia and Africa, especially after WW2. Serveral landlocked European countries industrialized just fine without a single square foot of colonies, certainly no worse than first generation colonial powers.
• BurningFrog 7y ago
  > Europe's industrialization as well as other Western countries heavily depended on the exploitation of third world countries Causality and time moved the other direction. Industrialization made Britain and a few other countries rich and technologically advanced. That enabled them to conquer and exploit third world countries. On balance, that enriched a lot of individuals and made a lot of leaders feel powerful, but didn't actually make the countries any richer. The earlier conquests of the New World by Spain and Portugal was a whole other thing, mostly based on astonishing immunological luck.
  • zapita 7y ago
    British colonization of India started in 1612 and was complete around 1750. The first British colony in America was established in 1607. Resources from the Indian Raj, in particular, played a crucial role in enriching Britain and therefore financing the industrial revolution.
  • iguy 7y ago
    Yes to this. Somehow it's easy to imagine that the Iraq war could happen for the benefit of some people's careers, and Halliburton's stockholders, while being a complete disaster for the US as a whole (not to mention for everyone else). Yet when we discuss 19th C colonial adventures, the default assumption is that the much weaker states of the time certainly knew exactly what they were doing, for their own good. And could make sure that their generals, months away by post, certainly obeyed, and never got rich themselves...