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If I said to you right now "you can get amazing quality clothes for $10, a new, fast car for $5,000, and nearly-free seafood of any type you might desire", woul

• nsonha 5y ago
  I dont think this is the only perspective. Without those outsourced industries, the economies of those countries might be worse off and people might have better air and water but face poverty, umemployment and other crises. It'll be better for the West to bring back jobs no doubt.
  • sean_the_geek 5y ago
    I don’t understand the downvotes to your comment. It is a valid alternative perspective.
    • rocknor 5y ago
      The downvotes show how little the HN audience knows about economics and geopolitics, making dumbass statements like > Modern life is pretty damn great but let's not kid ourselves that it's basically theft from the poor and the young.
      • nsonha 5y ago
        The funny thing is most people having this view have not lived in a developing country. Yet they feel that they know what's best for us.
  • beardedetim 5y ago
    Could we say the same about Africans in the slave trade? I’m not sure because I don’t know history but I would hazard a guess that one could.
    • nsonha 5y ago
      I'm not talking about slave trade Countries that have a significant outsourcing footprint, do you think they do it because they're foolish/greedy? if it is so bad for them? There is a pressure especially in overpopulated nations to create jobs and the local economy is not mature enough to create enough jobs nor value to pay well.
      • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
        Or they do it because local officials are bribed or powerless
        • nsonha 5y ago
          or both, why do things have to be either black or white?
          • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
            If you ever lived in Russia, you'd realise that its entirely resolved by bribes, not national interest
• lorlou 5y ago
  We all are aware of that. It has been widely publicised for decades by those who expected that, by making people aware, they would change their spending habits. They didn't. Nobody cares. And that has to be the end of that argument.
  • ornornor 5y ago
    > They didn't. Nobody cares. And that has to be the end of that argument. Nice. Glad others didn’t think this way too or we’d have no ozone layer anymore, lead in gasoline and paint, and no building codes.
    • donkeyd 5y ago
      Weren't all these things solved by regulations? Sure, 'nobody' is an exaggeration, but people still smoke, people still drive unnecessarily wasteful cars, people still fly when there are alternatives. People in general just don't care. Only if political leaders care enough and can fix things without a big impact to their constituent, this stuff gets solved. If the impact on daily life is too big, nobody wants to make these hard decisions. Just look at how little is actually happening to combat climate change or plastic waste in the grand scheme of things.
      • ornornor 5y ago
        > Weren't all these things solved by regulations? Well, yes. But parent is equating people not putting their money where their mouth is with "nobody cares so we shouldn't try and change anything", which is wrong IMO. Of course this goes through regulation. Nobody complains about seat belts anymore (and those who do are being Darwined away so that takes care of itself), yet everyone only started wearing a seatbelt once regulations were introduced.
    • lorlou 5y ago
      Those things were fixed because they were very easy to fix and people didn't have to change their habits. How about the rest?
  • 5y ago
• pjc50 5y ago
  The pandemic has made it very clear that "accept some minor inconvenience or somebody you've never met is added to the death statistics" is a very appealing position. Only by giving the affected people a voice and real political power can it really be averted.
  • throwaway894345 5y ago
    > Only by giving the affected people a voice and real political power can it really be averted. I'm not sure what this means concretely (are you suggesting the poor Chinese worker need representation in western politics, or does the west need to topple the CCP and install a suitable democratic government?), but if we in western countries hold our business partners accountable to our own worker protection standards (and environmental standards) then we can solve lots of problems at once without toppling the CCP or giving non-citizens voting rights in western countries.
• tim333 5y ago
  It's not that bad really - the people making clothing and cars mostly have decent lives too. The fact that there are some bad actors beating and killing etc is a different issue.
• ben_w 5y ago
  When the industrial revolution brought things like power looms to the UK, it wasn’t exactly fun times for all. It was still a step up from the previous condition of serfdom and subsistence farming. Sweatshops are a bad thing which we should work to replace, but just shutting everything down makes the workers worse off, it doesn’t give them 21st Century middle class G7 lifestyles. The good news is, China has been going through those same growing pains much faster than the British did.
  • sheepdestroyer 5y ago
    Democracy, Human Rights, and then by extension Worker protection & Environmental protection, etc.. are not a sure things occuring naturally from industrialisation and far from a given. When people fought for societal changes, for instance in France during the Revolution or May 1968, the ruling class did not have a complete control of the means of communication, powerful automated censorship, pervasive facial recognition, a dystopian social credit system, etc...
    • miltondts 5y ago
      It appears that significant social change, only occurs when things get really bad for the majority of people and a revolt, or threats of it are raised. Otherwise what seems to happen throughout history, is that people gain power and use that to extend their leads indefinitely. Technology seems to make this process even more efficient and with a resulting inequality that is millions of times greater than what could be achieved 1000 years ago. Now there seems to be no hope for better social conditions, because the powerful can isolate themselves almost completely while retaining their power with automated tools. In addition, we are in the age of constant distraction and stimulation (panem et circenses). The future of the average person doesn't seem very bright.
      • pirate787 5y ago
        The world for nearly everyone is vastly better today than 1,000 years ago. The poor in America today live better lives, at least materially, than the aristocrats of just 200 years ago. It is a great irony that one of the biggest problems facing modern society is obesity-- food is plentiful to excess and labor-saving devices in every household.
• inglor_cz 5y ago
  Premodern life wasn't exactly better, at least from the dawn of agriculture on. Hard work tended to rest on the shoulders of those who couldn't resist being yoked. At least in 2021 a lot of the hardest and dirtiest work was "outsourced" to machines and robots. Edit: -1 for a comment that does not contain anything controversial as far as I can see.
• usrusr 5y ago
  And if you ever wondered why you effectively get a resounding "yes!" by action from people who claim the opposite in in words: market participants who do what you describe by successfully maintaining the illusion that they don't will outcompete those who actually don't. Hard. In the end you get a choice between honest exploiters and dishonest exploiters.
  • Retric 5y ago
    Manufacturing doesn’t require exploitation. Generally there is a tradeoff with automation where the amount of labor required to make something is quite flexible. However, the more you automate the more important the remaining workers become. Which generally means the less automation the more exploitation you end up with.
    • usrusr 5y ago
      Automated manufacturing that doesn't care about emissions will still outcompete automated manufacturing that does. OT: Generally you tend to end up with locations that are only competive with automaton narrowing down their output to products that can have production runs nearly unchanged for years while stuff that is subject to fashion or fast innovation goes elsewhere.
      • Retric 5y ago
        Sometimes, for example lumber mills that pollute more don’t get some inherent advantage from doing so. They are an example where increased efficiency means reduction in pollution, though of course in other industries toxic waste products are inherent to the manufacturing process. Industrialists often suggest that dumping waste is the only viable option, but frequently it’s pinching pennies with minimal economic benefit.
• rakoo 5y ago
  Your argument is on point but it lacks the two that will drive the century to come: - clothes are cheap because they are mined/manufactured/transported mostly with energy coming from fossil sources, and the IAE itself says that Oil has reached its peak. If energy goes down, production can only go down (yes, processes have been more efficient, but the efficiency has only transformed into even more stuff produced. That's the Jevons effect) - clothes are cheap because their pollution, chief among them CO2 emission, is "free". But it's the kind of cost we'd rather not be paying
• GhostVII 5y ago
  Moving manufacturing jobs to poorer countries provided more jobs, and generally better jobs, than they had before. So I don't think characterizing it as stealing is really fair. I'm sure in many cases companies should be providing their workers in these countries with better working conditions, and maybe we should put more pressure on them to do so. But if people are voluntarily working at companies like Foxconn (for example) because it is better than their other options, it's not "theft", its objectively better for them because it gives them more options.
• rmah 5y ago
  Then I'd say you that while it's nice that you seem to care deeply and are empathetic, your highlighting only the problems is not constructive in aiding the very people you care about. I'd say that you need to educate yourself about how economics works and how societies have historically escaped poverty. That while consumers in rich nations should most definitely try more to minimize the problems you describe, that overall (and long term) international trade is probably the best way humanity has found thus far for helping the poor around the world. And that it has thus far helped to raise literally billions out of abject poverty.