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> t's not about any kind of skilful or technological or natural "competitive advantage" - humans are the same everywhere! - it's about how much any given countr
by ch4s3 5y ago
> t's not about any kind of skilful or technological or natural "competitive advantage" - humans are the same everywhere! - it's about how much any given country is willing to abuse its workforce
This is a terribly myopic view of the world. Having a much lower cost of living or relative stage of economic development is a competitive advantage in manufacturing low cost goods that require a lot of human input. Those wages can be and often are pretty good relative to local alternatives. Low skill, low cost manufacturing is usually a stepping stone in economic from subsistence agriculture to a more advanced economy. The conditions don't necessarily have to be bad, and are quite a bit better than a lot of agricultural work.
Having lot's of people moving from farms to cities is a competitive advantage in low cost manufacturing. We're already seeing China moving aways from some of these types of manufacturing as their economy advances. Neighboring states are using this shift to try and shift their economies away from subsistence agriculture as well.
It's fine to lobby for better working conditions, especially in trade deals, but we shouldn't deny people in other parts of the world the opportunity to move from agriculture, to light manufacturing, to more advanced economic activity.
- int_19h 5y agoIf those conditions are "not bad", then why do we have borders and work visas? Let's be honest here: if the labor market was truly free across the globe, with no borders in place, most of those workers in countries where manufacturing has been outsourced to, would have moved to US and other Western countries. And the reason for that is primarily not political, but economical - Westerners get paid more (in terms of purchasing power as it translates to quality of life) for doing the same job. It doesn't matter how you move pieces around on this board, it boils down to the same thing: the West keeps its standard of living by outsourcing work that's "too expensive" to perform under that standard elsewhere.
- ch4s3 5y agoThis is a deeply myopic and zero sum view of trade. Moving low tech manufacturing to Asia has lifted a billion people out of grinding rural deprivation across multiple nations. Western nations are wealthy because the West, broadly, won WWII and the Cold War while spending the post war period building high tech industry. The US in particular started industrialization as a low cost manufacturing center. Other nation deserve a chance to follow the same path to prosperity.