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So you're saying that fair trade coffee benefits "the white man" rather than the producers in the third-world country? That's exactly the opposite of what fair

So you're saying that fair trade coffee benefits "the white man" rather than the producers in the third-world country? That's exactly the opposite of what fair trade means. Also, hand-made isn't fighting against capitalism, it's fighting against mass-production, sweat-shops and machine-people jobs like the ones portrayed on Chaplin's City Lights or even Discovery Channel's How It's Made.

klbarry 15y ago
Factory jobs pay more than double the average wage in all developing countries. They are demanded by workers and much anguish is caused when they are lost.
- dereg 15y ago
  This should be mentioned more often. Furthermore, people criticize companies like Foxconn for things like employee suicides, when the suicide rate at Foxconn is actually lower than the suicide rate of China as a whole.
  - CognitiveLens 15y ago
    Do you have a source for this? I remember looking into it a while ago and the only consistent statement was that suicide rates at Foxconn were lower than those of OECD countries, not China itself. I ask because saying that the suicide rate is lower at Foxconn than in China as a whole is a much more convincing argument and I would like to be able to use it confidently in the future!
    - onemoreact 15y ago
      People's Republic of China suicides 13.85 per 100,000 in 2008 or 128.5 per million. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra... Foxconn has ~1 million workers http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/ff_joelinchina/all/1 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/ff_joelinchina/all/1 Although the company disputes some cases, evidence gathered from news reports and other sources indicates that 17 Foxconn workers have killed themselves in the past half decade. Or 17/5 = 3.4 per year per million people. You can play with the numbers several ways but it works out to less than 5% the suicide rate for China. Not that everyone is going to suicide at work, but having a job is probably cuts down the rate by a lot.
      - CognitiveLens 15y ago
        Thanks.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
cschmidt 15y ago
He's saying that the main benefit of fair trade to the consumer is a sense of superiority or reduced guilt over those who drink "regular" coffee. That sort of benefit always strikes me as a bit of a "luxury good" as well, in the sense that the benefit isn't about the functionality or quality of the coffee itself. There is of course a benefit to the producer as well, in the form of a fair price. I imagine most of the factory workers on "How It's Made" rather like their jobs. They all seem to take pride in what they produce.
- bh42222 15y ago
  What kind of pedantic asshole cares if the main benefit of fair trade is a sense of superiority? And it's quite something to claim the sense of smugness some people feel is a bigger deal than higher prices for farmers! Humans are instinctive, not as much as other animals, but still quite a bit. This is no way news. That we are driven by all kind of social trends, rather than pure reason is also damn old hat. I think I sense of superiority was one of the main arguments behind buy fair trade. So f-ing what!??!? If it gets 3rd world farmers higher prices for the same or safer labor, then seriously so what? Get off your astronomically high horse people.
  - cschmidt 15y ago
    >What kind of pedantic asshole cares if the main benefit of fair trade is a sense of superiority? > And it's quite something to claim the sense of smugness some people feel is a bigger deal than higher prices for farmers! Whoa, please be calm. I didn't say either of those things. I merely said the the main benefit to the consumer is X, and the main benefit to the producer is Y. I never said anything about the relative importance of X or Y. Of course, the key thing is that the farmers get a fair price. The mapleoin post seemed to miss patio11's implicit point that there is a benefit to the consumer. That's all I was responding to. patio11 didn't get it backwards, he was just making a point from the consumer's point of view.
    - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
      >Of course, the key thing is that the farmers get a fair price. // As a consumer of fairly traded goods this is the main benefit to me; that my purchases aren't forcing other people in to abject poverty, uneducation and poor health. FWIW in the UK nearly all major supermarkets have own-brand Fairtrade marked coffee (for example) and there are Fairtrade coffees at a wide range of prices. Yes bastard capitalists try to leverage people wanting to do right by their fellow man for profit but when fair trade becomes pervasive they are no more able to do this than with regular coffees now. That is when requiring that workers are fairly paid for their labour and protected from dangerous working conditions is considered part of the product (as it is for goods made in Europe say), as much as a packet is, then it becomes harder for middlemen to leverage this moral position to increase shelf prices.
jmj4 15y ago
>So you're saying that fair trade coffee benefits "the white man" rather than the producers in the third-world country? That's exactly the opposite of what fair trade means. Does Fair Trade really benefit all of the producers in the third-world? What are the side effects of Fair Trade? I think you could postulate that it drives down conventional coffee farmer's profits, since non-fair trade coffee will try and compete on price. Wouldn't this lead to lower wages and higher poverty for the majority of the farmers? I have no data to back this up. Anyone know any facts about this and care to share?
dangrover 15y ago
No, but the price difference between buying normal and fair trade (as a consumer) is much larger than the price difference between the underlying coffee crop used in each. Tim Harford wrote about this: http://timharford.com/2008/04/business-life-fair-trade-or-foul/ http://timharford.com/2008/04/business-life-fair-trade-or-fo... In some cases, he says, fair trade is 10X the margin! Fair trade exists to segment the market and collect more consumer surplus (more than it exists to improve conditions).
- theThirdMan 15y ago
  If anyone would like to read more on the externalities of fair trade: http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj27n1/cj27n1-9.pdf http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj27n1/cj27n1-9.pdf
- fennecfoxen 15y ago
  Also, the Fair Trade people will only certify certain business structures (they're really big fans of cooperatives), leaving a number of small family-owned businesses out of their world-view. Not that cooperatives are bad or anything, just that it's kind of a narrowing thing to do. They're opinionated. You may or may not agree with all those opinions. Fair-trade coffees are also subject to adverse selection. The really good beans can be sold to coffee fanatics on their own merits, at a price above generic fair-trade costs, leaving the inferior beans to be branded fair-trade. This isn't to say Fair Trade is evil, just that it's... limited and has a few issues, and it's probably better these were discussed rather than covered up in the name of promoting an abstract unspecified good which may or may not actually justify the price premium. You may get better results by buying normal and giving the savings away.
  - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
    >You may get better results by buying normal and giving the savings away. // Kinda like beating people up and then paying their hospital bills? Nice.
    - fennecfoxen 15y ago
brycecolquitt 15y ago
> Also, hand-made isn't fighting against capitalism, it's fighting against mass-production, sweat-shops and machine-people jobs like the ones portrayed on Chaplin's City Lights or even Discovery Channel's How It's Made. That's capitalism. To be more specific, those are inevitable effects of capitalism.
- wladimir 15y ago
  The inevitable effects of capitalism as taken to the extreme, losing any sense of humanity. Which seems to be where we're going. However, I don't agree it has to be this way. Comments like yours push any form of capitalism into the bad stuff corner, throwing out the baby with the bath water IMO.
  - brycecolquitt 15y ago
    It's not that any and all forms of capitalism are bad, but capitalism has its benefits and its drawbacks. Obviously, there are lots of benefits. The aforementioned effects are some of its drawbacks. I'm not sure why people have this notion that we can only take the good parts of capitalism and leave out the bad parts. It seems this is what you're suggesting--but how would we do that? Because when you do, you're most likely making the economy _less_ capitalist, and more of a mixed market economy.
    - wladimir 15y ago
      You get the good parts of capitalism by not treating it as the end-all solution to everything, but using it as a tool where appropriate and curbing its excesses where necessary. Seems that what you call a mixed market economy is exactly what I meant. It worked for a long time for quite a few countries here in Europe, until "free market" was suddenly considered a panacea for everything according to the ones in power. Before we got to the casino-economy of today...
      - brycecolquitt 15y ago
        I agree with you. I think the free market infatuation many US politicians have without truly understanding it is a major reason for our predicament. That said, a free market is capitalism at its purest, and in a free market, we'll get sweatshops and the like (which are very sought-after jobs in developing countries). I guess my point is: semantics matter. If we want to push back against these effects, I think it's important to realize we're actually pushing ourselves away from capitalism and more towards a mixed market economy, which is a good thing in my judgement. But we shouldn't see a mixed market economy and call it capitalism, because they're not the same thing--mixed market economies attempt to mitigate capitalism's negative effects.
tambourine_man 15y ago
portrayed on Chaplin's City Lights I think you mean "Modern Times".

klbarry 15y ago

Factory jobs pay more than double the average wage in all developing countries. They are demanded by workers and much anguish is caused when they are lost.

dereg 15y ago
This should be mentioned more often. Furthermore, people criticize companies like Foxconn for things like employee suicides, when the suicide rate at Foxconn is actually lower than the suicide rate of China as a whole.
- CognitiveLens 15y ago
  Do you have a source for this? I remember looking into it a while ago and the only consistent statement was that suicide rates at Foxconn were lower than those of OECD countries, not China itself. I ask because saying that the suicide rate is lower at Foxconn than in China as a whole is a much more convincing argument and I would like to be able to use it confidently in the future!
  - onemoreact 15y ago
    People's Republic of China suicides 13.85 per 100,000 in 2008 or 128.5 per million. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra... Foxconn has ~1 million workers http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/ff_joelinchina/all/1 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/ff_joelinchina/all/1 Although the company disputes some cases, evidence gathered from news reports and other sources indicates that 17 Foxconn workers have killed themselves in the past half decade. Or 17/5 = 3.4 per year per million people. You can play with the numbers several ways but it works out to less than 5% the suicide rate for China. Not that everyone is going to suicide at work, but having a job is probably cuts down the rate by a lot.
    - CognitiveLens 15y ago
      Thanks.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]

cschmidt 15y ago

He's saying that the main benefit of fair trade to the consumer is a sense of superiority or reduced guilt over those who drink "regular" coffee. That sort of benefit always strikes me as a bit of a "luxury good" as well, in the sense that the benefit isn't about the functionality or quality of the coffee itself. There is of course a benefit to the producer as well, in the form of a fair price. I imagine most of the factory workers on "How It's Made" rather like their jobs. They all seem to take pride in what they produce.

bh42222 15y ago
What kind of pedantic asshole cares if the main benefit of fair trade is a sense of superiority? And it's quite something to claim the sense of smugness some people feel is a bigger deal than higher prices for farmers! Humans are instinctive, not as much as other animals, but still quite a bit. This is no way news. That we are driven by all kind of social trends, rather than pure reason is also damn old hat. I think I sense of superiority was one of the main arguments behind buy fair trade. So f-ing what!??!? If it gets 3rd world farmers higher prices for the same or safer labor, then seriously so what? Get off your astronomically high horse people.
- cschmidt 15y ago
  >What kind of pedantic asshole cares if the main benefit of fair trade is a sense of superiority? > And it's quite something to claim the sense of smugness some people feel is a bigger deal than higher prices for farmers! Whoa, please be calm. I didn't say either of those things. I merely said the the main benefit to the consumer is X, and the main benefit to the producer is Y. I never said anything about the relative importance of X or Y. Of course, the key thing is that the farmers get a fair price. The mapleoin post seemed to miss patio11's implicit point that there is a benefit to the consumer. That's all I was responding to. patio11 didn't get it backwards, he was just making a point from the consumer's point of view.
  - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
    >Of course, the key thing is that the farmers get a fair price. // As a consumer of fairly traded goods this is the main benefit to me; that my purchases aren't forcing other people in to abject poverty, uneducation and poor health. FWIW in the UK nearly all major supermarkets have own-brand Fairtrade marked coffee (for example) and there are Fairtrade coffees at a wide range of prices. Yes bastard capitalists try to leverage people wanting to do right by their fellow man for profit but when fair trade becomes pervasive they are no more able to do this than with regular coffees now. That is when requiring that workers are fairly paid for their labour and protected from dangerous working conditions is considered part of the product (as it is for goods made in Europe say), as much as a packet is, then it becomes harder for middlemen to leverage this moral position to increase shelf prices.

jmj4 15y ago

>So you're saying that fair trade coffee benefits "the white man" rather than the producers in the third-world country? That's exactly the opposite of what fair trade means. Does Fair Trade really benefit all of the producers in the third-world? What are the side effects of Fair Trade? I think you could postulate that it drives down conventional coffee farmer's profits, since non-fair trade coffee will try and compete on price. Wouldn't this lead to lower wages and higher poverty for the majority of the farmers? I have no data to back this up. Anyone know any facts about this and care to share?

dangrover 15y ago

No, but the price difference between buying normal and fair trade (as a consumer) is much larger than the price difference between the underlying coffee crop used in each. Tim Harford wrote about this: http://timharford.com/2008/04/business-life-fair-trade-or-foul/ http://timharford.com/2008/04/business-life-fair-trade-or-fo... In some cases, he says, fair trade is 10X the margin! Fair trade exists to segment the market and collect more consumer surplus (more than it exists to improve conditions).

theThirdMan 15y ago
If anyone would like to read more on the externalities of fair trade: http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj27n1/cj27n1-9.pdf http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj27n1/cj27n1-9.pdf
fennecfoxen 15y ago
Also, the Fair Trade people will only certify certain business structures (they're really big fans of cooperatives), leaving a number of small family-owned businesses out of their world-view. Not that cooperatives are bad or anything, just that it's kind of a narrowing thing to do. They're opinionated. You may or may not agree with all those opinions. Fair-trade coffees are also subject to adverse selection. The really good beans can be sold to coffee fanatics on their own merits, at a price above generic fair-trade costs, leaving the inferior beans to be branded fair-trade. This isn't to say Fair Trade is evil, just that it's... limited and has a few issues, and it's probably better these were discussed rather than covered up in the name of promoting an abstract unspecified good which may or may not actually justify the price premium. You may get better results by buying normal and giving the savings away.
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago
  >You may get better results by buying normal and giving the savings away. // Kinda like beating people up and then paying their hospital bills? Nice.
  - fennecfoxen 15y ago

brycecolquitt 15y ago

> Also, hand-made isn't fighting against capitalism, it's fighting against mass-production, sweat-shops and machine-people jobs like the ones portrayed on Chaplin's City Lights or even Discovery Channel's How It's Made. That's capitalism. To be more specific, those are inevitable effects of capitalism.

wladimir 15y ago
The inevitable effects of capitalism as taken to the extreme, losing any sense of humanity. Which seems to be where we're going. However, I don't agree it has to be this way. Comments like yours push any form of capitalism into the bad stuff corner, throwing out the baby with the bath water IMO.
- brycecolquitt 15y ago
  It's not that any and all forms of capitalism are bad, but capitalism has its benefits and its drawbacks. Obviously, there are lots of benefits. The aforementioned effects are some of its drawbacks. I'm not sure why people have this notion that we can only take the good parts of capitalism and leave out the bad parts. It seems this is what you're suggesting--but how would we do that? Because when you do, you're most likely making the economy _less_ capitalist, and more of a mixed market economy.
  - wladimir 15y ago
    You get the good parts of capitalism by not treating it as the end-all solution to everything, but using it as a tool where appropriate and curbing its excesses where necessary. Seems that what you call a mixed market economy is exactly what I meant. It worked for a long time for quite a few countries here in Europe, until "free market" was suddenly considered a panacea for everything according to the ones in power. Before we got to the casino-economy of today...
    - brycecolquitt 15y ago
      I agree with you. I think the free market infatuation many US politicians have without truly understanding it is a major reason for our predicament. That said, a free market is capitalism at its purest, and in a free market, we'll get sweatshops and the like (which are very sought-after jobs in developing countries). I guess my point is: semantics matter. If we want to push back against these effects, I think it's important to realize we're actually pushing ourselves away from capitalism and more towards a mixed market economy, which is a good thing in my judgement. But we shouldn't see a mixed market economy and call it capitalism, because they're not the same thing--mixed market economies attempt to mitigate capitalism's negative effects.

tambourine_man 15y ago

portrayed on Chaplin's City Lights I think you mean "Modern Times".