By the way, how do you account for the number of people willing to emigrate to the US, if it's such a bad place?
How do I account number of people willing to immigrate: 1. It is way,way easier to move to USA, than anywhere else in developed world. 2. Proximity of Latin American/Carribean countries, which are verrry bad. And you do not need an expensive ticket from Haiti for example. Just find whatever floating and have a free ride.
Now how you account for that: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/the-real-high-tech-... ?
If you want to change things and help developing nations, make sure those developing nations have added most of the value.
For example, you can buy fair trade chocolate bars, with beans bought from Ecuador at a "fair" price, whatever that means. But then the bars are made in Switzerland, or France, and the European country adds much of the value, and keeps much of the profit.
Kallari Rainforest Chocolate, for example, is a cooperative making chocolate, and they pick the beans in the lowlands and drive up to the mountains and turn them into bars, and then airmail it out.
If you want to make a difference, figure out where your money actually goes.
This in effect negates the biggest advantage of developing countries (cheap labour) and allows the products to be manufactured in developed countries at a "fair" price.
Fair trade, along with agricultural subsidization is some of the most evil things that developed countries do.
This is not a subsidy and it’s not a tariff. It’s (an attempt at) providing information.
I do not like the `fairtrade' stuff for the same reasons as w00pla, but since nobody's forced to participate (as opposed to agricultural subsidies and tariffs), I do not mind other people engaging in this.
Fair trade is free trade where people in the developed world choose to pay the produces to pay them for certain strange things. E.g. as a fairtrade producer you can not employ day labourers. (At least that's what I heard. But I do not remember the source.) And genetically modified plants are banned, too. (http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/includes/documents/cm_docs/2008/...)
I can image myself paying more for stuff that gets produced in nice working conditions and does not damage the environment. But I'd actually prefer to see more GM and I do not mind day labourers. Perhaps one could create an alternative to `fairtrade' where you can combine your own building blocks of stuff you want to pay extra for?
It’s not necessarily “paying more”, looking at the clarified conditions as services (even though of course there’s overhead, and possibility of corruption, in the labeling and certification process).
Imaging some item, let’s say jeans. You can get just jeans from company A, with an unknown profit margin or middlemen, or you can get jeans from company B together with information and conditions on production.
If these conditions were a service you were charged explicitly for, of course the company B jeans would be more expensive than the ones from company A. That’s not necessarily the case, however, since there might be unknown expenses for the consumer involved with company A (like, say, higher profit margins).
Or, for that matter, the jeans from company A could be every bit as “fairly” produced, just you don’t know about it. Nothing says that the labeled (“B” in the example) ones would be more expensive, disregarding the labelling/certification overhead.