Considering conditions in China it may have been worse for workers. Remember economically if 1 person gains 1 billion and 999,999 people lose 1,000$ that's considered a net gain. (ed: in many macro economic models.)
There's a kernel of truth there, but you have to open the gap much wider, many orders of magnitude wider, to the point it becomes more a philosophy question than one of economics, because the amount of money you'd actually have to give to one person to equal 999,999 very poor people getting $1,000 exceeds the amount of wealth in the world comfortably. (I don't even have to run the math; the exponential decay of utility makes this a done deal.)
I agree that it is a common error to mistake economics as being "about" money, one I think even at times PhDs in economics make, but it isn't about money. Money is merely one slightly special and easy-to-measure token in an economy, but it isn't really what economics is about.
Consider, stagnating US middle class wages are ignored when calculating 'economic growth'.
Free trade only really applies between countries, so that's a macro economic issue.
I'd have to [citation needed] right back at you on that. That verges on the mathematically impossible; it's written in the very basic most elements of economics itself. I wasn't kidding about the math completely failing if you don't have it; the entire concept of trade breaks down [1] without diminishing marginal utility.
What's more likely happening is that you're seeing Newtonian physics equations and complaining that the equations "neglect" quantum mechanics. They don't, really, they're in there, they just aren't obvious, and it breaks down when pushed too hard. (So non-obvious it took centuries to discover in this case, not relevant to the econ case.) If macroeconomic models don't appear to have a term in them directly that says "here's diminishing marginal utility", it's only because it's so deeply in the foundation you can't see it through the stuff built on it.
[1]: You might still get trade in a world without diminishing marginal value, but one in which you still have different personal valuations. However, instead of a world in which a lot of people have a little bit of everything, which is what we observe, you would get a world in which each individual has a lot of only the thing they value the most, having traded away everything else they have to everybody else to obtain that one thing they value most. If that sounds weird, well, yes, it is weird, because we can't imagine not updating our value functions based on what we currently have; it's so fundamental we literally can't imagine not having it. Note: This is not "wealth" concentration... in fact what you think of as "wealth" doesn't even exist in this world and it would indeed produce a world beyond desparately poor as these crazy people literally focus on food to the exclusion of water, or water to the exclusion of shelter, and so on. This is a world in which one person has all the oranges, and one person has all the apples, and one person has all the blue rocks above a certain size while another person has all the blue rocks below that size. It's not the world we live in. Diminishing marginal utility is a fundamental truth of the world, not some economic mumbo-jumbo... not having diminishing marginal utility would be the crazy economic mumbo-jumbo.
So, citation provided...
"It is self-contradictory to discuss a process which admittedly could not take place without money, and at the same time to assume that money is absent or has no effect." - F.A. Hayek, The Pure Theory of Capital, 1941: p. 31
Certainly, this is not to say economics is about money. However, to assume any form of monetary neutrality in the short or long run is a folly, for any economy governed by monetary exchange has a critical relationship with monetary and financial institutions. Monopolies on issuance of currency complicate recovery, as well.
If anything, many economists neglect money. Indeed, it was naive IS-LM models with interest-insensitive money demand functions was what ignited the so-called "monetarist counterrevolution".
but [money] isn't really what economics is about.
David Friedman, son of the famous Milton, wrote:
Economists are often accused of believing that everything – health, happiness, life itself – can be measured in money. What we actually believe is even odder. We believe that everything can be measured in anything.
To answer the obvious follow-up:
Economics is the study of choices: what makes a person choose Option A rather than Option B. So the core concept in economic is opportunity cost.
PS: Wages are only one factor among many.
People in the developed countries do not understand what real poverty and despair is. If you had lived the lives they have, pollution would be your least concerns.
I am a Chinese born in and lived in China for 24 years. That Chinese lives have been dramatically improved in the last decade is as common sense as the earth being round here.
This discussion is off-topic. You should message me if you want to learn more about China. Your views on China is obviously through the lens of Western media, which are not wrong on the facts but usually misleading as they willfully ignores anything positive here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
I oppose any form of Socialism, but even I have to admit that China has improved far beyond anything we could have imagined 30 years ago.
It is now one of the largest economies in the world. People have housing, education and access to medical care. No one is starving there anymore.
And not only did they improve their own standard of living, they now go about investing in large scale infrastructure in Africa which has the potential to improve the lives of millions there in the long run.
PS: It's a 'what have you done for me lately' problem.