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Comment by fapi1974 | Hacker News Reader

fapi1974

This is a tough question but I don't want to duck it. There is no question that any company creates value by taking advantage of a pricing difference - whether it's the price of labor as measured in wages and benefits, or the cost of making a widget using a new technology, or something else. The reason I feel good about what we do is that I feel like we are helping spread some of the [highly concentrated!] economic wellbeing from the Bay Area to other places that can benefit more from it on the margin. That's totally separate from how rough it is for lower skilled folks in high cost markets to make ends meet...which is a real problem, I agree.

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No, what you're doing is further stratifying this country. You don't offer any opportunities to advance. You don't offer the benefits you offer your programmers. You take advantage of income disparity. You take advantage of people who are in smaller towns. If you really wanted to take that well-being and spread it, you'd offer stock options, you'd offer them decent insurance, you'd offer them a future.

I have no skin in this game, but it seems to me that you're being unfair.

There's a story that goes around the nonprofit sector about activists stopping sweatshops in developing nations. The wages there are terrible, the working conditions inhumane. So it's good that they stopped the sweat shops from existing. Right?

Well, they went and checked some time later, to measure the effects of the change. It turned out that the children who had been working at those inhumane sweatshops had turned to the next best alternative:

Child prostitution.

(Here's a link with sources to back this up: http://lesswrong.com/lw/hcp/seeking_reliable_evidence_claim_...)

It seems like your argument has the same structure. I don't know anything about People Delight, but if it's the case that this is the business model that makes it economically feasible to provide jobs to people for whom those jobs are the best option, then I think it would be a mistake to force those jobs out of existence because the jobs couldn't provide even more benefit to the workers than they currently do.

I want everyone, everywhere to have all they need and want, and to live happy lives on their own terms. It just seems like you're being unfair to fapi1974 by asking him to do it singlehandedly.

This is the fallacy of the broken window, and not the entire story. After the mistake in Bangladesh, the activists learned from their mistakes, and the next country got rid of sweatshops, plus provided education and stipends for the children so that they didn't have to go into those poor situations.

This isn't about forcing those jobs to go away. This is about keeping companies from exploiting these workers. The workers that People Delight are exploiting don't get the benefits tech firms bandy about so freely, can't unionize, don't get the opportunities to advance. There is money to be made there without exploiting, but things don't get better unless you criticize the people doing the exploiting.

It may not be his money (it's the business's money), and the goal of the business isn't to spread well-being. He just said he feels good about it because it does some to spread that well-being, and it does.

I really see nothing wrong with hiring remote workers with compensation at a rate that's acceptable to them. It's not taking advantage of anything--they choose to live in small towns with a lower cost of living.

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