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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

You know what I would like to see?

Tariffs on countries with sub-standard working conditions and environmental practices.

So they could starve with no employment in a field, right? Or die working in a farm with no any kind of mechanisation?

Subsistence farming isn't so bad of a life, compared to 60 hour factory weeks. Lots of western elites see something like that as a luxurious retirement.

I personally don't want to participate in a slave economy.

Tell that to the former subsistence farmers who show every indication of preferring assembly work. Life as a subsistence farmer is much worse than you can imagine. We know this because people overwhelmingly prefer factory work, even in terrible conditions.

>Subsistence farming isn't so bad of a life, compared to 60 hour factory weeks.

Wanna bet? Why do you think rural populations leave as soon as they are able and move to cities to work in factories.

> Lots of western elites see something like that as a luxurious retirement.

The bigger stereotype is rich westerners fetishizing harsh rural life - the kind of life they aren't willing to participate in but have no problem advocating for for the poor in developing nations.

Some of them do, many, but not all. Surely some are surprised by the expectation vs reality of their new lives.

I have spoken to many "rich westerners" about my (also western, not poor but rural) upbringing and gotten responses which were longing for that sort of life. It is possible to live very well by a certain standard, on a small amount of land by doing most of the things you need for yourself. There are a lot of people who want that instead of their city life. Not for others but for themselves.

Very few people who didn't experience something like it have any idea at all what it might be like.

>I have spoken to many "rich westerners" about my (also western, not poor but rural) upbringing and gotten responses which were longing for that sort of life.

I bet. There is a romanticization of a back-to-basics lifestyle. But western farming is nothing like 3rd world subsistence farming.

>It is possible to live very well by a certain standard, on a small amount of land by doing most of the things you need for yourself.

There is a hidden assumption underneath your statement, namely that you have ready access to electricity, indoor plumbing, modern healthcare, and generally typical western infrastructure. So what you're describing is either cottage living, or a hobby farm. Those are nothing like 3rd world subsistence farming.

The suicide rate decreases when Chinese farmers move to cities, so it seems people prefer to live in cities than be subsistence farmers.

Please, go work on a field and get back to us.

Thats basically a tariff against developing countries you are asking for. How do you think the West got rich in the first place? With 30 hours work weeks?

The railroads didn't build themselves

I agree with ekianjo in this sentiment, although we can pass some of our lessons to developing nations, preventing tragedies like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

Development doesn't happen immediately, but it can happen fairly rapidly (50 years for Korea vs 200+ for the US).

>How do you think the West got rich in the first place?

By increasing productivity through industrialization and technology advancements, and by doing those things before the rest of the world. (and by having economic systems that accomplished this faster/more effectively than others, possibly also as the result of plagues that decimated the population a few times)

Good one.

In case nobody gets the joke: the economic system was the plague.

No it wasn't. Don't be foolish.

Plague? What plague? The west didn’t industrialize in the Middle Ages.

A lot of things happened that made the west wealthy in comparison with the rest of the world. Plague also didn't just happen once, it was a continuous thing with a few large events.

The reduction in population of some of those epidemics made fairly large improvements in the survivors' lives and can be seen as the stimulus in a lot of the progression of Europe.

Progress that led to wealth in the west wan't just the industrial revolution(s), it started long before and was the effect of several technological and social developments.

>> By increasing productivity through industrialization and technology advancements, and by doing those things before the rest of the world.

You seem to be ignoring the human labor part that happened around then and the backbreaking work that they did. Robots didn't get it done nor did the 40 hour work week.

Increases in productivity would have been _faster_ with shorter work weeks, but would have been detrimental to the wealth concentration such is the cost of capitalism. Reduction of hours is, to a point, a source of growth.

> By increasing productivity through industrialization and technology advancements

yes, but if you think your great-great grandparents had it easy, well you should ask around and read books written around that time. I think you forget the standards for everyone was just plain misery not long ago.

I am not really sure what you are talking about.

I have actually read a bit about how one of my great-great grandfathers lived, and it didn't seem he was miserable and could arguably be said to be better off.

More to the point though, the question was how the West got rich. I was talking about the last ~1000 years, maybe a little less, of history in the western world and how their development led in part to the differences in development today. What that has to do with how many ancestors 100 years ago were miserable or not doesn't really connect.

Taking on that subject though, I have this idea that people regardless of situations are on a grand scheme equally miserable. Whether living in a cave 20,000 years ago or a New York penthouse, if you had a way to quantify misery I doubt you would be able to find a significant discrepancy. (corollary: much of the depression and other mental illnesses experienced today are a result of the drastically different environment and set of hardships experienced compared to the ones we evolved in)

> I was talking about the last ~1000 years,

The West was still pretty poor even 200 years ago. Going back 1000 years ago makes no difference. Economic development and the fact that almost everyone benefited from it in the West is very, very recent History.

>How do you think the West got rich in the first place? 30 hour work weeks?

By profiting on other people’s labor time; not their own.

But it also just happens that, in the US, 30 hours is just the right amount to forgo providing benefits and job security, so your proposal was not that far off.

> By profiting on other people’s labor time; not their own.

Certainly not. During the early ages of industrialization, workers made a better living in the cities than in the countryside, but had to work a lot for it too.

How did the 3rd world massively grow in the 20th and 21st century?

Slave Labor. Colonising other countries and exploiting their lands.

No, this is a false justification, since "The West" is not just the US, and many other western countries had abolished slavery for a long time already before becoming really rich. So, your claim is just wrong.

I recently visited Stanley Mills, on the river Tay just outside Perth in Scotland. It's now a fascinating museum, and focuses on the history of the cotton mill and its workers.

In the early 1800s the mill employed 885 workers. 540 were female and 497 were children as young as seven. Their working day started at 5:30am, 45-minute breakfast at 9:00am, 45-minute dinner at 2:00pm and work finished at 7:00pm. Children finished at 3:15pm to attend the company school.

The Factory Act, passed in 1833, changed how the mill treated its workers. The act restricted working hours and also prohibited employment of children under nine.

You should read The Dictator's Handbook. Tariffs and Foreign Aid server one purpose: to help democracies impose non-democratic policies in those countries.

The US/EU/UK give foreign aid to States with resources they want. Thereby keeping autocrats in power (they take a huge cut of that aid; people typically get the scraps after they pay off essential supporters and generals).

Foreign policy is always about resource management and almost always helps keep autocrats in power. When the nation runs out of resources and aid is cut, it typically promotes democratization because the leader can no longer pay supporters. They have to appeal to the people and increase the influence selectorate size. If they don't and the people rise up, they'll often win if the leader doesn't find a way to pay the police/army.

States (both democratic and autocratic) exist because they have a monopoly on violence. Foreign aid really only helps autocrats maintain that monopoly.

Most places with autocrats have no tradition of democracy and removing the autocrats often leads to civil war. This has been a recurring theme in Africa over the last half century. The West has made some disastrous foreign policy decisions, but I think the idea that we keep autocrats in power solely to extract foreign resources is not supported by the evidence.

Also, here's a list of recipients of US foreign aid[0]. I don't see an obvious connection between material wealth and amount of aid spent.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_foreign_aid#Over...

While I don't doubt much of this has truth, it's a bit of a one dimensional look at foreign and trade policy. Nothing world powers do has "one purpose". Motivations, intentions, and outcomes are manifold.

States don't exist because they have a monopoly on violence, it is just that a (at least semi-) monopoly on violence is a core trait of a state. Statehood is the evolutionarily stable outcome of any geographic population so far. An area without a state will, without exception, develop one.

Alternately, we could incentivize better working conditions and environmental practices by negotiating them in to trade deals.

Is that not exactly what a tariff based on those metrics is?

Making bad working conditions and lax environmental standards expenses instead of profit centers.

Isn't that basically the same thing?

I’ve lived through something like this in the past. What do you think happens to the country imposing the tariffs?

Depends heavily on the country and the tariffs.

we had some labor standards included in the TPP but obviously it was worth less than dirt when it came to public appeal

All for labor standards here, but I think you doing a disservice to dirt, something many Native Americans understand as one of the only things they have left.

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