I would rephrase this. They are stuck in their circumstances which forces them to survive on a few cents a day. MNCs like Nike take advantage of this by getting their goods manufactured in Bangladesh at next to no cost and sell them for thousands of dollars. If the same workers in Bangladesh were to migrate to US I am sure they will make minimum wages, so their skill is indeed not $0.
There are other ways of valuing those people, but you have to break out of a capitalist framework if you want to value them at more than a few dollars a day.
Assuming they even qualified for immigration, would they even be employable?
Do they speak a language that would be widely useful in the US? Are they literate? Numerate? Basic stuff we take for granted here in America, where everyone had at least 10 years of public schooling.
We're not even going into the more "advanced" skills like a driver's license, or functional literacy.
I think we have to factor in reality and external constraints if we're looking at this scenario.
An individual worker, maybe you can say that. But the entire segment of the developing-world workforce? If they were somehow able to immigrate en masse, it would disrupt the economy enough that I don't think we could predict the effects and say "they'll earn $7.25/hr".
Where they live, doing the work they do, they as individuals have almost no monetary value to western capitalist society (despite collectively generating uncountable value).
This is the context of the response you were commenting on. There is a distinction between "this person is earning close to $0 because they are living in a poorly functioning country and economy" vs "this person's skills are worth close to $0". The latter implies that even if that person moved to another country, they wouldn't possess any skills worth paying $7/hour. Which is false.
For perspective, if you took Bill Gates and parachuted him into an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon, they would consider him to be useless. But few would agree with an absolute statement that "Bill Gates has no valuable skills."
No. If all the unskilled workers in Bangladesh moved here, they mostly wouldn’t make minimum wage. They’d mostly just be unemployed.
really? i would imagine they would find a job, and is willing to accept one that paid at least minimum wage.
1. How much more value you can now create. E.g Moving from assembly to managed code was also a 1000x shift
2. How much of that value you actually capture, as opposed to it going to your CEO, customers, etc
The people in developing countries have the misfortune of being able to capture only a minuscule fraction of the value they create
The workers did not create the branding, marketing or hype. The fact that a sneaker that is manufactured for dollars is sold for thousands, is the actual travesty. The workers is capturing the inherent value of the labour - because if they did a clone of the sneaker, and sold it without any of the branding/marketing, it would not sell for thousands, but instead probably low $10s-$50s dollars, which is inline with the labour and material that went into it.
It will be gradually harder and harder to compete with mega-rich entities in any area, automation and AI will increase, and so wages will fall while prices inflate.
1. https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM
2. Look outside and see how many homeless people there are in any average America metro. This was not the case 30, 40, 50, 60 or 70 years ago.
3. EDIT "Inequality for All" https://youtu.be/zvAFPHLFMa0
So you're right, we have fewer people starving to death, because food is relatively more affordable (and SNAP). However, we have more people who can't afford housing, medical emergencies, having children, or an education. The way that poverty has presented and affects people has changed, but our guidelines are still based on the idea that you aren't poor unless you literally can't afford to eat.
The line of poverty, under the relative measure model, would just keep growing. I don't agree with that - poverty should be measured absolutely; ala, the minimum calories you can intake and maintain health, the minimum heating/clothing required to not freeze to death or succumb to the elements, sanitation, and basic healthcare (things like cuts/bruises/bacterial infections dont kill you).
As soon as you start to include things that didn't exist at the time of setting this absolute baseline but would in the future if the technology develops, you start moving the poverty goalpost. For example, the internet didn't exist in the 1960's, but i've heard that access to it is included in poverty meaasures today.
But I think it's fair to say that the baseline should grow, more slowly than the median.
The internet has replaced other forms of communication and is needed to get almost all jobs, so yes it's a necessity now.
https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/theogloss/imago-body.html
But pushing aside those outmoded ways of thinking did make it easier to sell people useless goods and services which can't fill the hole where dignity and self-respect could instead reside.
And on top we've built the artifice of "social" media (the most shameless oxymoron imaginable) producing sufficient anxiety ensuring that the hole remains unfilled despite all effort.
This is a frightening confluence.
They are valued independently of that. E.g. in a democracy someone who is super productive will get paid a lot, but will have exactly the same number of votes as someone with nothing.
If you think their wage should be valued independently of their economic output, then I think that is a misunderstanding: money is only useful as a measure of economic value.
That doesn't mean you can't give people money or housing; again, you'd just be valuing them on something other than their economic output.
Yes exactly, and to all those whiners complaining about not being able to put food on the table whilst I and my schoolmates at Shortridge Academy each have trusts worth more than their expected lifetime earnings I say: Though your life might have "value" to a select few (like your parents) it unfortunately doesn't have much economic value to those who actually measure such things (like my parents.)
It would behoove you to take some personal responsibility for your station in life. I certainly take responsibility for mine, and that, in my clearly valuable opinion, makes all the difference between us.
Then again, it all happened in a relatively long timeframe. Whereas here we got access to chatgpt pretty much overnight.
The fact that the market adjusts isn't a good metric to use for the healthiness of a society.
> how to value people independently of their economic output.
You can't assign an economic value to people, and I suspect that's what you're alluding to - that people aren't valued unless they are compensated X amount. UBI makes this a moot point. There's no tangible actionable meaning to "valuing people", systematically, otherwise.
And besides, the idea of controlling people’s reproductive capacities is not without modern precedent.
There's no need for sterilization measures at the moment (even though they have also been practiced for generations). And I would urge you to keep in mind what the actual outcomes of aggressive population control would actually be. (I'll give you a hint: it's ethnic cleansing and targeting the most vulnerable peoples.)
The fact that there's an entire school of thought out there (I know you aren't the only one) that really thinks psuedo-forced sterilization of the poor is better than just getting our resource consuption and generation under control is kind of sickening frankly.
a few months later
OMG the face eating leopard is eating my face, how did that happen!
Then hopefully middle class can be generated in a poor country by modernisation and education.
Same thing in the case of AI. We're about to see a lot of so-called 10x developers become commoditized.
10x developers won't become a commodity. 0.1x developers will.
The cynical in me thinks that all you need is another world war to fix the overly crowded planet. Then things will be quite balanced again and you can keep on judging people by what you call the economic output.
Wishing others were dead is a dangerous philosophy
It's insane that we live in a world with enough technological progress that we can easily feed, cloth, and shelter everyone, yet a huge portion of us are so greedy that we don't want to see that happen because it might mean one penny less for ourselves.
I first began to encounter this when I as an idealistic teenager looked into why poverty/hunger still existed when we had enough food/money to wipe it out. Aid to low income countries often wouldn't get to the intended recipient. Their leaders would live like kings while kids would die from malnutrition. It just baffled me (still does) how someone could be so selfish.
Then I realized we in the US have it just around the corner. I knew someone who worked at a "remedial" high school where the kids struggled with hunger, homelessness, and addiction. All the schools in the area would shuffle any kid in danger of flunking to make sure their numbers looked good. They lived in neighborhoods I as a middle-class person would never venture into. We just do a good job sweeping massive poverty in the US under the rug.
This was a middle of the road state - then you look at states such as Mississippi and you wonder how we can live with ourselves.
Is there a term for this phenomenon of optimizing specifically for metrics even at the cost anything else? I’ve heard all sorts of examples, from education to politics and even sports.
The number of offspring is a function of the average education and security of the population (especially the female). More education and security (i.e., more middle class), fewer children.
At least that's how I got the popular statistics from Hans Rosling.
But again that’s the cynical view. The better and more optimistic view is that… it’s all a freaking hype, and we just need to figure out what to do next.
Even the bottom billion are probably a lot more incorporated into the state than you would expect.
Those people know about the outside world, send their kids to school and are aware that they can't afford to go to the doctor.
Their lifestyle encompasses what seems to be romanticized by primitivist anarcho-communists and other radical leftists. If the only thing missing in this picture is "hospitals", then it has nothing to do with their wages.
The crowd that bemoans consumerism and proselytizes that we "don't need" x/y/z also thinks that these independent farmers, who mostly don't participate in global trade (the poorest, I mean), need more money. Not to be conflated with what UN defines as "extreme poverty" which entails inability to provision food effectively. And the way they want to give them money, is through the benevolent progressive imperialism of Communist takeover.