While companies are saving by moving manufacturing plants, many people (millions) in Vietnam are going to experience higher standard of living. I say it's a win win.
Aren't therefore many people (millions) in China going to experience lower standard of living?
The problem with this is, the "factory owners" of the world run a political machine which they use to prevent that from happening, claiming it prevents them from building more factories. They use the same political machine to establish the moral goodness of continued factory building as axiomatic.
This makes everything rather complicated.
But I agree with you that "factory owners" and "government" are basically the same people. That's what I was referring to by the political machine I mentioned above, although it extends far beyond government.
Well, yes and no. The view I espoused was pretty similar to what Warren Buffet says, and that guy has owned a factory or two in his day. Even in the US, which has less government, there are a number of programs for those who don't have much. Perhaps you'd like to see more - fair enough - but the exact level of support is open for debate, isn't it? I don't think we'll ever agree on precisely what it should consist of. The Nordic states seem to work pretty well with more government. Probably depends on a lot of factors...
So I don't think there's any big cabal, really.
"There exists a System, in which we are all but cogs" doesn't seem a very useful way of analysing the world, however correct we might suspect it is. Maybe I should try harder.
And in fact, what you are linking to is a right-wing attack on very legitimate economic ideas. The introduction of the 40-hour week did increase employment, and further reduction of work weeks would indeed increase the number of people employed (as we see already: all job growth in the U.S. currently is full-time jobs being converted into multiple part-time jobs in the service industry).
That is, you've linked to a discussion of something on Wikipedia and you believe that the discussion of it proves its truthfulness; nothing could be further from the truth. See also: discussion of moon landing conspiracies.
In fact, if I fire someone in China and hire someone in Vietnam, I have indeed engaged in a zero-sum transaction - actually a negative-sum transaction, since I'll be paying the Vietnamese guy less than the Chinese guy. Overall, the world economy will be moving slower because of my actions.
I don't believe in things like "the market will sort everything out", by the way. There are winners and losers, and I think society has some duty to help take care of those who get the short end of the stick. But I don't think "don't let the factories move" is the right way to help those people, long term.
Yeah... 'caus that worked for Mexico... can China look forward to a descent into drug traficking fueled civil war now?
I wouldn't define that exactly working well.
It has nothing to do with Libertarianism, and everything to do with Economics...
As an industry, the technology sector prides itself on innovative thinking and using new approaches to solve old problems in a better way. It doesn't seem like economic development should be a path-dependent process.
It saddens me to see people shrugging off human misery as though it's required by some ironclad law of economics. Instead, we should devote serious effort to figuring out how to get from "poor, subsistence farming" to "developed economy" without the "child labor and sweatshops" step.
Rawanda is already trying to make that leap: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-11/04/paul-kagame-e...
Do you have any proposal of a solution that does not make it more broken?
People work in sweat shops because it is better than not working in a sweat shop. It is the bottom rung on a long ladder, albeit one that starts underwater in the sewer.
That's simply how the world works. Sometimes it's a matter of greed, sometimes it isn't. The success of Walmart and Amazon seem to indicate that people will lean towards lower priced goods, period. Unless you don't buy any mass produced goods, and only source your needs to local crafts(|wo)men? Do you buy your clothes from a local tailor? How about your furniture from a domestic manufacturer?
I made no further comment.
I have.
Sorry, but things are going well within normal.
They're attempting to bypass the heavy-industry stage of development, and go straight to being a knowledge/service economy. The jury is still very much out on that effort, but it's certainly worth a shot.
Hell, even Paul Krugman doesn't label the issue as black and white. I want to remove sweat shop conditions as much as anyone, but keeping people alive through poverty takes priority.
Also, you don't fix sweat shop conditions by closing sweat shops. You just move them into the underground, where instead of shady business owners as bosses, they have shady crime bosses as bosses. The real trick, is to better sweat shop conditions.
This can even be done at Samsung/Apple's level, where they can make part of the requirement set for a contract certain workplace conditions/pay.
As if Paul Krugman is the pinnacle of radical thought on the issue?
He is a Keynesian -- which I guess counts for something like "far left" in the US.
As is pretty much every economist. Neoclassical economics (which borrows many of Keynes' ideas) dominates modern economic thought. 'Austrians' seem to exist only on the internet...