Am I really generating N sandwiches worth of value every few minutes?
Or am I (systemically) skimming value off the top of what's produced by individuals who are being paid disproportionately to the value they produce?
Our surprise at this variation is equivalent to the surprise of someone who doesn't know anything about programming at the fact that a piece of code can be made 100x faster.
Yes, you really are. We're programmers and businessmen -- our value scales waaaaaay the heck out of proportion to the amount of time we spend on something. I think that is awesome. (If I was a big proponent of income equality, I'd really hate it. I can do an honest day's work while sleeping by setting a system in motion to do it for me -- no manual laborer will ever be able to do that, which suggests that I will make rather more money than them, by a lot, and the gap is going to get larger over time.)
I am pro capitalism, but the current system does have pretty deep social costs. [a second caveat being I can suggest no superior practical alternative]
No, poverty is incredibly shitty for the folks working in sweatshops in Asia. Nike didn't invent poverty. It got there a long time before Nike -- or America, or the nation of China for that matter. Poverty is the natural state of the human condition.
For most of human civilization, we've had societies where almost everyone was desperately poor and then a few people were marginally less poor. (Poor Americans eat better and have better healthcare than European aristocrats from a few centuries ago. Plus, they don't defecate in buckets they sleep next to, which is a plus.)
The newfangled innovation brought about by capitalism isn't poor people: its rich people. Rich people who are so overflowing with money they buy frivolous shoes, enabling some Chinese peasant to get off the farm. Chinese peasants are pretty much in favor of getting off the farm -- it gives their kids a much better shot at surviving to the age of 5, and means you don't have to deal with famine.
And of course medieval Europe did not have any of the species they later got from the Americas: no potatoes, peppers, corn, tomatoes. There was no coffee or tea or chocolate either. And no ocean fish unless you lived close to the sea.
If you were a rich person in medieval times you could basically have a much roast beef as you wanted. (That was apparently Charlemagne's undoing.)
This is an excellent aphorism. I wish I'd been the first to put it that way!
However a single Big Mac does not cost so much. It's efficiencies of scale basically.