Spent a fair amount of time in these factories. First thing is, no factory makes everything themselves, it's a huge network of factories and a buddy network of factory managers who supply varying levels of material to one another. That's part of the reason it's difficult to ascertain the true quality of life of workers associated with making a product, because down the line many factories go into making one finished product.

I can say from my own anecdotal experience labor conditions are mixed bag. The light industry factories seemed to have safer conditions, and my companies factories were pretty decent. One iron processing factory I saw down right scary, imagine vats of molten iron at ground level, and operators in bare feet.

One counter-intuitive thing I saw is that workers will often protest not when worked too hard, but when worked too lightly. Many factory workers WANT long hours so they can send more money back to relatives, or increase their personal savings. At least when I was there five years ago, it could be dangerous for a factory to be light on hours, as employees will quit and move to a factory where there are more hours to be paid. With the economic slowdown, this might have changed.

What I'm getting at is it's hard to generalize about labor conditions in China, so saying things like they are all "slave labor" isn't really useful. You have to look at the specific circumstances of that companies manufacturing chain, if you are able.

People are doing this voluntarily. Rumors of forced labor are greatly exaggerated. Perhaps somewhere in Burma but in China and India and other places, people do this hard work because the alternative is harder. This is how you work your way up from a very low starting point.

England wasn't always a workers' paradise either. Wages in China will rise.

Yes, most of these jobs are better than the alternative, namely, starvation in the countryside where there are no jobs. In the worst cases, (not all) these jobs pay so little that the workers can't accumulate capital, can't send their kids to school, etc. And due to the magic of subcontracting, the large Western employers have no long term investment in the country -- they'll pick up and leave when the next country over offers them a slightly better deal.

In Thailand I met a woman who was working for a private museum. She had figured out that her boss had basically made his fortune through selling slaves. Voluntary indentured servitude for several years, sold out of villages. And this isn't just some backwater, Thailand is where a lot of manufacturing is happening lately.

My family is originally from Taiwan, and both of my folks grew up when Taiwan was still an inconsequential tropical island consisted mostly of fishing villages and a hodgepodge government-in-exile. Both of them are beneficiaries of the "abusive" practices of foreign businesses. My father worked in a plastics plant, and once had to outrace a cloud of deadly chlorine gas, and survived by the grace of a low wall surrounding the factory (chlorine crawls along the ground). Safety practices were almost non-existent - my mother is still missing a small chunk of her right index finger (and she was lucky). My mother's family was desperately poor - my grandfather eventually succumbed to years of breathing in coal dust with no protective equipment, and all of his children worked from as young as 10 years-old to put themselves through school.

But here's the thing: people in that country could not afford to educate themselves, and if it were not for the willingness of employers to hire child labor and form sweatshops, they would never have had the opportunity to climb out of that hole.

If you had insisted on no child labor, minimum pay standards, and rigorous safety adherence, there would have been no reason to set up shop in a backwater island like Taiwan, and then where would we be? My family would likely still be living in the jungles up on some mountain somewhere, starving.

That's part of the problem, though, isn't it? The tremendous migration of manufacturing jobs to third world countries has been in large part because they are not limited to a 40 hour work week and first world safety standards. Of course it's cheaper to manufacture in China, their regulations are a lot more lax than ours, although that may be changing.

I, too grew up in a Third World country. My parents were missionaries in Central America in the 80's. I grew up playing soccer with children who's bellies were bloated from parasites and could not afford shoes.

I've worked in communities that were essentially indentured servants to the tomato packing industry. The tomato company owned the housing, ran the schools, provided plumbing, etc.. to their workers. The employees were willing to put up with indentured servitude, because on a certain level because it was better than starving. It was better for their children to get a 6th grade education and then go off to pick tomatoes than to have no education at all.

Why did that happen? So we can have tomatoes at our local grocery store for $1 a pound.

I agree that it is better for the people in the third world to have jobs rather than not have jobs, but I'm pretty conflicted about the entire situation. Starving children, vs children working 16 hours a day in a tomato field? That's not a good choice to have to make.

I'd be careful where you draw the line in your judgment.

For instance, the next generation of people will start with a 6th grade education and a minimum standard of living. Their challenge is to move the goalposts further.

That's just how the rest of the world did it, in fact, starting off with child and virtual slave factory labor and slowly moving to better and better conditions. If you've got some kind of shortcut to make it happen inside of one generation, I'd love to hear it.

The point I was trying to make, albeit not too successfully was that it's a difficult situation, and there aren't a whole lot of great options for people in those situations.

Take the invasion of France in WWII. The Allies killed over 14 thousand French civilians in bombing in preparation for the invasion. Would you say that's a good thing? It's obviously an awful thing, no matter how you slice it.

But looking at the longer picture, sometimes good things come out of bad things. This was the case for the invasion of France, and I believe this is also the case for child labor and sweatshops in third world countries.

That doesn't make bad things into good things, that just means that context is important.

I'm pretty sure it IS an easy choice. B is clearly the correct answer. Over time it will get better but even if it DOESN'T, even if it onlways comes down to: A) Starve or B) 16hrs in a farm field. B is the easy right answer.

Now option C is something that's going to take a lot more then simply buying more expensive tomatoes.

I guess that is assuming an open market, too. It does not quite apply to dictatorships and slavery. Unless you count "flee to a neighboring country" as an option, which it probably isn't in most cases.

Edit: I guess even slavery does not completely invalidate the concept. If demand was high enough, prices for slaves would rise. Eventually it would be high enough for slave owners to sell, and effectively the new owners would have to offer freedom as a price.

Also neighboring countries would be willing to accept refugees if they had a high demand for labor.

Japan, being as nationalistic and xenophobic as they are, chose to invent and develop robots rather than allow as many foreigners into their country as was "needed."

With one caveat -- as long as there are well-enforced laws that protect the rights of workers to organize or protest, and a strong local government that isn't powerless with respect to foreign companies, that can direct investment to make permanent upgrades in local conditions. Taiwan obviously got it right, somehow -- I don't know the history. Perhaps you can enlighten me, but maybe it's due to their democratic assembly and their strategic relationship with the West.

Other places in the world seem to be getting a worse deal -- often due to the deficits of the local government or culture, I'll admit. But globalization also seems to move a lot faster than it did, with less commitment to the host countries. If it takes literally just weeks to set up light manufacturing somewhere else that's just a little bit more desperate, how does a place like Cambodia hold onto the little gains they've made so far? I'm not an expert in that country either but I hear they've had serious problems with that.

Anyway, I have to bow to your superior understanding of the realities, but I just don't think that my microwave ovens or cans of cola had to be paid for with so much misery. It just doesn't seem like this is truly required.

Indentured servitude is prominent in American history too--it's how many of our ancestors got passage to the New World. And now here we are with air-conditioned offices, OSHA regulations, and paid leave.

How do you suggest we remedy this? The OECD gets together and forces a minimum wage on the developing world?

That might work, but I think the shortest, fastest and simplest way out hell is let their economies grow as fast as they can.

That's a pretty reasonable analogy for the cycle of debt that one can get stuck in with "payday loan" stores.

Not the same thing at all. To make this analogy work the choice would be 1) LET THE PERSON DROWN. 2) Help him by letting him work for you until the next ship comes around.

In some ways I feel like the tone pieces like this take when discussing Chinese life is condescending. For some people this is just 'work.' Consider using this kind of pity to talk about American blue collar workers - does it seem appropriate?

Do I owe the local worker a living? Of course not. But we both pay taxes to the same government, and he is getting shafted due to China's MFN status, and I as a professional who can afford iPhones am getting an awesome deal.

The local vs remote worker argument works when there's something inherently preferable about the local worker, like you and him are cousins or form the same tribe, or something like that. But nationalism aside, isn't everybody entitled to the same opportunities?

Free trade agreements are negotiated painstakingly to make the treatment of investments uniform across countries. In the process, they usually accord some special treatment to professional classes. I myself am a beneficiary of such rules -- as a Canadian professional, I can skip across the border to the USA with just a little bit of documentation.

We don't have anything equivalent for labor. This seems to me to be a great omission, if not an outright scam. Even after free trade between the US and Canada and Mexico, we don't allow workers to cross borders. Nor do we have uniform standards for the treatment of labor like we do for capital, either.

It seems to me to be deliberate -- they want the workers to be stuck with the local situation, and they want local governments to compete on lowering benefits and labor standards.

I live in San Francisco. When the big earthquake hits and someone has to pull me out of the rubble, they won't be outsourcing that job to the Philippines. It'll be some guy who lives near me, probably the kind of guy with a broad back and an unironic mustache, who has to make do with underemployment since all the local jobs seem to be for douchebags with iPhones.

This applies to consumer electronics, appliances, kid's toys, you name it.

I'd bet when you think of old stuff, you think of a singer sewing machine or a '57 chevy, stuff that withstood the test of time. well the world was full of crap then too, most of it broke and got thrown away. My toys are more than 20 years old. they are cheap plastic. they aren't even painted, just a few sucky stickers. Our microwave when i was a kid would make parts of food smoke while leaving other parts frozen solid. Consumer electronics? i think timex made it's reputation by being a slightly less crappy watch.

You name it. You can certainly find 1 example of a stellar product that lasts for years and years. There are hundreds of that products peers in the landfill.

While it's quite possible that several specific things were manufactured objectively better at some point in the past, basing judgments about the past solely on nostalgia and the few pieces that are still holding up well is not the foundation of a strong argument.

If you want to make a valid comparison, the "good old days", for the purposes of this question, are probably before the 1960s. I'm not saying that there isn't some confirmation bias going on in the OP, but it's wrong to say that products were bad in 1987, and that therefore products aren't getting worse over a longer window of time.

It was a lot less so than it is today.

My parents had a textile factory till the mid 90's - and that was still a relatively thriving industry at the 80's - as were a lot of other types of manufacturing.

For example, a lot of computers were made in western countries where as today there is probably not much in your computer that wasn't made in south east Asia, and I can say that without knowing which computer brand you are using.

So? That doesn't make the argument any less fallacious. Maybe products are a lot worse today than they were in 1989.

My point is that there's no clear and necessary reason that a comparison of 1987 product quality to 2009 product quality is a valid counterargument to the OP's assertion. The only way it works is if you intend to argue that product quality has risen (or at least stayed constant), while the percentage produced domestically has fallen. And if you're trying to argue that point, you've got to provide some evidence (something more than a quote from Spaceballs, anyway), or you're just begging the question.

The WD harddrive I bought last year crashed... My 3 year old mac needed a repair.

Yes, things run hotter, and faster, and are smaller, and whatever. But they are less reliable.

You can't rebut an argument about lack of data and selective memory with anecdotes.

I'm not a walmart fan, Old stuff just sucks. It can be fascinating and intriguing and cool, but a difference engine looses to a pentium core 2 duo. You can go buy a car for $20k right now, that is faster, safer, and more fuel efficent than anything sold in the 1970's.

time == tech. tech wins.

Edit: Not that I have examples from the 80s or 90s to compare with.

Keep in mind that I won't even wear a watch because I don't like dangly things, so I won't even pretend to understand what sorts of people go for the typical sorts of luxury item.

1 you can just dial a number, you keep a hardcopy list of phone numbers of common contacts 2 phones get the ability to show caller ID, just the number, not any associated name 3 as part of becoming portable, phones include a simple contact list showing names and numbers that you can select to dial 4 the contact list is used, along with caller ID functionality, to show the name of the caller 5 the contact list gets the ability to store address book style information also, which is not directly related to any other feature of the device (the phone). 6 the contact list is maintained portably outside the device, allowing integration with additional services 7 the phone gains the ability to communicate via IM 8 the contact list is used to store unified information for all contacts, IM and phone, and not have separate lists independently in each phone feature.

At any earlier stage, the later stages seem like luxuries until the majority of devices have that feature; then it's not a luxury anymore, it's a necessity. Who's going to buy a smart phone these days that doesn't have some kind of unified contact list? Not having it would be a major hindrance, but lack of hindrance, utility, doesn't make it a luxury or not.

There's a pop culture definition of luxury, as you point out, like dangly watches, that serve no purpose other than to show off. That's the most baroque kind of luxury. There's also a more pragmatic, utilitarian luxury that is not absolute but changes based on the market and availability. Few people would consider the utility of an indoor outhouse to be a luxury, despite the fact that its main purpose is also served by an outdoor outhouse.

Memory, megapixels, storage, screen, speed etc are all advancing so quickly that it doesn't make any sense to bother making something that'll last beyond a few years.

It would however be cool and responsible to make these devices more environmentally friendly, but that's a hard sell to some.

I'm sort of glad I didn't spend the extra on my first MP3 player - 32mb of wonderment.

The fact is, any labor will be cheaper in China than in the US. This could be factory garment assemblers or traditional metal workers. The cost of living is so much lower over there that even the best costs less from China than from the US.

The upgrade treadmill is just fashion and marketing.

There's a big movement towards emulators among the gamer scene I'm able to observe, because a lot of gamers are realizing that games haven't become fundamentally better in the last decade. Yesterday evening at a friend's, the Wii was forsaken for a Genesis; it's surprising how entertaining those games still are, because we've been conditioned to think you can't have fun without being cutting-edge.

You're right, we are conditioned to value the wrong things. The same game with more polygons is the same game.

30 years ago, my father and his brothers played Atari. I grew up with parents that both understood video games, at least somewhat. There's nothing objective about the way we view video games, or any other form of media.

For instance: I primarily look for media with some sort of emotional power, which is all-but-impossible to find in video games. I can think of perhaps five or six video games that had any emotional impact on me. I can name far more movies that have had a similar impact. My secondary search is for polish, and there movies also have an edge over modern games. The things I look for aren't what you look for, though - they're subjective. I remember having much more fun on an SNES than I did with, say, the Xbox. Your milage varies.

I'm guilty of playing this game along with everybody else, but at some point we'll realize that we don't need all of what we've got, and we'll start being satisfied with it. Hell, I can see myself sticking with the laptop I've got right now for a decade.

That's called getting old.

The fun of chasing the new is half (or more) the point.

Their ability to maintain the status quo is essentially tied to double-digit economic growth. If their economy slows down to even modest growth they face serious unrest.

Considering cultures in Asia/Africa (possibly even South America) from a Western perspective will always lead you to draw conclusions such as "slave labour" and "abuse".

Now, I'm not going to deny for a moment that such things do go on - but not in quite the same way and on the scale certain people wish to imagine.

Anecdote from my university course: our dept. was open 24/7 (even on Sundays if you had a special pass). I would regularly walk past the lobby at 1am and see the Chinese continget (there were many on my course) still working there. We tried to get some to come to a pub once and they didnt really get the whole relaxing/chilling out thing.

It was an interesting insight into the culture - and when I was lucky enough to travel in some of the less well known areas of Asia you see it in even more detail. Greater thabn 40hr weeks are not borne out of the manufacturers getting more out of the labour. It is borne out the culture (and, yes, they took advantage of it).

Fake Steve just gets better and better. ;)

You may ask whether the birth lottery is any fare and I do not know about that one really, it is, it goes really deep and it effects everyone, but being a practicalist, although this one event may be unfortunate, until the Chinese government opens up fully and adopts our values, there is not much we can do really. So stop crying and start working on making those super cool macs cheaper :)

If globalization can succeed at improving the standard of living for those at the bottom of the continuum, it will have to be at the expense of those at the top. It's a zero sum game.

Let's say the stock market increases at 10% per year. This growth is driven by more capital being invested in the market each year. That means everyone in the market earns 10% interest every year, right? Well, in reality, that's not the case. Some people earn 30% and some people lose 20%. In fact, if anyone earns over 10%, that means that someone else must be earning less than 10%. So, maybe it's a 10-sum game, but most people still use the term "zero-sum game" to describe the situation.

Distribution of wealth and standard of living work the same way. Everyone's standard of living is increasing at 10 moon units per year. This growth is primarily driven by technology. However, if people in emerging markets are to have their standard of living increase at 15 moon units per year (which it is, and that's great), then someone else will have their standard of living increase at less than 10 moon units per year. That doesn't mean that our standard of living will decrease (although I wouldn't rule that out); it just won't increase as rapidly.

In reality, increases in trade raises the bar faster for everyone, often so much that it offsets the drop from the increased competition.

So say both country A and country B are increasing at 10 moon units per year. Country B trades as a net exporter with country A, and takes 1 moon unit per year from country A. However, the increase in economic activity boosts 2 moon units per year for everyone. Now country A is increasing at 11 moon units per year, and country B is increasing at 13 units per year.

You fixed the rate of increase. Jesus. Obviously it'll look zero-sum under those circumstances. The point is, the more efficiently the stock market's played, the faster it grows overall (in theory). It's not zero-sum.

In game theory and economic theory, zero-sum describes a situation in which a participant's gain or loss is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the other participant(s). If the total gains of the participants are added up, and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero.

The same is true of our standard of living. The standard of living index, so to speak, has been increasing for a long time (forever, maybe?), and it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Everyone's standard of living will increase, in aggregate.

However, if people in poorer parts of the world start commanding higher salaries, people in more affluent areas won't be able to buy things as inexpensively as they do now. That's exactly what FSJ is pointing out here. I don't understand why I'm being down-modded for echoing it.

There was a time when Kings built huge castles and palaces. Those times are behind us now, because the standard of living is more evenly distributed. It's only going to continue to become more so.