Call for Constructive Responses To the Jobless Economy

Great Debates
21

I once knew this Chinese woman who remarked that one of the big differences between China & the States is that Chinese parents love their children.

The anti-child labor set seem to not recognize their implicit assumption that those poor, third-world types obviously don’t love their children; if they did, then they would choose a better option for their kids. But they do love their children. One needs to understand that these people face the world that is given, and choose the best path they can. If sending a kid to a factory is the best option they have, then proscribing them from doing so will only make them worse off, not better.

By whatever means, if one wishes to end the horror of child-exploiting sweat shops, the way to do it is to provide more and better options rather than restricting the extant choice set. Dropping trade barriers and letting a poor nation become wealthy enough to afford to stamp out child labor is one way. I’ve never really heard of that many others.

22

Wow. There are racist pigs of all ethnicities (but I guess we all knew that.)

Not at all. If that were true, the laws would fine parents, not factory owners. It is not like there wasn’t child labor in the US, after all. The purpose of these laws is to require factory owners to provide jobs for adults instead of children, and to protect those who want to from unfair competition by making it very expensive for those owners who want to save money and increase profits by exploiting children. This reduces the pool of labor, and therefore increases wages. Yes, your underwear might cost a quarter more, but I think we can deal with that.

And free trade had nothing to do with the elimination of child labor in the US. It was a moral issue. And good sense. How can anyone have an educated labor force if the kids are in factories, not in schools?

23

To reply to the OP:

First, admit that tax cuts for the rich is not helping, cut them back, and further cut taxes for the middle class, with perhaps a negative income tax scenario for those who are more likely to spend it.

Second, think about a WPA type of program, providing short term support for infrastructure and education projects. I know plenty of out of work people who would make great additions to our schools, but who would not want to change careers permanently. We are still, 70 years later, benefitting from WPA projects. if you divide the cost of the tax cuts by the number of jobs they have created, you have a very loose upper bound on the salary you can pay. An additional benefit is that people employed this way will be consuming more, and won’t be getting unemployment. Yes, tax revenues should go up - there is no reason for us to be at 1950’s levels. , especially when we have to pay for a war on terrorism. (A cost that those pushing for a reduction in federal spending usually overlook.)

I agree with the comments on improving health care. Employers who don’t provide benefits are dumping the costs on those who do, and on the taxpayers. People are using emergency rooms for basic health care which is expensive, inefficient, and even dangerous for those whose care might be delayed because of the crush. If our free enterprise system was doing so well, we should have the cheapest., best health care in the world.

24

Racism? Did you see the part where the Chinese (of or relating to China or its peoples, languages, or cultures) parent was criticizing the American parent (of or relating to the United States of America or its people, language, or culture). What does that have to do with race? It sounds like nationalism to me.

Cutting administration costs to a reasonable level would help reduce the cost of healthcare a great deal. The United States spends a larger percentage of healthcare money on administration than any other industrialized country in the world by a wide margin, if I recall correctly. If you want some statistics I’ll search my old posts for the thread about it at a time of day when the board is a little faster.

25

Make sure you’re not in a glass house.

Fine. Why should I conclude that such policies are going to work? Are children really that more productive? Do they run wild with their parents having no say in what they do or how much they get paid? If a parent can’t negotiate a good wage for the kid, should I assume that they can negotiate good wages for themselves? Do you have evidence that the parents aren’t already doing what they can to make ends meet, and that a factory job would be that much better for that goal? If the parents were employed in the factories, would ample schooling opportunities just pop up for the kids, or would they just go off to some other form of employment?

Here is a piece of information: Kids work. We’re not talking about a trade-off between catholic school or a factory, we’re talking about a trade-off between working in the family business or working in a factory. Or begging. Or scavanging. Or other nasty things. Poverty is so bad in this world that we have enough data to make cross-cultural comparisons of whether parents let the oldest or youngest daughter starve when food is short. You seem to think that in these communities there is plenty of wealth, yet they accept kiddie sweat shops happily. Or are you suggesting that they are so corrupt or stupid that they can be snowballed into taking kiddie sweat shops when they can clearly see that adult factories would be so much better for them?

You are just like that Chinese woman. You are looking into a foreign culture under wildly different circumstances than your own, and making patronizing and insulting conclusions instead of trying to see the world through their eyes.

Voluntary choice is welfare increasing. If Bangladesh allows child factory labor, why would that be? Is it because Bangledeshi officials are categorically corrupt? Is it because they’re so naive that they’re snowballed by those geniuses at Nike? How about an explanation that doesn’t assume that Bangladeshis aren’t categorically corrupt or stupid? Let’s cut the cultural imperialism and ask why they make the decisions they do. I would have thought that it’s because they know their own country, that they know their own culture, and that they want what’s best for Bangladesh. Heck, I would have thought that since so many of the world’s elite seek western education that they would be not only qualified, but prepared for the slick wheelings-and-dealings of mean old Phil Night.

It is certainly naive of me to assume that in places like Bangladesh the polity is free of corruption. But to assume that it is so corrupt that it can be portrayed as allowing some sort of unspeakable evil to befall it when it could clearly afford to be free of that evil is the far greater sin. They’re people, and they’re doing the best they can. Why are you so well placed to judge them?

Do me a favor. Instead of replying, read An Inquiry Into Well-Being and Destitution by Partha Dasgupta. It is an eye-opening exploration into the economics of poverty. Everybody should read it.

26

The point js_Africanus is making is very important, because understanding why there is child labor also helps one to understand why there aren’t better environmental controls, worker safety rules, and other things that people like.

It’s not because some arbitrary pig-headed government decided to exploit the people. It’s not because parents in these countries hate their kids or want to live next to polluted factories. It’s not even because big evil American companies set up shop to ‘exploit’ them.

Child labor exists because child poverty exists. When the alternative is starvation or digging furrows by hand on the family peasant farm, factory work starts to look damned attractive.

I wonder how many people who think we should just pass laws and enforce 1st world business practices on the third world really understand just how poor some of these countries are? We’re talking about places where people live in discarded packing crates and rummage in trash heaps for sustenance. Or where families work in the sun 16 hours a day to ‘harvest’ just enough food to allow them to survive for another day of backbreaking labor. And this includes the children.

Child labor did not end as a widespread practice in Europe and the U.S. because of child labor laws - child labor ended when families no longer needed to put their children to work to surive. And so it will be in the 3rd world today.

Forcing these countries to adopt 1st world labor and environmental standards will not improve their lives - instead, these demands will create barriers to the very investment that will make their lives better in the long run and doom them to perpetual poverty.

27

Interestingly enough, a recent Scientific American article shows that it’s possible to draw a S/D curve in which the child labour causes two equilibrium points in the market; One with low wages for all and child labour, and one with higher wages and no child labour. It can be shown that through careful and judicious use of legislation, a country and shift from the scenario with child labour to the obviously more prefereable one without while not losing any economic productivity.

This doesn’t have much to do with the debate at hand but I just thought it was an interesting thing to throw into the discussion.

28

Let’s combine that with Sam Stone’s idea about freeing businesses, especially small businesses, from strangling regulations and you’re really on to something here.

Sam Stone and (I think it was) you had a one-sentence hijack in another thread about the costs of terrorism on capital formation. He was claiming that it continues to be restrictive; you (damn am I ever gonna look dumb if it wasn’t you. :wink: ) claimed that it is not. You were both right, in your own fashions. Terrorism isn’t reflected much in the stock market (or wasn’t, as evidenced by the declines after the Spain bombing and the Israeli attack on Hamas terrorists). But it’s been terrible for small businesses, the job-growth engine in the American economy for the past couple decades. Some of that is unavoidable and a proper part of free-market function – higher insurance costs, redundant storage facilities, etc. But combined with the huge regulatory burden it’s just stifling new business formation.

Free new businesses from most regulation that’s not directly related to worker or consumer safety. Let them grow into the regulations as they get large enough to hire legal departments and personnel departments and whatnot.

29

What part of all didn’t you understand? Do you support the statement that Americans don’t love our children? Do you support the statement that any race or nationality does not love its children? I don’t.
Fine. Why should I conclude that such policies are going to work? Are children really that more productive? Do they run wild with their parents having no say in what they do or how much they get paid? If a parent can’t negotiate a good wage for the kid, should I assume that they can negotiate good wages for themselves? Do you have evidence that the parents aren’t already doing what they can to make ends meet, and that a factory job would be that much better for that goal? If the parents were employed in the factories, would ample schooling opportunities just pop up for the kids, or would they just go off to some other form of employment?

Here is a piece of information: Kids work. We’re not talking about a trade-off between catholic school or a factory, we’re talking about a trade-off between working in the family business or working in a factory. Or begging. Or scavanging. Or other nasty things. Poverty is so bad in this world that we have enough data to make cross-cultural comparisons of whether parents let the oldest or youngest daughter starve when food is short. You seem to think that in these communities there is plenty of wealth, yet they accept kiddie sweat shops happily. Or are you suggesting that they are so corrupt or stupid that they can be snowballed into taking kiddie sweat shops when they can clearly see that adult factories would be so much better for them?

[/QUOTE]

I’ve lived in the third world too, buddy. I’ve watched people storm my house to get water. You m ight have missed that I did not malign parents for the situation. If the factory owner can get kids to work for a fraction of what they’d pay adults, you have no choice. In pure, unregulated, capitalism, child labor makes economic sense. Like I said, it isn’t cultural, since it was happening all over the first world 100 years ago. It took tragedies for it to stop. And sure, it is harder now. If Bangladesh bans sweat shops, and all the jobs move to China, they are worse off. it is a lot easier for US companies to turn a blind eye to this if they can argue that 10 year olds working with heavy machinery are better off. I assure you, exactly the same arguments were made by the opponents of child labor laws in the US.

I’m not against working on a family farm, or even in an apprenticeship system. That has been a good way for kids to learn a trade for thousands of years. Factories are another story. But parents are the victims of this situation also, not the cause of it.

I suppose you think requiring safety equipment in factories is first world snobbery also, right? What’s a few deaths and maimings, as long as you stay competitive? Hell, WalMart can cut another dime off the price, that’s worth it.

30

Nitpick: Actually the federal government does publish the amount that the federal government spends as a percent of GDP…Just look in the historical tables PDF file (Table 1.3) of the federal budget. Or were you referring specifically of whether they publish one that includes all levels of government?

31

Man, jshore, next time you could at least say that it’s in the Historical Tables. I mean, the Analytical Tables start with table 5-1, and jump all over the freakin’ place. I finally figured out it must not be there, and saw the Historical Tables document.
Definitely a piece of government work. Sheesh.
Anyway, this nonsense about advocating child labor because that’s what the poor folk want is just that: nonsense. I’m just two generations away from a family that was so poor that one Christmas my mom got absolutely nothing for Christmas, and it wasn’t because her mom didn’t want to give her something. Both my grandparents on my mom’s side were illiterate, and neither of them ever had a house with running water in their entire lives.
My grandparents on my dad’s side were prosperous, OTOH, so I have the weird perspective I suppose of being able to see both sides in a single family.
Anyway, none of the children worked on my mom’s side of the family worked. As in none.
It is indeed racist, and condescending in the extreme, to think that poor people send their children to work out of choice. Just stop arguing that, because it’s just plain wrong. As is child labor. The governments involved have an obligation to provide a minimal education to the children of the country they govern. If they aren’t doing that (China stands out here) then they are failing in their obligations as a government. No excuse for this is acceptable. I mean the Chinese government, along with the Bangladeshis, I’m sure, have plenty of excuses. There’s no excuse for their Western apologists, however.
Jeez, aren’t there any minimum moral standards you free traders are willing to accept at all? Truly, I find this unbelievable.

32

It was Sam and Jonathan Chance in this thread. Close, but no cigar. :slight_smile:

33

Excuse me? your defining poverty as not getting something for christmas? Not every christmas but one christmas??? What kind of bizarro world are you living in? There a people in the US today who are poorer than that yet its still a world apart from the kind of conditions the poorest of the poor are living in. Time and time again, historical evidence has shown that the only way to get rid of child labour is to make people rich enough so that it’s not neccesary. When your faced with the choice of starving your child to death or working him to death, then there really is no two ways about it and you take the lesser of two evils.

Unless the anti-child labour group can come up with a credible and feasible call to action that can be backed by more that wishful thinking, I would say that the simplistic banning approach is only going to harm these children even more than they are now. The simple truth is that the only way to stop child labour is to make these countries richer and the best way we’ve found to do that is to promote active trade and a liberalised market to lift these countries out of poverty. This is what all of South East asia realised in the last 50 years and is sadly something that Africa has studiously ignored.

As for the China comment, I was under the impression that China, like most communist countries had a far higher literacy level than their level of GDP would suggest and that education is highly valued there. In fact, when I was last there, one of the main gripes I heard from the poorer regions was that harvesting work had become a lot harder with so many school aged children being forced to attend classes instead of helping in the field.

34

1.) Amend the Constitution: raise the threshold for filing a lawsuit from $20.00 to $25,000.00
2) Place a 75% Federal Excise Tax on lawyer’s fees
3) Enact a “loser pays” law: if you file a frivolous lawsuit, and lose, you pay the court costs and expenses.
This will reduce the flood of litigation that has been a serious brake on the economy.

35

Personally, I’d rather actually see proof that lawsuits are a big problem right now in the US economy before even considering an amendment to the Constitution because of it. Even if lawsuits are a big problem, how does raising the threshold to $25000 help? Surely if there is a problem it is not because of lawsuits for amounts under $25000?

36

Heh, how appropriate that on a thread about economics I get a subscription notice for the SDMB.
Less government control, less focus on the macro and more focus on the micro is the key. A recognition that the economy isn’t limited to the currency that it uses, and a recognition as to what is a luxury and what is a necessity. Increased communication and learning to share are essential. When people share everyone has access to more, while necessity for production becomes less.
Governmental Level:

Frivolous Lawsuits: Loser pays makes sense to me. 25,000 for a lawsuit would limit litigation to being a luxury of the rich.

Downsize the Federal government dramatically. The 15% marker that was proposed earlier seems appropriate but I would say keep downsizing until you can’t anymore. Bring defense spending to under 50 billion, dismantle every overseas base, and start lowering foreign aid.

Stop regulating morality, take away any impetus for the FCC to fine CBS for such frivolous stupidity as seeing Janet Jackson’s nipple.

Legalize drugs and prostitution completely, legitimizing those that are currently considered ‘unemployed’ but making near 6 figures.

Stop expecting every other country to put America first in a global system. Either get behind globalization or get behind protectionism, but stop with this globalization for everyone else, protectionism for America nonsense.

I disagree with nationalized health care, but maybe a 1 for 1 tax credit on self-provided health care would make it more economical for non-profits specializing in health care to start cropping up. In otherwords for every dollar you spend on health care that’s a dollar you don’t pay in taxes.

Simplify the tax code.

End to Farm subsidies, if that land isn’t being utilized free it up. ESPECIALLY don’t give any subsidies to dairy or beef distributors, cattle must either be kept in horrible conditions in big stockyards where they live a life of being fattened up only to be slaughtered, or they require massive free ranges where they completely annihilate natural vegetation yet provide only a small percentage of the actual bovine products that we consume. If Beef becomes prohibitively expensive, so be it, it’s not a necessity and one of the most wasteful aspects of modern society. (No I’m not a vegetarian I ate a steak earlier today in fact)
On an individual level:

Focus on your micro economy. The truth is, most of us have no clue what the idiosyncracies of an economy we don’t live in are, we act like we do, we talk like we do, and we’ll pull out all sorts of statistics that seem reasonable, but we really don’t. Let micro economies deal with their adjacent microeconomies. Stop supporting big corporations, remove your dependence from them and take as little from the government as possible, it only legitimizes these sources if you utilize them. The more connected to your micro community you are, the less you need the paternalism of the government to protect you.

Get to know your local community.

Something that we do in my circle is set up mailing lists with the idea that it will help to facilitate either a barter economy or ideally a gift culture economy. A gift culture economy is where anything that is not necessary is given away to someone who will utilize it, not bartered, freely given. This works on a limited basis, but I have seen a difference in my life as to what I can do without money as opposed to the way I was living before. In otherwords you put out an APB of sorts on an item needed, or a service or some such within a closed group that you know believe in such a system so you don’t get the “Well what about those that won’t contribute?” factor.

Recognize the aspects of your life that are not pragmatic, and are somewhat gluttonous. Having a 2 bedroom home for two people is extravagant, but by American standards it’s not particularly out of reach, so we see it as normal. I’ve lived in situations with a lot of people under one roof and I have people telling me “I could never live like that.”, but why can’t we live in situations like that?

There is the Mexican stereotype of 10 Mexicans in one apartment, it’s not that far off base, but they do what they need to do to survive, yet here in New York you’ll have someone paying 2/3rds of their paycheck just so they can live in Manhattan by themselves when there is lots of cheap space available in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, but for the most part people are AFRAID to live in those areas. So we live with so much luxury that getting over our fear is something we don’t even have to do.

My local economy is fueled to a large degree by drug money, many of my peers are in school in their late twenties either accruing debt or living off of the last generation. In my peer group, selling drugs is not uncommon, and this includes many upper middle class white kids. The truth is the drugs ARE NOT as dangerous as propaganda would lead you to believe and it is the overinflated black market prices on Coca and Poppies that pays for terrorism. If we’d stop fighting the drug war, we’d undercut terrorist organizations completely, allowing for local supply of these substances, dropping the price on the drugs so that habitual users are spending less of their income on the drugs, therefore stealing less often. We wouldn’t have to pay taxes to go and fight a losing battle that only screws over those who are already less fortunate than us in “third world countries”. And it would legitimize whole sectors of the economy, that exist and provide a lot of the movement of currency in our existing economy, whether people want to accept that or not. We’d save money paying for enforcement, we wouldn’t have to pay for that expensive undercover to prowl a rave or the Black Hawk flying over Colombia. Not only that, but it would take down a barrier of trust that seperates a lot of the youth from the older generation. I don’t know that many people who believe the drug war is a good thing. My grandmother is against it, my father is against it, and an even higher percentage of people my age are against it, and those that DO use drugs have to fear who they tell out of a Big Brother sort of fear that they will be ratted out to the government for it.

Downsize EVERYTHING basically. In computers a distributed processing model is MUCH more efficient than that of a big super computer. Just look at SETI @ Home for your example.

Organizations such as Friendster and MySpace are more than just chat tools, they help you to understand where the person you need to access is within your social framework, it helps you to know who you have to approach to facilitate an introduction. If you have an account, take a look at it and see who you are connected to and who you have met, or know of that you are not directly connected to.

Every system of government works on a feudal system, there is a hierarchy of people that you need to know. The old axiom about who you know being more important than who you are rings very true. This board is a perfect example of how information technology is creating more tight knit communities. There is an abundance of resources in this country already, an economic collapse would be easily survivable if people start learning how to network for what they need, and are more willing to salvage things.

Erek

37

Gotta call equine excrement on ya here, my friend pantom. It IS, in fact, a moral choice that compels the third world poor to send their children off to factories. Think of it this way: The choice is between going to the factories, and starving. Period. Those are your options. There’s no choice “c”. (If there is, please enlighten us as to what.) It’s actually condescending of you to think that a poor family in Bangladesh or China would have the same choices and options that we in the first world have. They don’t, not with regards to career options, nor to environmental safety, or to political and economic freedom.

See above for how I’d frame this moral equation. However, it must be said that we in the US do have cause for complaint with China’s actions on pegging the dollar to their currency, effectively subsidizing our trade deficit. I don’t think the same can be said for Japan, since they are a large customer of our Treasury bonds–essentially, they’re subsidizing our unbalanced budgets.

That being said, I agree with you on some solutions you’ve proposed. Reverse the Social Security tax, and national health care. Sam Stone does bring up a minor point about . . . oh, I dunno . . . PAYING FOR THE DAMN THING, but the fact remains that health care resources are consuming a larger and larger amount of our GDP.

I think that I can make the case that a national health care system is advisable and would be a boon to the economy, based on the following points (some of which have already been stated in this thread):

  1. Big employers basically are hamstrung by the health-care expenses of their older workers and retired workforce. See ** pantom’s** notes re: GM. If you think of these expenses as a tax on GM–and GM will have to pay these taxes for every covered worker until they die–then you can see how health care is a drag on the economy. I say that if you were to offer GM a chance to convert their health-care expenses to a corporate tax whose proceeds would go entirely to a national health system, they’d go for it in a heartbeat. (This assumes a discount based on an economy of scale, as other corporations would be paying into this as well).

  2. Small employers are already being hammered by these health-care costs. And as noted previously, this is where economic growth takes place. Wouldn’t a would-be entrepreneur be more motivated to leave Big Monolith, Inc. and strike out on his own knowing that he’s at least not risking his health?

  3. The higher unemployment figures in other countries with national health care as cited by Sam Stone don’t answer some obvious questions, such as cause and effect. And even assuming as Sam does, isn’t it fair to say that if you have to be unemployed, it’s better to be so in a country with a good social safety net?

  4. One final point about national health care–and it only now occurs to me that I could have abbreviated it NHC this whole time: Genetic testing is evolving rapidly, to the point where soon a scientist will be able to take a strand of your hair and determine, with reasonable accuracy, the chances of you contracting a serious (read: expensive to treat) disease in your lifetime. Once insurance companies get this information, those with healthy genes will be able to get cheap insurance throughout their lifetimes, while those people who are otherwise healthy but have red-flagged genes indicating serious health problems sometime in the future will be unable to get any kind of health insurance at all. The creation of an uninsurable underclass will doubtless spur comprehensive NHC legislation, and soon.

There are plenty of particulars regarding implementing an NHC program, and there is a good potential for the politicians to screw it up. Just look at the recent senior citizen prescription drug fiasco for proof. But the case can be made that an NHC program could prove to be a boon for the economy.

38

You mean, like this? :wink:

I could have linked directly to the PDF file but since it was 2 MB I decided people might hate me more if I did that.

First, you have to demonstrate that this litigation is really a serious brake on the economy. Then you have to consider what problems you might create by restricting litigation too much. (I was just reading something from FAIR last night that deconstructed an article on Newsweek on litigation…The results weren’t pretty; it practically made it sound that Newsweek would have gotten more of the facts right if they had made them up randomly.) I’m not saying there aren’t some commonsense reforms that could be made but a lot of the push for reform is driven by vested interests who seem to not be above complete fabrication in order to make their case. (Previously, FAIR reported on a U.S. News and World Report editorial that gave some examples of frivolous lawsuits. The problem was that the examples are listed by Snopes as being urban legends. And, the magazine apparently refused to print a retraction. It did print a letter from some woman who is head of some Trial Lawyers Association…but left it like that: I.e., this woman with a vested interest claims they are not true; our editor says they are true. No hint that 3rd party unbiased observers concluded they were not true.)

Do you know what percent of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid? It is way lower than you think. In fact, I think I read or heard that the aid we are now giving Iraq (not the cost of the war, just the actual aid itself) is greater than the aid we give to the rest of the world combined.

39

Alright, jshore, I have a problem sometimes with reading comprehension. Sheesh, a person has to be perfect around here.
:cool:

Speaking of reading comprehension,

If you read the rest of it, you would have noticed that the grandparents in question did without just about everything their entire lives (including food during the Depression, BTW, when my dad, who came from a prosperous family, can easily remember people walking around with the trademark distended bellies of the desperately hungry), but there was one thing they made certain of: giving their children, one of whom was my Mom, who got into college at 16 on a scholarship, an education.
They did that because they were given a choice by the government that ran that country. As for the useless POS’s that run China, check this out:

from this Nature magazine article on Chinese agriculture.
As I said, there is no excuse for this. The communists have been in power for more than half a century. If they still can’t provide even a minimal free education to the people they govern, it’s long since time for them to be overthrown.

40

Even during the depression, the poor of America and Canada were generally not as bad off as the poor in the poorest areas of the world today. And the depression was a time-limited event. Most people affected had some assets and education before it happened, and were able to carry that through even if poor.

The world average income is slightly over $8,000 per year. That’s for all countries. The poverty line in the U.S. is what, double the world average income? There is no poverty in the United States that can compare to the poorest places on Earth. Even in the desperately poor areas in the Appalachians incomes are usually measured in thousands of dollars per year.

In contrast, have a look at this map. The countries in white represent the 3rd world, and they have an average income of $755 per year, or less. In the poorest countries, the average per capita income is in the neighborhood of $200 per year.

Think about that. Less than $20 per month. To feed a family and ‘house’ it ( a ‘house’ may be a mud hut, or even just some old wooden scraps with plastic bags tied to it to keep a bit of the wind and rain out). And you wonder why these kids need to work for a living? Why don’t they go to school? A single textbook is a month’s wages for the family. A pencil would be worth a day’s food ration. And there are no teachers, because the teachers have either left the country, been killed, or they are starving along with everyone else.

And it’s not just a matter of giving them aid. All of the poorest countries are poor for two reasons: Gross mismanagement of the economy, and/or war. In many of these countries, communism destroyed the infrastructure. In places like Cambodia, anyone with an education was rounded up and shot. In Africa, constant tribal warfare has destroyed the infrastructure and prevented anyone from investing there. Other countries are run by Kleptocracies that siphon off any mineral wealth or other national resources, leaving nothing for the people.

Now, imagine you’re one of these people. You live on scraps. You live in a packing crate. You have a tiny, parched patch of earth that you toil over 16 hours a day hoping to raise the odd vegetable. And by ‘toil’ I mean down on your hands and knees in the sun, with no protection, digging furrows with sticks. What little irrigation you can come by is often carried in buckets on poles from water sources miles away.

Now imagine a factory opening in the area. The workers have a roof over their heads. They sit on stools running looms or sewing. They get 30 cents an hour. It’s hot, tedious, and cramped. But it kicks the ASS of the alternative. 30 cents an hour, times 12 hours a day, six days a week, is $1123 a month, FIVE TIMES the average income.

Now imagine how you’d feel if you landed that job and some rich kid doo-gooder from America showed up and protested your factory because it was a ‘sweat shop’. The factory goes out of business, the kid goes home and feels good that he’s ‘saved’ you from the evil capitalists, and you get to go back to your dirt patch.