I mean, there’s certain types of cultural exports or hegemony that makes sense. We got the Aztecs to stop sacrificing children to Huitzilopochtli. We don’t live in a world where people REALLY believe in total cultural relativism.
I think you’re spot on that we in the West find “step above slavery jobs” extremely distasteful. This results in situations where the news media celebrates the closing of a “child sweatshop” in Cambodia, but the cameras aren’t rolling when, faced with poor economic conditions due to the factory closing, those same children are now working in a child brothel, which everyone agrees is worse.
Similarly, Siddharth Kara has recently revealed the horrors going on in the Congo involving the Cobalt trade with the warlords and the Chinese. That ones interesting too because thirty years ago the operations were run by South Africans but the western world largely agreed this was wrong so they ceded the land back to the Congo. This resulted in warlords becoming enriched by the power vacuum and becoming well armed and making things horrific for the poor people living in Congo who have to mine up toxic cobalt with their bare hands in dangerous tunnels and pits.
The solution to child and worker exploitation is not look sad and just buy the cheap garments and cobalt.
This is a coordination problem first and foremost. The solution is to tax the shit out of supply chains that don't provide the basics.
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And yes, development economics is ugly. There's no royal road from subsistence farming to Switzerland-level, but whatever road there is it's not composed of separately inscrutable steps. It's perfectly okay to strive to make each step better and less horrible. Just as on the other side of globalization it's not some unknowable force closing non-profitable mines, and again it's a coordination problem that the disadvantaged folks and regions of globalization, in the developed economies, only got a big pat on the back. (And yes yes, there were a few programs to try to retrain unemployed people here and there, but it was simply a waste of money, because they got no help to mentally deal with the situation. Folks should have been encouraged very heavily to move where the jobs are instead of wallowing in semi-deserted corporate towns of misery.)
I think you’re spot on that we in the West find “step above slavery jobs” extremely distasteful. This results in situations where the news media celebrates the closing of a “child sweatshop” in Cambodia, but the cameras aren’t rolling when, faced with poor economic conditions due to the factory closing, those same children are now working in a child brothel, which everyone agrees is worse.
Similarly, Siddharth Kara has recently revealed the horrors going on in the Congo involving the Cobalt trade with the warlords and the Chinese. That ones interesting too because thirty years ago the operations were run by South Africans but the western world largely agreed this was wrong so they ceded the land back to the Congo. This resulted in warlords becoming enriched by the power vacuum and becoming well armed and making things horrific for the poor people living in Congo who have to mine up toxic cobalt with their bare hands in dangerous tunnels and pits.