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by teataster
1759 days ago
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Efficiency is rewarded by consumer buying (voting with money) efficiently produced products. It's not some abstract evil ideal that drives the market. It's people doing purchases. Now, good markets need good (perfect to be precise) information. If people knew this is where we would end up (say most production moved to Asia), would they have made different choices (say to preserve manufacturing in US EU with better worker conditions)? I would argue our economic system is just fine. But we fail in political, educational and ethical issues. Especially ethical, people know about horrible conditions in sweatshops, still there are massive queues to shop at low cost brands. I feel clothing as the most egregious, because there are decent alternative choices. |
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Right, but the fact that our economic outcomes are decided by consumers is an artifact of our economic system, not some necessary truth. There are a lot if upsides to such a system, but as discussed in this thread there are also downsides.
> I would argue our economic system is just fine. But we fail in political, educational and ethical issues
I disagree here. Our economic system makes sweatshop clothes cheaper (we could for example regulate or raise tariffs against them). That means that making thw ethical choice becomes a sacrifice of sorts, and not only that but it puts people who don't make that choice at a comparative advantage (they have more money left over), which effectively makes their influence over the rest of the economy greater.
We should be doing better in terms of political and ethical education, but we should also be ssetting up economic incentives to do the ethical thing not the opposite.