[SamReidHughes]

You're not actually computing the answer to whether foreign investment made the Chinese vastly better off. The answer is, it did. You can even absorb an entire Wikipedia section into the question without considering the counterfactual of what unemployment or lower-wage factor employment or agrarian employment practices were like, and the answer is yes, it did.

> then try to reason about it all (including the profits going back into the american coffers).

Apple's profits come from their customers giving them money, not the Chinese employees, who took profits as well.

[ignoramous]

> You're not actually computing the answer to whether foreign investment made the Chinese vastly better off.

That could have happened without humans being treated like cattle. I don't think that's hard to compute? If it is, no amount of 'what else could the american capitalists do if not leverage lower wage structures to their advantage' justifies that, I am sorry.

> Apple's profits come from their customers giving them money, not the Chinese employees, who took profits as well.

Employees took the profits? The profits trickled down from one mega corp to another; the line workers had to pay for it with their health. Answering "why wouldn't Apple build iPhones in the US" makes the capitalist designs plenty clear (which isn't a bad thing, and there are all kinds of ways to make money, but after a reaching a certain scale and seemingly bottomless capacity to generate revenue, it should start to matter just how it is made, as well).

[SamReidHughes]

You aren't addressing whether they'd be better off or worse off, with one less option for employment. A handful of complaints and controversies as linked doesn't actually provide the information necessary to draw the conclusion you claim.

Wouldn't you expect workers to be better off in treatment when the end customer has high margins, as Apple did, compared to low margins, as the next best employer would have?

> Employees took the profits?

Yes, that's why they got jobs -- the money.

And they took more at other companies, too, because having Apple do manufacturing in China also drives up wages at competing employers.

[ignoramous]

I get your point that one can't have their cake and eat it too, but the scale at which Apple operates (and its sustained strong performance) makes it super hard to justify any form of exploitation. In MBA terms, regardless of the positive influence of ginormous captial, ESG matters for ginormous companies even more.