[pron]

Oh, no. Again with the "choosing". Since I read similar arguments quite often here on HN, I want to give a general, rather than particular answer. The short version is, people under duress can't really "choose" anything, even if it may seem to some free-market capitalists as if they do.

Let me paint a fictional picture for you. Say there's this island that's been ravaged by natural disasters and famine, and its entire population is starving. Rich people from a nearby country realize the islanders are in real distress and will be willing to do a lot for anyone who will save them from certain, horrible death, so they decide to use them as workers. So the rich people set up shop on the island, and the locals start working for them. Some of the rich people pay the workers (each of them producing, say $100's of product a day) with one loaf of bread, oh, and they also rape the women. Some pay their workers $2 a day, and they don't rape the women. Naturally the locals love the latter group, while that group of rich people from the mainland describe how they've saved the poor islanders from certain death and have even treated them rather humanely - well, at least compared to some others. They praise the wisdom of the market who let them gain from the islanders' cheap workforce, while letting the islanders survive.

Now, this (fictional) story is not about China. It's about anywhere an impoverished population, or anyone under extreme duress, lives. Speaking about choice under such conditions is preposterous. People will choose a quick death over slow mutilation. People will choose enslavement over annihilation. Believe me, there's no "free will" at work here, and whether or not the rich people from the mainland have done any good to the island, they certainly have nothing to brag about because they're exploiters who've saved a population merely to enslave it.

My story is extreme and I am not making any direct comparisons. I am saying that poor people are not "free" and they most certainly can't "choose", and if they do have a sliver of choice in their miserable lives (akin to the choice an innocent man might have for his last meal before execution), there is certainly nothing for anyone here to be proud about - certainly not about providing them with "alternatives" (like commuting the innocent's sentence to a life of forced labor).

[Produce]

As another anecdote for the lack of social mobility that the vast majority of people experience, how many people born into wealth has anyone witnessed transition into the working class? What's the ratio of that population to people born into wealth who stay wealthy? Just as it is extremely difficult to be born poor and end up rich, so it is the other way round. People often forget the ever looming hidden factors in these situations; morale and mind-set. From all of the research I've done on what makes people successful, it's all in the mind. From all the research I've done on what makes people change, it's all in the environment. In other words, mindset is intimately linked with the conditions one finds himself in which in turn dictate actions. A nuance of this is that mind-set also modifies environment which, in turn, affects mind-set again. It's a self-modifying system; the feedback loop that is your consciousness.

This is all hardly surprising - just as individual physical particles have inertia, so do we.