[btian]

Except it's not. China has reached the stage in economic development that people are moving to higher skilled and higher paying jobs. Infrastructure in Vietnam has improved to the extent that is ready for large manufacturing plants.

While companies are saving by moving manufacturing plants, many people (millions) in Vietnam are going to experience higher standard of living. I say it's a win win.

[sixthloginorso]

Except for the people they'll lay off as the plants move? It didn't work out wonderfully for the autoplant workers at Flint and Detroit; for some reason, the people didn't get the upgrade you speak of after the plants closed. Weird, huh?

[gejjaxxita]

If we kept thinking like that all our clothes would be hand-woven.

[jellicle]

> many people (millions) in Vietnam are going to experience higher standard of living.

Aren't therefore many people (millions) in China going to experience lower standard of living?

[davidw]

The economy is not a zero-sum game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

[sixthloginorso]

The economy isn't magical either; jobs lost in one region because the factories closed and moved to another aren't necessarily going to be recouped by new job creation in a short span of time.

[davidw]

Then we should probably do what we can to help the worst off in the economy, whether they've lost their jobs due to new technology, moving factories, or whatever, rather than trying to nail the factories down to one particular place.

[JonnieCache]

>help the worst off in the economy

The problem with this is, the "factory owners" of the world run a political machine which they use to prevent that from happening, claiming it prevents them from building more factories. They use the same political machine to establish the moral goodness of continued factory building as axiomatic.

This makes everything rather complicated.

[davidw]

> the "factory owners" of the world run a political machine

Well, yes and no. The view I espoused was pretty similar to what Warren Buffet says, and that guy has owned a factory or two in his day. Even in the US, which has less government, there are a number of programs for those who don't have much. Perhaps you'd like to see more - fair enough - but the exact level of support is open for debate, isn't it? I don't think we'll ever agree on precisely what it should consist of. The Nordic states seem to work pretty well with more government. Probably depends on a lot of factors...

So I don't think there's any big cabal, really.

[Artistry121]

Yes, government intervention does make things rather complicated.

[jellicle]

Moving plants is not what the link you are linking to talks about.

And in fact, what you are linking to is a right-wing attack on very legitimate economic ideas. The introduction of the 40-hour week did increase employment, and further reduction of work weeks would indeed increase the number of people employed (as we see already: all job growth in the U.S. currently is full-time jobs being converted into multiple part-time jobs in the service industry).

That is, you've linked to a discussion of something on Wikipedia and you believe that the discussion of it proves its truthfulness; nothing could be further from the truth. See also: discussion of moon landing conspiracies.

In fact, if I fire someone in China and hire someone in Vietnam, I have indeed engaged in a zero-sum transaction - actually a negative-sum transaction, since I'll be paying the Vietnamese guy less than the Chinese guy. Overall, the world economy will be moving slower because of my actions.

[davidw]

If the economy were zero-sum, we would be far poorer today, with 7 billion people, than 200 years ago, when there were only 1 billion people, right?

I don't believe in things like "the market will sort everything out", by the way. There are winners and losers, and I think society has some duty to help take care of those who get the short end of the stick. But I don't think "don't let the factories move" is the right way to help those people, long term.

[blueskin_]

Not really, because they are moving to higher paying jobs than assembly-line work.

[edwinnathaniel]

Not all of them. Only the luckiest ones. 1-10% probably. The rest got laid off.

[caoilte]

> China has reached the stage in economic development that people are moving to higher skilled and higher paying jobs.

Yeah... 'caus that worked for Mexico... can China look forward to a descent into drug traficking fueled civil war now?

[Symmetry]

It's actually working pretty well for most Mexicans, just not the minority who live near the US border.

[pizza234]

With "working well", you mean, dozens how thousands of violent kills over the last years in the entire country, routine murdering of journalists and policemen, and essentially total corruption of the institutions?

I wouldn't define that exactly working well.

[llamataboot]

Ah yes, the wonderful world of libertarian thought. Where sweatshops to make cheap shit for rich countries is a win-win.

[quaunaut]

As someone who wholeheartedly disagrees with libertarian economic policies, I still find your facetious comment worthless.

Hell, even Paul Krugman doesn't label the issue as black and white. I want to remove sweat shop conditions as much as anyone, but keeping people alive through poverty takes priority.

Also, you don't fix sweat shop conditions by closing sweat shops. You just move them into the underground, where instead of shady business owners as bosses, they have shady crime bosses as bosses. The real trick, is to better sweat shop conditions.

This can even be done at Samsung/Apple's level, where they can make part of the requirement set for a contract certain workplace conditions/pay.

[deaconblues]

Purely anecdotal, but a buddy of mine lives in Shenzhen and tells me that Apple's leading the pack in terms of sweatshop conditions. Whether that's completely true, who knows.

[mcross]

Leading the pack in which direction? Improving sweatshop conditions or the factories they use have the worst sweatshop conditions?

[mempko]

which do you honestly think it is?

[w1ntermute]

Hundreds of millions of Chinese have been lifted out of poverty because of their manufacturing boom. I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the fact that you're still clinging to the outdated economic beliefs that used to keep the Chinese people poor and starving.

[ssdfsdf]

It's a broken world where the solution to poverty is the exploitation of a generation.

[tracker1]

You should take a look at the US from about 1880-1950... It's the case of every empire where things are built on the backs of the poor. Or in the case of earlier US, and many other societies, slaves.

That's simply how the world works. Sometimes it's a matter of greed, sometimes it isn't. The success of Walmart and Amazon seem to indicate that people will lean towards lower priced goods, period. Unless you don't buy any mass produced goods, and only source your needs to local crafts(|wo)men? Do you buy your clothes from a local tailor? How about your furniture from a domestic manufacturer?

[pyre]

Well, we better keep them in poverty while we work on making the world perfect. You can be the one to tell them that they world isn't perfect yet, so you're going to keep them in poverty until it's ready.

[hessenwolf]

Who said the world is not broken? If it were not broken, why would we spend so much time trying to fix it?

People work in sweat shops because it is better than not working in a sweat shop. It is the bottom rung on a long ladder, albeit one that starts underwater in the sewer.

[marcosdumay]

Yes, it is.

Do you have any proposal of a solution that does not make it more broken?

[angersock]

It's not broken--advances in civilization have always tended to involve sacrifice, be it through war, farming, or manufacturing.

Sorry, but things are going well within normal.

[ssdfsdf]

To those who have replied: None of you have disagreed with my statement. It is a broken world. A generation is being exploited.

I made no further comment.

[evanspa]

But it's obvious the world is already broken. It's not a stretch to infer by your post that you are implicitly passing some sort of judgement on the state of manufacturing jobs in these countries, and that is what folks are responding to.

[simonh]

Have you ever been to the Chinese countryside?

I have.

[Mikeb85]

Look at how far China has progressed.

It has nothing to do with Libertarianism, and everything to do with Economics...

[ForHackernews]

Surely it must be possible to have economic development in poor countries without sweatshop-level exploitation.

[Mikeb85]

For sure it might be possible, but historically it hasn't happened. Furthermore, there are still, to this day, occupations in the West which have deplorable working conditions. For instance, construction, mining and oil field work - where workers are outside in conditions as cold as -40 degrees, and work 12-16 hour days for 2-3 weeks strait without days off...

[corin_]

The fact that something happened due to economics doesn't mean there aren't other ways it could happen.

[bd_at_rivenhill]

Probably not, all of the developed countries went through a sweatshop phase at some point in their past.

[ForHackernews]

That's true, but just because something happened a certain way in the past, doesn't mean it's absolutely necessary it proceed that way in the future.

As an industry, the technology sector prides itself on innovative thinking and using new approaches to solve old problems in a better way. It doesn't seem like economic development should be a path-dependent process.

It saddens me to see people shrugging off human misery as though it's required by some ironclad law of economics. Instead, we should devote serious effort to figuring out how to get from "poor, subsistence farming" to "developed economy" without the "child labor and sweatshops" step.

Rawanda is already trying to make that leap: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-11/04/paul-kagame-e...

[mathToCS]

Care to name an example from the last 100 years?

[ForHackernews]

Elsewhere I gave the example of Rwanda attempting to do this: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-11/04/paul-kagame-e...

[coldtea]

>Hell, even Paul Krugman doesn't label the issue as black and white.

As if Paul Krugman is the pinnacle of radical thought on the issue?

He is a Keynesian -- which I guess counts for something like "far left" in the US.

[awkward]

Not only that, but he's been consistently pro globalization for his entire public career - even his work that lead to a nobel prize was along this issue.

[schnable]

Exactly. And at this point, his columns basically act as a fig leaf for Democrats to continue to support global "free" trade.

[wutbrodo]

In a conversation-oriented forum like this, the context of a remark is important. It was in response to a claim that this was some sort of libertarian fantasy, not radical thinking overall. I think it's pretty safe to say Krugman is not a radical libertarian (hence the "even Paul Krugman").

[Mikeb85]

> He is a Keynesian

As is pretty much every economist. Neoclassical economics (which borrows many of Keynes' ideas) dominates modern economic thought. 'Austrians' seem to exist only on the internet...

[coldtea]

I'm from Europe. We have much more wild flavors.

[Touche]

Sure, it would be preferable to jump straight from poor farmers to a picket fence and a swimming pool without the in between, do you have a suggested way to do that?

[ForHackernews]

Rawanda is trying to do something like that: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-11/04/paul-kagame-e...

They're attempting to bypass the heavy-industry stage of development, and go straight to being a knowledge/service economy. The jury is still very much out on that effort, but it's certainly worth a shot.

[jebblue]

The Philippines would also be a great place for manufacturers to look at.

[BrandonMarc]

The Philippines is already a place the Chinese Navy is looking at ...