In his NYT opinion column, Nicholas Kristof suggests a new banner for clothing: “Proudly Made in a Third World Sweatshop!” I would buy it. Seriously! This brings to mind two of Krugman’s best ever pieces, In Praise of Cheap Labor and Enemies of the WTO:
Critics take it as a given that anyone with a good word for [globalization] is naive or corrupt and, in either case, a de facto agent of global capital in its oppression of workers here and abroad. But matters are not that simple, and the moral lines are not that clear. In fact, let me make a counter-accusation: The lofty moral tone of the opponents of globalization is possible only because they have chosen not to think their position through. While fat-cat capitalists might benefit from globalization, the biggest beneficiaries are, yes, Third World workers.
The raw fact is that every successful example of economic development this past century — every case of a poor nation that worked its way up to a more or less decent, or at least dramatically better, standard of living — has taken place via globalization; that is, by producing for the world market rather than trying for self-sufficiency. Many of the workers who do that production for the global market are very badly paid by First World standards. But to claim that they have been impoverished by globalization, you have to carefully ignore comparisons across time and space — namely, you have to forget that those workers were even poorer before the new exporting jobs became available and ignore the fact that those who do not have access to the global market are far worse off than those who do.
If you seriously think that “fair wages” or the banning of sweatshops will help those in the third world, you owe it to yourself to read these two pieces.
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