We just don't care enough. The amount of apathy the average person in a developed country has for the rest of their fellow man is astounding if you stop and think about it for a bit. People love to go on and on about how capitalism is good and paying them pennies isn't exploitation, we're lifting countries up into the "first world" and that's true to an extent, while conveniently ignoring that the countries being lifted up are either suffering for it themselves or are just shifting the exploitation farther down the line. Eventually we're gonna run out of people to shit on in order to make our lifestyles possible, and that's when it'll get interesting.
I've already written about this before on here so I'll just plop that down instead of rehashing it more:
I've read that there is a certain number of people that we're basically optimized to coexist within a societal structure, and modern civilization passed that a long time ago, and human beings in general just aren't capable of empathy on the scale of modern civilization. And I mean, it makes sense when you think about it. On some abstract level you have to know that even meagre standards of living in western society requires someone, somewhere to be suffering to provide it. $1 for a pound of bananas shipped from across the world before they even have a hint of yellow on them? That shit don't come without a cost, and our $1 sure as hell aint paying it. But we all just kind of don't think those people just to get through the day, because dwelling on the extent of suffering and horror we've wrought upon our fellow man in pursuit of whatever fresh hell the guys over at Oreo have managed to shape into the general form of a cookie would leave us a broken shell of a person and unable to show up for our next shift at the Big Mac factory.
"We just don't care enough. The amount of apathy the average person in a developed country has for the rest of their fellow man is astounding if you stop and think about it for a bit."
I wasn't going for that angle. I wasn't talking about the labor part. I accept that labor competes internationally. I have no moral right to a higher pay for the same work.
That's not the issue. The issue is that it shouldn't be possible to ship an oak tree across the entire planet for practically nothing. The true cost is not nothing, it has to be enormous. The "natural" pricing is heavily distorted by subsidies, trade deals, lack of taxation, dismissing all externalities, state sponsorship, the like.
None of this has anything to do with fair competition based on labor. It's a rigged game.
I can get an item shipped to me from China on Aliexpress for a few cents or even free. The same package shipped to me from my own city costs several dollars.
Business interest in the US totally screw over local producers and few politicians seem to care.
>it shouldn't be possible to ship an oak tree across the entire planet for practically nothing
Why not? Modern lumber carrier vessels are massive. Optimizing for maritime bulk cargo transport to ship across world economically vs western wages seems very feasible.
But globally poverty has been radically decreasing over the last few decades (although perhaps not so much since 2020). For example in 2010: “Globally, poverty is about a quarter of what it was in 1990” from https://www.humanprogress.org/five-graphs-that-will-change-y... . That is an old article but the trend of reduction in poverty continued from 2010 to 2020. Note much of that reduction is due to China, and Africa hasn’t improved as much.
Well, it's insane. But I'm sure I can think of hundreds of other equally insane things.
What can I do about any of them? Very little if I reject society, live in a cave and forage for berries. Also very little if I attempt to enter politics, even if moderately successful.
So I buy the fair trade bananas - for all the good that'll do - and try to tolerate all the madness.
I've already written about this before on here so I'll just plop that down instead of rehashing it more:
I've read that there is a certain number of people that we're basically optimized to coexist within a societal structure, and modern civilization passed that a long time ago, and human beings in general just aren't capable of empathy on the scale of modern civilization. And I mean, it makes sense when you think about it. On some abstract level you have to know that even meagre standards of living in western society requires someone, somewhere to be suffering to provide it. $1 for a pound of bananas shipped from across the world before they even have a hint of yellow on them? That shit don't come without a cost, and our $1 sure as hell aint paying it. But we all just kind of don't think those people just to get through the day, because dwelling on the extent of suffering and horror we've wrought upon our fellow man in pursuit of whatever fresh hell the guys over at Oreo have managed to shape into the general form of a cookie would leave us a broken shell of a person and unable to show up for our next shift at the Big Mac factory.