Sweatshops, privilege and projection

Nic Kristof over at the NYT comes across something that Milton Friedman noticed some time ago -- that sweatshops are a step up for many people in the world. In this example, he looks at Phnom Penh:

Talk to these families in the dump, and a job in a sweatshop is a cherished dream, an escalator out of poverty, the kind of gauzy if probably unrealistic ambition that parents everywhere often have for their children. [...]

I’m glad that many Americans are repulsed by the idea of importing products made by barely paid, barely legal workers in dangerous factories. Yet sweatshops are only a symptom of poverty, not a cause, and banning them closes off one route out of poverty.

Americans object to sweatshops because we project our level of privilege onto them. Would you work in a sweatshop? No! It's far beneath you and and the standards of living that you know. You'd be worse off.

But what if the sweatshop were a step up for you? We have a hard time imagining it -- in essence, imagining the situation of a person less privileged.

Thus the privileged world does harm when it intends to do good. Which represents more social progress: a nice, air conditioned factory, paying $5 an hour in China, to those who are not worried for their survival? Or a hot, crowded factory in Cambodia, paying $2 to those whose main alternative is living in garbage and dying of dysentery?

Here is Friedman making a similar point (forward to around 9:40).

PS: consider this when listening to rich urbanites' attitudes toward Wal-Mart. :)

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