Well, well, Josephus...that's about as simplistic as they come.

Here's an example of people who received a house and electricity and TV. They didn't ask to be relocated from their land on the Mekong and put to work in factories (if they're lucky), but that's progress.

http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6344

Read the first few paragraphs about how life was before. It probably involved a lot of hard yakka, but sustenance seems as if it was plentiful. We have this vision that all people in developing nations must be destitute before "development - not so.

(Btw, 90 percent of the electricity generated by the damming this part of the river is sold to a neighbouring country)

Interestingly this is what industrialisation looks like on the Yangtze.

http://www.china.org.cn/china/2013-04/07/content_28468610.htm

Still, no worries, all the people who depended on the fisheries can go and work in one of dem factories and come home once a year to see their families.

http://www.documentary.org/magazine/made-china-last-train-home-documents-life-migrant-worker

I realise I'm waffling in the wind here, and this is the way it is.

However, we keep telling ourselves how "enlightened" we are these days.

?

I think it's wrong that all these very poor ladies in 3rd world countrys have to work very hard for a very low money when lots of western men make great money by putting special well known lables on the very cheap cloths and sell them at a very high price in the Western Countrys.

Where I was born I remember all the ladies in out town worked very very hard not for profit but for the government, with the smallist wage paid to them and coupons and vochers and other government permits. We had a small garden in the yard at the back of our house and growed vegetables which helped a lot with our food but in winter with snow and ice and stuff you could not grow anything at all. Here in this country we don't have to work at all and yet we still have much food.

Making woman work very hard for little wages is wrong and like making them into slaves for a few rich western country mens benefit!

Hasbeen, you commented back a couple of pages, that China will take
a generation or two to reach a higher standard of living for all.

Big problem there, that will require their economy to grow by say,
six or eight times its present size.

Do you really think that China, India and a number of other Asian
countries can reach western standards of living ?

It is just not possible.
Then what about Africa ? They will not want to be left out.
There is not the energy rate of supply to do that size job.

There will be an evening out of standards in the whole world and that
is only possible if our standard starts falling towards that of the third world.
There is one alternative, a very large reduction in world population.

No Bazz I do not, & I doubt some of them, in some areas will be out of poverty in 50 years. I do expect their own internal economy will do much for them in the near future.

In the same vane I think much of China will have a standard of living risen to equal most what most western countries standard has fallen to within not much more than a couple of decades.

The quality of the governments will decide which countries do well, & which don't. This means many Mediterranean, African & Asian countries will go nowhere but down.

It is pretty obvious that states with too much welfare are only surviving if they have a special advantage, such as hydrocarbons, minerals, or a special geographic position & brilliant government.

How do you reckon we are going to go. Do you think our special advantage can overcome our handout mentality, & lousy government?

I was thinking about misanthrope's post.

Clearly in the garment industry the majority of workers are women, I don't know who's making the money (or who benefits from it).

I came across a couple of interesting articles which might be of interest for this discussion when trying to get some sense of the gender focus in misanthropes post

- http://wiego.org/informal-economy/occupational-groups/garment-workers
- http://www.actu.org.au/Media/Speechesandopinion/Whydowestandforsweatshoplabour.aspx

Also an interesting paper discussing some of the issues around migrant workers in China that I've only skimmed so far. http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---integration/documents/publication/wcms_097744.pdf

R0bert

Thanks RObert.

Pericles,

The resources of how many Earths would be required for the entire world's population to emulate the wasteful extravagance of the West?

(I believe the answer to that is about 3 1/2)

It's extraordinary that we excuse our exploitation of these people on the grounds that we are supposedly helping them prepare the way for a life of excess as experienced in the West.

Lexi,

My point being that it is "us" who depend on these practices for a continuum of our present lifestyle. We sanction (or at least turn a blind eye to) this type of corporate slavery because we're the one's who benefit. It's not happening in front of us, so it's easy to dismiss it or to contort it into some kind of feel good platitude about "lifting them out of poverty".

Baaaaah.