No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that the system that gives you those things does not provide a commensurate share of the profit produced to the people who actually supply the base product or even work with the product to provide you the components of those things.
Those folks subsist in extreme poverty, doing difficult physical work. They're miners and farmers and duck haulers and other such tasks that make up the bulk of the actual work but a minority of the actual profitshare.
You don't fix those problems in the long term by buying different things. You solve them by paying people sums commensurate with the value they produce and by focusing on making the base standard of living more fair for more of the planet rather than making it realistic for Jeff Bezos to build a private moonbase.
Such a reprioritization will surely see changes in what is available for the top 30% of the world, to the betterment of the bottom 70%. It is recency and identity biases that make it difficult for us to understand how much that matters.
Good points, but it is only in this very briefest moment of human history that we're even rich enough to care about the lives of people one town over, let alone on the other side of the world.
But how would you propose to solve this? Say China implements a minimum wage that meets your standard of a fair wage. What happens to the people of Vietnam who would gladly take those jobs at half the pay? Will you tell them they can't have jobs they consider far better than what they have now, because you don't think they pay enough? Like it or not, we're not in some broken system, we're in the best system we've ever had with no clear competitor. And things are going up for everyone, the world has never been so well off, a truly incredible feet considering the incredible population.
Although if I were king for a day, I'd use the wealth of the industrialized countries to build out nuclear plants everywhere. Because at least with cheap unlimited power people would never have to worry about food, sleeping in the dirt, or clean water. Bonus points for ending the need for slash and burn, or more fossil fuels.
> Although if I were king for a day, I'd use the wealth of the industrialized countries to build out nuclear plants everywhere. Because at least with cheap unlimited power people would never have to worry about food, sleeping in the dirt, or clean water. Bonus points for ending the need for slash and burn, or more fossil fuels.
Just an aside, ask yourself if cheap energy is actually the problem to solve here.
Those folks subsist in extreme poverty, doing difficult physical work. They're miners and farmers and duck haulers and other such tasks that make up the bulk of the actual work but a minority of the actual profitshare.
You don't fix those problems in the long term by buying different things. You solve them by paying people sums commensurate with the value they produce and by focusing on making the base standard of living more fair for more of the planet rather than making it realistic for Jeff Bezos to build a private moonbase.
Such a reprioritization will surely see changes in what is available for the top 30% of the world, to the betterment of the bottom 70%. It is recency and identity biases that make it difficult for us to understand how much that matters.