>I really understand how the lack of a liberal arts education has crippled a lot of people.
I think I also see how a surfeit of liberal arts education, with all its absurdly relativizing, simplifying, hand waving fashionable criticism of everything "commercial" that it depends on has crippled your own perspective.
No, the modern world isn't a simplistic black and white case of a tiny rich world being that way only because it lives off the back of a massive toiling class of slaves. The reality is much more complex and mutually transactional. The same market dynamics that make more developed countries even wealthier also heavily contribute to improved living in countries still developing further, and vice versa.
Is there exploitation? Sure. The human world has never been perfect and even while it improves, many injustices remain, but to categorize the socioeconomic structures of today's world so simplistically as your comment does is to make an argument that caricaturizes both the genuinely wealthy and the billions of poor you implicitly claim to sympathize with. They too are looking for and finding their comparative measures of improved wealth specifically by being participants in the market system that they too help build and actively participate in, and which makes the consumer goods they seek more affordable than ever before for an incrementally more comfortable life.
It's not perfect, but it's far better than the vast majority of historical alternatives. If you hate it so much, at least lay out a practical alternative that's actually desirable and realistic enough for billions of people to embrace it in practice as they do largely capitalist markets. Can you?
While you're doing that, why not look at the actual numbers for how more people than ever (in the developing or third world too) live today compared to any time in human history and try calling it all bullshit. It's easy to compare a given situation to our ideal of "how it should be". It's however much more honest to compare it to a previous reality so that the hard increments of improvement can be appreciated.
I think I also see how a surfeit of liberal arts education, with all its absurdly relativizing, simplifying, hand waving fashionable criticism of everything "commercial" that it depends on has crippled your own perspective.
No, the modern world isn't a simplistic black and white case of a tiny rich world being that way only because it lives off the back of a massive toiling class of slaves. The reality is much more complex and mutually transactional. The same market dynamics that make more developed countries even wealthier also heavily contribute to improved living in countries still developing further, and vice versa.
Is there exploitation? Sure. The human world has never been perfect and even while it improves, many injustices remain, but to categorize the socioeconomic structures of today's world so simplistically as your comment does is to make an argument that caricaturizes both the genuinely wealthy and the billions of poor you implicitly claim to sympathize with. They too are looking for and finding their comparative measures of improved wealth specifically by being participants in the market system that they too help build and actively participate in, and which makes the consumer goods they seek more affordable than ever before for an incrementally more comfortable life.
It's not perfect, but it's far better than the vast majority of historical alternatives. If you hate it so much, at least lay out a practical alternative that's actually desirable and realistic enough for billions of people to embrace it in practice as they do largely capitalist markets. Can you?
While you're doing that, why not look at the actual numbers for how more people than ever (in the developing or third world too) live today compared to any time in human history and try calling it all bullshit. It's easy to compare a given situation to our ideal of "how it should be". It's however much more honest to compare it to a previous reality so that the hard increments of improvement can be appreciated.