That benefit overlooks a lot of human cost involved. And if you're being real, you'd know the major beneficiary is Apple. The American companies aren't quite the saviors that folks might think they are.
You'll be unable to paint an alternative scenario for bypassing the process of gradual wage increases because it would never work in reality.
What was China going to do, warp straight to having an economy with $60,000 GDP per capita? If things actually worked that way, countries as diverse as Romania, Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Pakistan, Mexico - they'd all do it too. It doesn't work that way. You have to move up, gradually, through a very long and grinding road of progress and persistence.
Subtract the companies that provide the jobs for developing nations, and you have nothing. And you can't give a single other example throughout modern industrial history for an alternative path, because there can't be one. The capital investment has to come from outside, it has to be incentivized (otherwise why bother), and or you have to very slowly build it up from development internally + foreign trade (and that internal development will be accomplished by corporations just the same, just as it also was in China by domestic companies that behave just like Apple or worse).
Name a country that has skipped from poor and developing to affluent and developed without going through it (specifically without relying overwhelmingly on natural resources like oil, those are extreme outliers).
People forget this is actually what Singapore did. Before being a biotech and tech powerhouse, they were an assembly factory for western companies. Then they slowly expanded from that to airport, tech, airline, etc.
They have a geographic advantage too, but no one had to make Singapore a central shipping hub, it could have been anywhere else.
This is how you do it. There’s no other way. Eastern Europe is an interesting work in progress at the same thing. But the Ukraine war has really put a spanner in the works.
That's all well and good, but today's mega corps are leeches. And the world is more connected and less isolated. Things are very different from the 1950s to the 1980s to now.
Funnily, it is generally true given that net resource transfers to the global south have been negative for most countries... with the big exception being China[1], so China has benefited off global trade deals like these, but their income inequality isn't exactly something to look up to either (but despite that, they manage to beat the US on this stat). The other poor countries are mostly falling behind in a relative sense, and have been since the 80s, so we should certainly be thinking about disincentivising borderline slave labour because right now it isn't worth it for those countries, they simply aren't benefiting off doing it.
But also, we are moving (slowly) in the direction you'd likely prefer: Norway and Germany are now doing supply chain due diligence[2]. Hopefully we continue moving in that direction so we can push the floor up and perverse human rights violations become more of a thing of the past.
I wish sometimes folks could see past their paychecks, privilege, and holier-than-thou attitude. That's too much to ask. I mean, better chances at holding Apple accountable than dealing with its notorious fanbois.
When you insult someone in your argument, their instinct will be to clam up and double down to defend themselves even if intellectually they’d agree with you. If you truly wish to enact change in another’s point of view, allow them the emotional safe space to explore and turn around their views. Be honest and show you’re willing to work with them against the problem. Otherwise you end up with a frustrating shouting match where the other party disagrees with you more.
Agree. Though, when you see words like "abstract obscurantist nonsense", you know those kind of folks like it straight and wouldn't want it any other way.
That said, in the second-half of that comment (which might come off as argumentum ad hominem), I was speaking in generalities, and not about one particular person.
I don't have a paycheck, I'm living off capital gains, thank you. Your argument is a great example of throwing a pile of words (via your link) at a question and missing entirely, because the question is, "Does foreign investment in manufacturing make workers of a country better off?" and the answer is, "Yes, vastly."
But thank you for pointing out that Communist governance is awful, we're in agreement there.
Tell me you didn't read the link, and we can both go off on our merry ways? If you did, I want to know precisely which part about 'human cost' is hard for you to understand. Set aside the 'oh you poor lot, without american money you're toast' attitude for a second (it isn't charity!), and then try to reason about it all (including the profits going back into the american coffers).
You're not actually computing the answer to whether foreign investment made the Chinese vastly better off. The answer is, it did. You can even absorb an entire Wikipedia section into the question without considering the counterfactual of what unemployment or lower-wage factor employment or agrarian employment practices were like, and the answer is yes, it did.
> then try to reason about it all (including the profits going back into the american coffers).
Apple's profits come from their customers giving them money, not the Chinese employees, who took profits as well.
> You're not actually computing the answer to whether foreign investment made the Chinese vastly better off.
That could have happened without humans being treated like cattle. I don't think that's hard to compute? If it is, no amount of 'what else could the american capitalists do if not leverage lower wage structures to their advantage' justifies that, I am sorry.
> Apple's profits come from their customers giving them money, not the Chinese employees, who took profits as well.
Employees took the profits? The profits trickled down from one mega corp to another; the line workers had to pay for it with their health. Answering "why wouldn't Apple build iPhones in the US" makes the capitalist designs plenty clear (which isn't a bad thing, and there are all kinds of ways to make money, but after a reaching a certain scale and seemingly bottomless capacity to generate revenue, it should start to matter just how it is made, as well).
You aren't addressing whether they'd be better off or worse off, with one less option for employment. A handful of complaints and controversies as linked doesn't actually provide the information necessary to draw the conclusion you claim.
Wouldn't you expect workers to be better off in treatment when the end customer has high margins, as Apple did, compared to low margins, as the next best employer would have?
> Employees took the profits?
Yes, that's why they got jobs -- the money.
And they took more at other companies, too, because having Apple do manufacturing in China also drives up wages at competing employers.
I get your point that one can't have their cake and eat it too, but the scale at which Apple operates (and its sustained strong performance) makes it super hard to justify any form of exploitation. In MBA terms, regardless of the positive influence of ginormous captial, ESG matters for ginormous companies even more.
This argument didn't survive the 2010s, the elephant graph argument has since been thoroughly trashed as the rentier-class propaganda it always was.
China is not some meek recipient of Western wealth but instead a canny operator to the benefit of their upper classes and rulers, outsmarting the rest of the world for not the first time in human history. The West is the tail, not the dog here; foreign investment was there for the taking in a shortsighted race to the bottom.
