Are they in fact starvation wages? I'm the last person to defend Apple, and I'm all for emotional appeals about ethical issues, but they're useless without an understanding of the facts, and none of the complainants on this thread seem interested in understanding whether what they're saying is accurate, presumably on the off chance that they'd lose the opportunity to pay themselves on the back for their outrage.

Saying that Foxconn workers are being paid "starvation wages" is an infinitely different question from whether they're getting paid "adequately" (a squishy term that contains several orders of magnitude within it) relative to Apple's margins. It's very difficult for me to believe that people who are as uninterested in understanding the facts of the situation as your comment implies actually care about the situation or these people at all.

Understanding the factual landscape of the situation is separate from having an emotional response to it, but it is a prerequisite. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and economically illiterate (or willfully ignorant) emotional appeals like the one you're making have done immense damage to humanity.

I'm not even just talking about the standard examples of Communist dictatorships: there are a million less dramatic examples, like the straightforward Indian child labor law that did almost nothing but damage to the people it was supposed to protect: metrics across the board worsened for the families in question, including years of education, calories consumed, and most damningly, _hours of child labor_ (which increased).

By the way, I'm not insensitive to the notion that the balance between capital and labor's share of income could use some improvement. My point is about the damage that disinterest in understanding the distinction causes.