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.

> I don't have a paycheck, I'm living off capital gains, thank you.

Replying to worker abuse concerns with "well, I'm rich and don't have to work!" is really, really weird.

> "Does foreign investment ... make workers better off?" ... "Yes, vastly."

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.

If you wish for people to “see past” anything, cease insulting them when making an argument. When you attack someone, their instinct will be to clam up and double down to defend themselves even if intellectually they’d agree with you. To truly enact change, you need to allow people 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.

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.