yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Exploitation: A problematic pejorative


2m read
·Nov 8, 2024

When people use the word "exploitation" in the context of sweatshops, I think they want the word to express a negative judgment. I think that most of the people using the word in this way haven't thought things through clearly.

The greedy capitalist makes the poor person an offer: "Work for me, and I'll pay you $2 an hour." The poor person accepts the offer, glad that he'll still be able to feed his family next week. Meanwhile, an activist is leading a boycott of companies who use sweatshop work. He thinks it's disgusting that anyone should work in such terrible conditions for such a low wage.

If the activist is successful, the capitalist and the poor person won't be able to make the exchange that they both wanted, and the poor person will be back to where he was, with one less option and not knowing where next week's food was going to come from. The activist, to the extent that he's successful in closing down sweatshops, is hurting the interests of the poor person by denying them the option of working in a sweatshop.

The greedy capitalist, by following self-interest, is actually increasing the options of the poor person and improving his situation. If the complaint against the capitalist is that he should be doing more to help, uh, that's surely no reason to prevent him from helping the poor person a little bit. Surely, a little help is better than none at all.

Also, if the complaint against the capitalist is that he should be doing more to help the poor person, then surely that complaint must apply even more strongly to the activist. Whatever their intentions, the activist leading the boycott is actively making the situation of the poor person worse to the extent that his campaign is successful.

So please think twice before you use the term "exploitation" to describe sweatshop work. What do you mean by exploitation? Why do you believe it's negative? If the outcome of what you call exploitation is an improvement over how the situation would otherwise have worked out, does it still make sense to use this term in a negative way?

If exploiters are helping the poor, even just a little bit, while the opponents of exploitation are harming the poor, does it still make sense to use the term "exploitation" as a pejorative? I don't think it does.

More Articles

View All
How To Get Rich According To Robert Kiyosaki
There are a million ways to make $1,000,000. And this is how Robert Kiyosaki does it. Robert Kiyosaki is a financial educator, entrepreneur, and the author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, one of the best-selling personal finance books of all time. He’s challenged …
Why is Deadly Weather Mesmerizing? | StarTalk
Well, in the same way that CNN does very well in their ratings when there’s war, the Weather Channel does really well when there’s extreme weather. Right. So people love watching extreme weather—the tornadoes—it’s mesmerizing. Hurricanes. Absolutely. And …
Could this be the oldest known human burial? #archaeology
So this is the Superman crawl. It’s an opening less than 10 inches wide where you literally have to make a Superman pose just to make it through. If you follow the cape through the Dragon’s Back chamber and then go down to shoot, yeah, that’s you. Superm…
Using Fire to Make Tools | The Great Human Race
On this journey, we need to carry grains, milk, water, processing number materials directly on a fire. So, I want to make some clay pots. Prior to the invention of pottery, our ancestors used organic containers such as animal stomachs and baskets to store…
AI and bad math
What we’re going to see in this video is that the current versions of artificial intelligence are not always perfect at math, and we’re going to test this out. I created a simple math tutor on Chat GPT here, and what we’re going to do is see if it can hel…
Translation (mRNA to protein) | Biomolecules | MCAT | Khan Academy
So we already know that chromosomes are made up of really long strands of DNA all wound up into our into themselves. Something like I’m just kind of drawing it as a random long strand of DNA all wound up in itself. On that strand, you have sequences which…