Comments by "Sophia Nílsson" (@sophroniel) on "Why Bellerby Globes Are So Expensive | So Expensive | Insider Business" video.
-
As another person wisely said, "these aren't expensive because they're handmade, they're expensive because it's made by rich people in rich countries" which is exactly the crux of the matter, and they already had too many people commenting so I say here, thank you for commenting this!!!!
TL;DR: ~white~ rich people think they are too good to do menial labour so force the ~brown~ poor people to do the work under conditions that benefit only the ~white~ rich and catch the ~non-white~ poor into a perpetual cycle that leaves them worse and worse off, but which they cannot escape, because society approves, endorses and is built around this cycle functioning. Except take that and say "country/nation/ethnic minority/upper class" instead of "people" and that's what modern day enslavement is, but instead they called it "global capitalism" to make themselves feel better.
Long explanation:
this is the reason why international capitalism exists, and will always exist: because people in rich countries have expensive time, but these same rich countries don't consider a foreign, poor worker's time to be valued to the amount of anything greater that free, really. Until we acknowledge that craftspeople of all kinds deserve fair compensation for their time, and every rich country's currency valuation reflects this, the global churn of what is, in my mind, tantamount to the enslavement of poor nations by rich nations, anything made by a rich country's resident or citizen will be priced so high it is unattainable by roughly 80 to 90% of that very rich country, because even if their time is technically still expensive, they have no opportunities to make similar things made en masse in poor nations anyway, perpetuating the cycle of the gap between rich and poor people in any specific country growing wider and wider, just as the gap between rich nations and poor ones grows too.
People say things like "people are getting a better standard of living in 3rd world nations every year!" but if you can still outsource labour to these countries to make items for a pittance to then make bank off and share none of that economic growth with the bottom rung of that company or manufacturing facility, their work is still being devalued and reinforced global capitalistic, parasitic exchange, and where the poorer of the two countries will always lose and be worse off, just to prop up the richer countries.
Worse still, because we are all victims of this scheme that makes the world tik over, we cannot individually make a big effort to change the status quo, because there are soooo many moving parts that make up this system.... which makes sense, as it's built up over hundreds of years at this point. It's so ingrained in us that we just can't say something like "I won't buy anything made overseas, or something that has been made from imported ingredients or components" because, unless you also had infinite or significant money (which also probably came from exploiting someone somewhere) you'd ben naked and hungry pretty damn quick.
1
-
1