[freebeard]

Originally Posted by niky

These sweatshops may look dire to western eyes, but they're funding an economic revolution that is uplifting the entire population.

And once they're comfortably middle class... the jobs will go elsewhere.

Thanks for posting that.

In other news of improvements, both China and India underwent annual economic growth averaging around 10% per year throughout the decade. The sheer scale of it is mind-numbing; it's as if the entire population of the USA and the EU combined had gone from third-world poverty to first-world standards of living. (There are still a lot of dirt-poor peasants left behind in villages, and a lot of economic — never mind political — problems with both India and China's developed urban sectors, but overall, life is vastly better today than it was a decade ago for around a billion people.)

The number of people living in poverty and with unsafe water supplies world-wide today is about the same as it was in 1970. Only difference is, there were 3 billion of us back then and today we're nearer to 7 billion. Upshot: the proportion of us humans on this planet who are living in third world poverty (unable to afford enough food, water, clothing and shelter) has actually been halved.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/reasons-to-be-cheerful.html