研究メモ ver.2

安藤道人(立教大学経済学部准教授)のブログ。旧はてなダイアリーより移行しました。たまに更新予定。

クルーグマンの"In Praise of Cheap Labor"

『マンキューブログより』
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/dojin/20060419#p1

のコメント欄で経済学者二人にたしなめられたわけだけれども、

同じトピックに関して、再び以下のマンキューブログ経由で、

The Morality of the Global Economy
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/05/morality-of-global-economy.html

クルーグマンのエッセイを読んだ。

"In Praise of Cheap Labor; Bad jobs at bad wages are better than no jobs at all."
http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/smokey.html

以下はそこからの抜粋。

why, then, the outrage of my correspondents? Why does the image of an Indonesian sewing sneakers for 60 cents an hour evoke so much more feeling than the image of another Indonesian earning the equivalent of 30 cents an hour trying to feed his family on a tiny plot of land--or of a Filipino scavenging on a garbage heap?
The main answer, I think, is a sort of fastidiousness. Unlike the starving subsistence farmer, the women and children in the sneaker factory are working at slave wages for our benefit--and this makes us feel unclean. And so there are self-righteous demands for international labor standards: We should not, the opponents of globalization insist, be willing to buy those sneakers and shirts unless the people who make them receive decent wages and work under decent conditions.

その通りです(><)まぁ私はボイコットをしようとは思わないけど、まさに心境的にはこういうことです。さすがクルーグマン。賛否はともかく、未読の方は是非ご一読を。