Slate’s Seth Stevenson files a travel dispatch from India that reads uncannily like a scene from an Eric Ambler novel, and Brad DeLong takes him to task:
Seth Stevenson thinks that those who do not buy the [Kerala-made] coir mats are morally superior to Debbie and the rest of us: they are not complicit in the exploitation of Third World labor. But there is another way of looking at it–a way that makes those who do not buy the coir mats (and Seth Stevenson) into moral monsters. Suppose that Seth Stevenson, on his bicycle ride, were to stop by a couple of empty huts, run into them, steel the looms, and then smash their looms to pieces on the beach and dance in front of the resulting bonfire. Then the villagers could no longer make coir mats. They would have to find something else to do–something else that is worse than making mats. Such a theft-and-bonfire would have the same effect on the people of Desperately Poor Village as… as… drying up demand for their products by urging First World consumers to adopt a higher standard of morality and eschew the products of Third World labor, no?
Go read the entire post; it’s a great counterargument to a sentiment one encounters often. I rather like Brad’s rhetorical emphasis on expanding Third World options rather than contracting them. Given the difficulty of convincing progressive-leaning individuals that the case for free and expanded trade with the Third World is indeed beneficial thing for development and for the world’s poor, it’s useful to have an arsenal of ways to healthily reframe the issue away from mercantalist visions of gold specie being carted out of the colonies.
I’d add a semi-rhetorical question: to what extent do Stevenson’s politics correlate to his disdain of middlebrow retail?
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