I would rephrase this. They are stuck in their circumstances which forces them to survive on a few cents a day. MNCs like Nike take advantage of this by getting their goods manufactured in Bangladesh at next to no cost and sell them for thousands of dollars. If the same workers in Bangladesh were to migrate to US I am sure they will make minimum wages, so their skill is indeed not $0.
It will be gradually harder and harder to compete with mega-rich entities in any area, automation and AI will increase, and so wages will fall while prices inflate.
So you're right, we have fewer people starving to death, because food is relatively more affordable (and SNAP). However, we have more people who can't afford housing, medical emergencies, having children, or an education. The way that poverty has presented and affects people has changed, but our guidelines are still based on the idea that you aren't poor unless you literally can't afford to eat.
The line of poverty, under the relative measure model, would just keep growing. I don't agree with that - poverty should be measured absolutely; ala, the minimum calories you can intake and maintain health, the minimum heating/clothing required to not freeze to death or succumb to the elements, sanitation, and basic healthcare (things like cuts/bruises/bacterial infections dont kill you).
As soon as you start to include things that didn't exist at the time of setting this absolute baseline but would in the future if the technology develops, you start moving the poverty goalpost. For example, the internet didn't exist in the 1960's, but i've heard that access to it is included in poverty meaasures today.
But I think it's fair to say that the baseline should grow, more slowly than the median.
The internet has replaced other forms of communication and is needed to get almost all jobs, so yes it's a necessity now.
1. https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM
2. Look outside and see how many homeless people there are in any average America metro. This was not the case 30, 40, 50, 60 or 70 years ago.
3. EDIT "Inequality for All" https://youtu.be/zvAFPHLFMa0
1. How much more value you can now create. E.g Moving from assembly to managed code was also a 1000x shift
2. How much of that value you actually capture, as opposed to it going to your CEO, customers, etc
The people in developing countries have the misfortune of being able to capture only a minuscule fraction of the value they create
The workers did not create the branding, marketing or hype. The fact that a sneaker that is manufactured for dollars is sold for thousands, is the actual travesty. The workers is capturing the inherent value of the labour - because if they did a clone of the sneaker, and sold it without any of the branding/marketing, it would not sell for thousands, but instead probably low $10s-$50s dollars, which is inline with the labour and material that went into it.
I think we have to factor in reality and external constraints if we're looking at this scenario.
An individual worker, maybe you can say that. But the entire segment of the developing-world workforce? If they were somehow able to immigrate en masse, it would disrupt the economy enough that I don't think we could predict the effects and say "they'll earn $7.25/hr".
Where they live, doing the work they do, they as individuals have almost no monetary value to western capitalist society (despite collectively generating uncountable value).
This is the context of the response you were commenting on. There is a distinction between "this person is earning close to $0 because they are living in a poorly functioning country and economy" vs "this person's skills are worth close to $0". The latter implies that even if that person moved to another country, they wouldn't possess any skills worth paying $7/hour. Which is false.
For perspective, if you took Bill Gates and parachuted him into an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon, they would consider him to be useless. But few would agree with an absolute statement that "Bill Gates has no valuable skills."
No. If all the unskilled workers in Bangladesh moved here, they mostly wouldn’t make minimum wage. They’d mostly just be unemployed.
really? i would imagine they would find a job, and is willing to accept one that paid at least minimum wage.
There are other ways of valuing those people, but you have to break out of a capitalist framework if you want to value them at more than a few dollars a day.
Assuming they even qualified for immigration, would they even be employable?
Do they speak a language that would be widely useful in the US? Are they literate? Numerate? Basic stuff we take for granted here in America, where everyone had at least 10 years of public schooling.
We're not even going into the more "advanced" skills like a driver's license, or functional literacy.