Western countries, where we’ve had hundreds of years to deal with the negative effects of industrialization, are finally getting a handle on it. In the developing world, however, where this is all relatively new, there are serious issues, from child/forced labor, to the environment, to political oppression being sustained by the profits of that industrialization.

Though I don’t agree with some of the tone she takes, Annie Leonard’s “Story of Stuff” (www.storyofstuff.com) does a good job of illustrating the way the developed world exploits the resources of the developing world with little concern for the negative effects the citizens of those developing nations experience. We now have laws in the US to prevent wholesale environmental devastation. But in the third world, these laws don’t exist. The governments are so focused on the profits (often used to maintain oppressive control), they’re willing to allow their natural resources to be trashed.

Leonard also does a great job illustrating the “externalized costs” that come with globalization. We pay way, way less for the made in China products we buy than they actually cost to produce.

A lot of these problems go away when the manufacturing occurs in the USA. First, a lot of the BS junk that nobody needs–the stuff that fills $.99 stores and Pier 1 Imports–would go away, and there’d be much less waste, because it wouldn’t be worth paying the real cost of the singing animatronic fish we give as a gag gift. Second, industry would be cleaner. And, finally, we’d have a thriving middle class.

Nicholas Kristof came out in favor of sweatshops, or more accurately the injection of manufacturing industry where there otherwise is absolute poverty. Is it better that 1 American be promised a stable labor job with good pay, or that several 3rd-world families no longer live in abject filth?