Btw, imho a more interesting, but not really much more challenging, extension of your case is, if overall what the orphans produce is actually very valuable, say creating utility of 500 $/day for ultimate consumers, but mere market forces, competition between the firms or businessmen, means market prices for the goods produced become still only 50.01c/day, while the labor market clearing wage for the destitute orphans is 50c/day.
Even in this situation, commonsense ‘exploitation’ is straightforward applicable and +- intelligible a concept:
To a degree, the firms or businessmen become a bit irrelevant intermediaries. One refuses to do the trade? Another one will jump in anyway… Are they exploitative or not? Depends a bit on subtle details, but individually they have little leeway to change anything in the system.
The rich society as an aggregate who enjoys the 500 $/day worth items as consumers, while having, via their firms, had them produced for 50.01c/day by the poor orphans with no outside options, is of course an exploitative society in common usage of the term. Yes, the orphans may be better off than without it, but commoners do have an uneasy feeling if they see our society doing that, and I don’t see any surprise in it; indeed, we’re a ‘bad’ society if we just leave it like that and don’t think about doing something more to improve the situation.
The fact that some in society take the wrong conclusion from the feeling of unease about exploitation, and think we ought to stop buying the stuff from the orphans, is really not the ‘fault’ of the exploitation concept, it is the failure of us to imagine (or be willing to bite the bullet of) a beyond-the-market solution, namely the bulk sharing of riches with those destitute orphan workers or what have you. (I actually now wonder whether that may be where the confusion that imho underlies the OP’s article is coming from: Yes, people do take weird econ-101-igoring conclusions when they detect exploitation, but this doesn’t mean they interpret the wrong things as exploitation. It means their feel-good ‘solution’ might backfire; instead they should track consequences of alternatives and see that the real solution to the indeed existing exploitation problem isn’t as simple as to go to the next, overpriced pseudo-local pseudo-sustainable hipster shop, but is to start doing something more directly about the sheer poverty of their fellow beings far or near).
Btw, imho a more interesting, but not really much more challenging, extension of your case is, if overall what the orphans produce is actually very valuable, say creating utility of 500 $/day for ultimate consumers, but mere market forces, competition between the firms or businessmen, means market prices for the goods produced become still only 50.01c/day, while the labor market clearing wage for the destitute orphans is 50c/day.
Even in this situation, commonsense ‘exploitation’ is straightforward applicable and +- intelligible a concept:
To a degree, the firms or businessmen become a bit irrelevant intermediaries. One refuses to do the trade? Another one will jump in anyway… Are they exploitative or not? Depends a bit on subtle details, but individually they have little leeway to change anything in the system.
The rich society as an aggregate who enjoys the 500 $/day worth items as consumers, while having, via their firms, had them produced for 50.01c/day by the poor orphans with no outside options, is of course an exploitative society in common usage of the term. Yes, the orphans may be better off than without it, but commoners do have an uneasy feeling if they see our society doing that, and I don’t see any surprise in it; indeed, we’re a ‘bad’ society if we just leave it like that and don’t think about doing something more to improve the situation.
The fact that some in society take the wrong conclusion from the feeling of unease about exploitation, and think we ought to stop buying the stuff from the orphans, is really not the ‘fault’ of the exploitation concept, it is the failure of us to imagine (or be willing to bite the bullet of) a beyond-the-market solution, namely the bulk sharing of riches with those destitute orphan workers or what have you. (I actually now wonder whether that may be where the confusion that imho underlies the OP’s article is coming from: Yes, people do take weird econ-101-igoring conclusions when they detect exploitation, but this doesn’t mean they interpret the wrong things as exploitation. It means their feel-good ‘solution’ might backfire; instead they should track consequences of alternatives and see that the real solution to the indeed existing exploitation problem isn’t as simple as to go to the next, overpriced pseudo-local pseudo-sustainable hipster shop, but is to start doing something more directly about the sheer poverty of their fellow beings far or near).