Helsing posted:

This video is remarkable. It takes some basic and intuitive propositions and a laudable sounding premise and then uses them to make some of the most twisted, misleading and propagandistic arguments imaginable. Almost every specific comment it makes on history and development is incorrect and its model of how innovation works is dangerously simplistic. The overall message is so incredibly idealistic that there's literally no action plan whatsoever, which is unsurprising because the actual purpose of this video isn't to make you change your behaviour, it's to reassure you that the current system is basically benign and functional and that all that is needed is to remove some unfortunate distortions that are preventing some people on the bottom from achieving their true potential.

I ask people to stop and think for a second whether everyone would really be materially better off in any concrete sense if the electronic devices we're all using to post on these forums were priced fairly and produced by workers who were compensated equivalently to the privileged workers of advanced industrial countries. Kurzgesagt talks in this video about how much more advanced medical research could be if there were more scientists. That may be the case but they overlook the massive role of care workers in the medial industry. Somebody has to empty the colostomy bags and wipe up the blood. In a lot of economies that person is a racialized migrant (or the child of one) who is compensated with a comparatively tiny wage, which means there is more wealth available to invest in the healthcare system.

It might sound progressive to say that we would all be better off if the world were more equal but what that really does is disguise the huge extent to which our current living standards are predicated on exploitation. In numerous crucial fields like agriculture, textiles, garments, transportation, electronics or social reproduction the role of cheap labour is absolutely crucial to propping up living standards in places like Australia, Japan, Western Europe or North America.

If you take a T-shirt that was produced in Bangladesh and that retails at $14 CAD as an example, then the worker in this case earns $0.12 - less than two per cent of the total cost. The factory itself collects $0.58. Factoring in another costs like insurance and transport you end up with a shirt costing $5.67 to fabricate, transport and sell. The Store's markup is 60%. So the vast majority of the value in this process is captured by people in the first world despite the fact that the factory workers in this example are literally risking their lives every time they go to work.

Even more crucially though, the government of the country where the shirt is sold collects tax revenue off its sale. Assuming the shirt in this example was sold in Ontario, Canada in 2013 then there would have been a combined provcincial/federal sales tax of 13%, or $1.82. That means more value from each T Shirt sold by Joe Fresh in Canada is going toward supporting Canadian healthcare than is going toward compensating the actual workers or administrative staff or anyone else actually living in Bangladesh.

I apologize if this is a tedious length to go into but I think this point is important. People are sometimes quick to obfuscate or dismiss the extent to which first world economies in 2019 are directly reliant on the exploitation of the rest of the world. That Kurzgesagt video - brought to you by Bill and Melinda Gates - takes our empathetic desire to help people and then weaves it into a misleading Just-so story that conveniently obscures more than it reveals. I think there is a strong case to be made that we would all be better off living in a less exploitative world but this video isn't actually making this argument, nor do I think the video's primary aim was actually to convince anyone to be more altruistic. Instead I think the real intention here is to naturalize artifical constructed ideas like 'supply and demand' and naturalize them in such a way that a kind of progressive neoliberalism is seen as common sense solution to problems that actually call for much more radical fixes than anything a video sponsored by a billionaire's charity is likely to advocate.

tl;dr - Maybe earnestly citing a video paid for by someone who flew on the Lolita Express isn't actually the best starting point for a discussion of altruism or addressing problems with capitalism