The reason why professor recommends us the read this article is to let us have a deeper understanding that good intentions may not lead to good consequences; in international trade, both traders are better off, especially the poorer one; some people have a lofty morality, consider capitalism as a vampire and call for a fairer system, but actually they fail to think the matters through and neglect what's not seen.
What's intuitive in this article is the author's analysis of the reasons why it's not ideal to raise the salaries standard of third countries workers in a particular field.
(1)The author thinks that a mandatory increase of wages in a specific field will cause a new group of aristocracy and thus is harmful to workers in other fields. This idea is like Hazlett's opinion that bad policies merely cares about effects in short run and benefits of a small groups of people.
In my opinion, an artificial growth of wage increase will change workers' incentives, making more people to do this job. And according to the law of diminishing return, it will be more costly to produce a marginal product and cause market inefficiency.
(2)The author thinks that once the salaries of workers increase, the employers have to raise the prices to get profits. But since the advantage of third world countries' export lies in the fact that the productions they produce are cheaper, the rise in prices will make them less competitive and the corollary is that workers will lose money.
My question is: why don't the managers adopt the policies to make mass production?
Personally, I think that those who call for the rise in income of the third world countries workers are merely doing this for satisfying their own needs of having a lofty morality over others. They don't see that if they buy less, the workers will earn less and may be worse off. Those advocates, in my opinion, are merely hypocrites.
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