Why Matt Yglesias Is Wrong About Bangladesh

If Matt Yglesias sneezes you can bet there’s going to be a chorus of left-of-center tweeters ready to unleash a tidal wave of vitriol and scorn. So go ahead and guess how ugly things got yesterday, and remain today, after he wrote this:

It’s very plausible that one reason American workplaces have gotten safer over the decades is that we now tend to outsource a lot of factory-explosion-risk to places like Bangladesh where 87 [since revised to 238] people just died in a building collapse.* This kind of consideration leads Erik Loomis to the conclusion that we need a unified global standard for safety, by which he does not mean that Bangladeshi levels of workplace safety should be implemented in the United States.

I think that’s wrong. Bangladesh may or may not need tougher workplace safety rules, but it’s entirely appropriate for Bangladesh to have different—and, indeed, lower—workplace safety standards than the United States.

If you don’t feel like guessing, here’s an example…

[Continued @ Jubilee]