Summary
There is a Utopia called Omela where everyone lives a perfect life, everyone except a single malnourished boy chained to a tiny closet. Everyone in this city knows about this boy and they also know that if they unchain this kid the city will no longer be a Utopia. The story is about people who live in the city who leave after learning about the boy. Yet the true conflict is if they should let the boy go or not.
I’m ashamed to admit reading this left me confused about what the right thing to do is. Obviously, the inner hero in me wanted to save the child that was locked up and end this gross mistreatment of the person. Yet the logical side of me thought about the millions of people that live in Omelas and the quality of life they would have after the kid was free. It reminds me a lot of the Trolley Problem where sacrificing that one kid could save many more lives.
However, I also thought about how this exists in the real world. There is a clear division of labour and wealth in this world. The developed world is able to live a happy, peaceful life, we all have equal opportunity and nothing is stopping us from becoming the next Bill Gates or Mark Zukerberg. Obviously, this isn’t completely true with some facing problems like poverty, discrimination, sexism. Yet many NBA Players came from tough beginnings, many actors faced problems in their childhood and it's much easier to deal with poverty in the Developed world than in the undeveloped world. Here each one of us has the opportunity to live out the American Dream, we’re promised that if we work hard enough then we can make something of ourselves. However, what we have now is built on the backs of people in the underdeveloped world. A great example of this problem is Sweat Shops.
Many companies have been called out recently because of their use of Sweat Shops, yet if it wasn’t for our humanity these companies would have done nothing to change their practices. We go to a store and buy clothes unaware of the effort put in by people halfway around the world. But the problem isn’t that we’re outsourcing the job of making clothes, it’s that we aren’t paying them properly. Being born to a poor family in Bangladesh means as a child you’ll be working and you have no choice but to take any job you can get. This child doesn’t have equal opportunity, they can’t afford a proper education nor would they even have the time to study. The child will barely be educated and spend the rest of their life, working a grossly underpaying job and will never have the opportunity to break the cycle. That child will grow up, working every day to make ends meet, then eventually have kids of his/her own that will be born into this cycle, again never getting the opportunity to be something more.
First, it’s important to note that paying this kid almost nothing helps the Developed world, maybe not as much as the kid in Omelehas helped their citizens, but it helps. It lowers the prices of clothing, shoes, anything you see that says made in <insert 3rd world country>. The impact of having increased prices for common goods would range anywhere from being unnotible to propelling them to homelessness. Yet I believe that the short term lowers quality of life is necessary to receive the immense long term benefits of paying them properly. Every century the quality of life of people gets significantly better. Less than 200 years ago doctors were putting nails in people's heads, 100 years ago the toaster was just invented and only in the 21st century have people been able to make long-distance calls or use the internet or smartphones. Inventions like these have made our lives exponentially better and living in the lower class today would probably be better than being extremely wealthy 200 years ago.
However, the inventions I have talked about before have come from anywhere and anyone. Anyone who was living a decent enough life that they could think about these inventions and maybe even have the means to implement it themselves. If we paid these sweatshops more, if we gave these kids in 3rd world countries the chance to have time to focus on things other than survival then they could be the ones to make the world a better place. They will be the ones who make the world a better place. Yet currently in the modern world 700 million people live in extreme poverty. If everyone lived as well as people here in Canada, USA do then sure resources would be evenly spread out over the world reducing the quality of life of people in developed countries. Yet this would be short-lived. The rate of global innovation would increase and more people would start companies, charities and just make the world a better place. This would all result in the lower class of the next generation living a better life than the upper class of this generation.
Now the question is would people be happy living in a lower class even if it was a better life? Or would they just compare their lives to everyone else's and hate their situation?
TLDR, give everyone the same opportunity and in the long term the global quality of life goes up