“ Most of us would never deliberately choose our own material comfort over the life of another person. Most of us do not consciously choose to work others to death for the sake of lower prices on the things we buy. But we participate in such an economy because we are detached from the producers, the people who actually make our things….We do so not necessarily because we are greedy and indifferent to the suffering of others, but largely because those others are invisible to us.”
We Shop, They Drop (via azspot) (via marco)
Knowing a bit about the secondary impacts of our purchasing decisions is very important. We like to do things like “let the market decide”—and the market should make decent choices if everybody has enough information. Unfortunately, consumers have lots of information about the end good, lots of information about the price of the end goods, but almost no information about the process that created that good. Most consumers, for example, would not want to buy black market diamonds used to fund war crimes. However, telling one diamond from another is tricky.