I never said the factory owners were the good guys.

But let's take your very contemporaneous hot take and play it out.

1. The weavers were skilled labor. The industrial process was so easy a child could do it. The fair pay for operating that machine was never going to be equal to the weavers wage.

2. The difference in rate of production was massive. This wasn't a price drop, it was the floor falling out. Think 1 person now able to produce as much as 500 weavers.

The weavers didn't give a shit about kids or fair wage! They simply were being replaced and mad about the loss of income! Even if they had been hired on by the factory owners, there would have been enough of them unemployed (500 to 1) that it was going to play out the same way!

> The word "all" here is excluding far, far more people than you realise. Your "better world" is built on the suffering of hundreds of millions.

Yes, no more polio, no more rindapest, most of the globe has a cell phone and access to a wealth of knowledge... we didn't die of bubonic plague, we dont have dead siblings or dead mothers in child birth.... It's a much better world.

Im also acutely aware of the human suffering in my PC from cobolt, and rare earths! With a nice side of environmental damage. I'm well aware that the coffee I drink and the chocolate I eat is a product of child labor. I'm aware that by earning more than 100k a year I'm in the top 10% of the global population.

There is no point in moralizing about it, because there is no point in the past where it was "better" than right now! We as a people are making progress and until that stops being true we need to be grateful were at the top and keep moving everyone forward...