Factories of Progress: Why "the poor have walked off the land into the factories as fast as the factories could take them."

The introduction of factory manufacturing in the developing world changed the lives of more than a billion people, and in doing so, it helped to lift an entire continent out of extreme poverty. Factories in developing countries are often portrayed as involuntary labor camps at worst and as centers of coercive employment at best. Hot, dark, dangerous, a wholly unwelcoming place where workers are conscripted against their interests to toil for the betterment of Western civilization. 

While this picture of the factory may seem temptingly intuitive, it is far from an accurate picture of modern industrialization and manufacturing in low—and middle-income countries. For over fifty years, the factory has provided an escape from the crushing immiseration and unfathomable drudgery of subsistence farming. 

Subsistence farming in low-and middle-income countries is by no means an agrarian utopia; areas of the world where a large proportion of the population remains engaged in small-scale farming are still the poorest places on earth today. Rather than a back-to-nature, organic paradise, subsistence farming is an exhausting, dangerous, ultra-low-income, hand-to-mouth existence that is literally backbreaking. Families who work these small farms all too often cannot afford an education or medical care for their children and suffer extremely low standards of living. They live one failed harvest away from serious economic stress, hunger, and hardship, with no financial safety net. 

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