Moral Dilemmas and Factual Claims: Some Comments on Paul Krugman's Defence of Cheap Labour.

This brief article is by way of an extended comment on that piece which happened to contain factual claims central to the empirical research programme of one of us, and ethical and political issues of concern to us both. As readers will see, our view is that in his essay on cheap labour, (as indeed in many of the others in the collection), Krugman makes some pungent and telling criticisms of other writers on economic matters and in this particular case - of some analytically weak and ethically dubious claims which are frequently espoused by contemporary anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation radicals conventionally regarded as being on the political left. But at the same time -or so we shall argue - his own polemic is, in important ways, undermined by the narrowness of the theoretical framework within which it is constructed, and most especially, by Krugman's almost total lack of a historical perspective in which to see either contemporary debates over global capitalism or the ethical issues at their heart.