# If all trade is voluntary, then what is "exploitation?"

Capitalism is a force that has lifted billions out of poverty, where even poor remote villagers enjoy luxuries that would have been unimaginable to medieval kings. When someone takes a job, even the worst job, it’s because both parties expect mutual gain. And yet companies routinely get accused of exploiting their workers for offering low pay and bad conditions, even if the pay and conditions are far better than the other available jobs. This sometimes results in protectionist laws that prevent those businesses from existing in the first place, making everyone worse off.

Given this, is there any meaningful concept that could be called “exploitation?”

I think there is.

In fact, I claim, it routinely happens that someone will *voluntarily and rationally* submit to a circumstance that should very rightfully be called “exploitation.”

An Actually-Exploitative Corporation
------------------------------------

Consider this dialogue, taken from [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FfrWGCEhZJbkeFgww/the-power-to-demolish-arguments):

> **Steve**: Acme exploits its workers by paying them too little!
> 
> **Liron**: Can you help me paint a specific mental picture of a worker being exploited by Acme?
> 
> **Steve**: Ok… A single dad who works at Acme and never gets to spend time with his kids because he works so much. He's living paycheck to paycheck and he doesn't get any paid vacation days. The next time his car breaks down, he won’t even be able to fix it because he barely makes minimum wage. You should try living on minimum wage so you can see how hard it is!
> 
> **Liron**: You’re saying Acme should be blamed for this specific person’s unpleasant life circumstances, right?
> 
> **Steve**: Yes, because they have thousands of workers in these kinds of circumstances, and meanwhile their stock is worth $80 billion.

In this case, Steve has provided no reason to believe that this worker — let’s call him “Bob” — is being exploited, for any reasonable sense of the word.

But sometimes there are extra details that reveal that, actually, yeah, Acme really is responsible for Bob’s life circumstances.

Let’s make up some more details. Why doesn’t Bob have time to see his kids? He would on Monday evenings, except that the company requires him to drive an hour for a weekly city-wide meeting, where he raises his hand to prove that he worked the past week, and listens to some information that would be better communicated in an E-mail.

Other people in his circumstance manage to save money – why is Bob living paycheck to paycheck? Because the company required him to wear a tuxedo once a month — everyone must wear the same brand, and it costs at least $5000 – and he’s on a payment plan for it.

The company has many more ways to make him miserable. He’s not allowed to use his phone on the job, even when there are no customers around and he’s just sitting doing nothing. He wants to bring his own chair to help his back pain, but he’s not allowed. If he’s late by a minute, he loses half a day’s wages. His boss yells at him, and the higher-ups praise the boss for being tough and motivating. There’s a ritual where, every morning, any worker who made a mistake the previous day gets their mistake read out in front of everyone, and gets shamed for it.

In each of these cases, the company is inflicting massive cost on Bob, with at most a very small benefit to themselves.

And in each case, Bob takes it, because his alternative is to be fired and have no job whatsoever.

Bob is being exploited.

This motivates my working definition of exploitation:

**Exploitation is using a superior negotiating position to inflict great costs on someone else, at small benefit to yourself.**

More forms of Exploitation
--------------------------

Here are some more examples:

*   A parent sits down for tea, but their kid is running around. “Absolutely no noise while I’m having tea, or no Nintendo for the next month.” Every time the parent pulls this card, the kid accepts.
*   A factory pays $5/hour for dangerous but air-conditioned indoor work, in a region where most other jobs are $2/hour farm labor in the hot sun. There is a piece of equipment they could install that would cost $1000 but would reduce the risk of injury by 10%. They don’t install it.
*   A shy, nerdy programmer is dating a very attractive, nerdy woman, in an area dominated by many nerdy men seeking few nerdy women. She knows that she’ll have a far easier time finding a new partner than he would were they to break up. She begins using this position to change the relationship — telling him he doesn’t love her if he doesn’t pick her up from the airport, asking to open the relationship and hinting that him not wanting to is being controlling. Every time, he accepts, until he’s a shell of his former self.

In each of these cases, one person has the power to casually inflict severe losses on the other — punishment of a child, loss of a job, loss of a relationship. And so whenever they can gain $1 by making the other person pay $10, they do so. That’s exploitation.

This view of exploitation impacts what policies you should demand of companies. And it affects what kind of behavior you can morally request from others – and from yourself.

The Fair Trade movement seeks to pressure companies into providing their foreign laborers working conditions and pay closer to American standards. This lens suggests that neither the naive employer-provider view (“Make them treat their workers fairly!”) or the Econ 101 view (“They are providing jobs that the workers happily accept, and we should respect that”) are a complete way to evaluate what would produce the globally optimum policy. We should instead ask: are there small things the companies should be doing that would make a big difference in the workers’ lives?

This lens also suggests a personal code of conduct. Whenever you make a request from someone you have power over, ask yourself just how hard it would be for them compared to the benefit you get. And when you want to evaluate someone for ethics, ask them about when they took a small sacrifice in order to make a big difference for someone else.

**Related**: Eliezer’s [Parable of Anoxistan](https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1815090947514142759)

**Update:**

Two commenters  piped in with useful additional content.

First from Villiam:

> > Let's say a company demands that a worker buy a suit worth $10, and gains $1 from it. Then the worker could offer to work for $1.05 less, but without the suit, and that would be more profitable for both the company and the worker.
> 
>   
> And the company could simply say *no*, knowing that the worker has more to lose, relatively, and therefore will be likely to give up and accept the original deal.
> 
> Seems to me that at least a part of the intuition behind "exploitation" is that the person with greater negotiation power can precommit to *reject even the win/win* deals if they are not unbalanced enough in their favor.
> 
> To use the metaphor of a growing pie, imagine that there is a button that will magically summon a pie for both of us to share, but only if we both press the button simultaneously. Problem is, you are starving but I am not. So I say that unless you give me 90% of the pie, I refuse to press the button. I will lose some good pie, but I can live with that, and you can't.
> 
> Furthermore, this is an *iterated* game. If you accept to take 10% of the pie and let me take 90%, what happens when we find a similar button tomorrow? Yeah, you will be starving again, and I will be not.
> 
> (And this can get even more unfair, when the stronger party can use their advantage to lobby for making the environment even worse for the weaker party. Not sure what would be the proper metaphor here. Making it illegal to eat things other than pies? Making it illegal for two people to press the magical button unless one of them is me?)

  
Second, from Ben:

> I don't think the framing "Is behaviour X exploitation?" is the right framing. It takes what (should be) an argument about morality and instead turns it into an argument about the definition of the word "exploitation" (where we take it as given that, whatever the hell we decide exploitation "actually means" it is a bad thing). For example see this post: [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world). Once we have a definition of "exploitation" their might be some weird edge cases that are technically exploitation but are obviously fine.
> 
> The substantial argument (I think) is that when two parties have unequal bargaining positions, is it OK for the stronger party to get the best deal it can? A full-widget is worth a million dollars. I possess the only left half of a widget in the world. Ten million people each possess a right half that could doc with my left half. Those not used to make widgets are worthless. What is the ethical split for me to offer for a right half in this case?
> 
> \[This is maybe kind of equivalent to the dating example you give. At least in my view the "bad thing" in the dating example is the phrase "She *begins* using this position to *change* the relationship". The word "change" is the one that sets the alarms for me. If they both went in knowing what was going on then, to me, that's Ok. Its the "trap" that is not. I think most of the things we would object to are like this, those Monday meetings and that expensive suit are implied to be surprises jumped onto poor Bob.\]

I would add that my framing of exploitation in this post seems to presuppose a default bargain, either a natural split (as in the pie example), typical expectations (violated by the the odd conditions in Bob's job), or a previous agreement (as the dating example). When I talk of one party using their bargaining position to inflict losses on the other, it is losses relative to that default bargain. The trade has to still be a net positive, otherwise even the weakest party would walk away.