>>512195591
I'm actually feeling a degree of saturation with this trope that it's some economically rational decision to hire chep labor to lower the costs
economic decisions like this are a sliding window where the only rule is that you can't have it all but you can slide from one side to the other side and back
companies like Apple, for example, have always practiced a "higher quality, less sales" policy where they do not bend to market whims but rather go the other way by firing low quality labor (they even shut down their Indian branch because their products made in India had a higher than usual production error rate)
German cars are another example where Germany practiced some form of sobre gentlemanship with their products by not cutting down every single marginal cost and for a while they were very prestigious
it doesn't mean that it's wrong to do it the other way, you can hire cheap labor and flood the market with cheaper products and in case you get a much higher error rate you simply hope to mitigate that with your overall sales rate, which is a model that China has adopted
the problem is that boon-and-bust cycles have generated a lot of mini-oligarchs that have either inherited their wealth or became rich over night due to a speculative market and these individuals see themselves with a lot of economic surplus and are self-deluded that they're also great businessmen, managers or even going as far as thiking they're "global leaders" but with zero experience
this is the "gig economy" where instead of acting rational, you hedge your bets against your own self, with examples up to the market crash where lots of "businesses" destroyed their own selves for the sake of government handouts and subsidies that enriched some of their leadership
>tl;dr
lower your standards, sell more but less expnsive
raise your standards, sell less but more expensive
should all in all lead to the same results but through different means