Every now and then, we remember that there are poor people in the world, and sweatshops become news. Jonah Peretti — the click-accumulating mastermind behind The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed — got his start in viral journalism 15 years ago by baiting Nike with a chain of witty emails requesting that his personalisable Nike trainers be emblazoned with the word SWEATSHOP.

Peretti having moved on to grander projects, the stage storyteller Mike Daisey picked up the baton, delivering a riveting monologue, “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”. It was about Daisey’s heroic unmasking of appalling working conditions in the Chinese factories that make iPads. It made compelling radio when This American Life aired it in 2012. It was even more compelling when This American Life retracted the episode shortly afterwards. Ira Glass, the show’s host, wrote: “Daisey lied to me.”

Economics, of course, offers a less click-worthy perspective. We shouldn’t be surprised if people making sneakers and iPads are paid badly to do tough, hazardous work, because they live in countries where such work is everywhere. And since people are moving away from grinding and precarious rural poverty to work in these grim factories, perhaps they see them as an improvement? The pithiest account of this view comes from the great 20th-century Cambridge economist Joan Robinson: “The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.”