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South African wine industry rooted in human misery, says report Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk Unsuitable housing, pesticide dangers and barriers to union membership catalogued by Human Rights Watch monitors There is no question of its flair for producing a world-class chenin blanc, cabernet sauvignon or pinotage at an affordable price. But the provenance of South Africa's wines is altogether less savoury, an investigation by human rights monitors has revealed . Workers on the country's wine and fruit farms lead "dismal, dangerous lives," according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), which found on-site housing unfit for habitation, exposure to pesticides without proper safety equipment, lack of access to toilets or drinking water while working and barriers to union representation. Farm workers contribute millions to South Africa's economy, with products that are sold in Tesco and other British supermarkets, yet the...

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Is Meritocracy Good? The Baseline Scenario By James Kwak Two years ago I wrote a post arguing that smart, well-educated, hard-working people did not deserve to make more money than other people, at least not as a normative (as opposed to a utilitarian) matter. Last night I was re-reading A Theory of Justice  by John Rawls. This is what he has to say on the matter (§ 12, pp. 73–74): "[The liberal conception of the second principle of justice] still permits the distribution of wealth and income to be determined by the natural distribution of abilities and talents. Within the limits allowed by the background arrangements, distributive shares are decided by the outcome of the natural lottery; and this outcome is arbitrary from a moral perspective. There is no more reason to permit the distribution of income and wealth to be settled by the distribution of natural assets than by historical and social fortune. . . . Even the willingness to make an effort, to t...