Our good buddy Joel Johnson went inside Foxconn’s 540,000 employee factory in Shenzhen. There are 950,000+ employees in China alone. To put that into perspective, Columbus, Ohio, my hometown, is home to 711,470 people.

How do they live? By most standards, fairly well. They sleep eight to a room in a space about as big as a two-car garage and they have TV and exercise stations. They live, in short, the way you’d expect 540,000 people to live – sometimes happily, sometimes upset with each other and their situation, and sometimes tragically.

I’m glad Joel is there to document this and to prove that for all our First World piety, whatever is going on in Foxconn is both good for the employees and good for the bosses. It’s just not good for us as we lag ever-behind the manufacturing might of Asia.