The ideal American store, Adam Gopnik once suggested, would have no employees. Consumers' desires would be met flawlessly by unerring, tireless machines. On the other hand, the ideal French store has no customers: Nothing to interfere with the workers' satisfying work and humane schedule. Of course, people in any developed country are both producers and consumers, but Americans have long been encouraged to see themselves as consumers, first and last—to hell with anything that gets in the way of quality and variety at a low price. Last week, Charles Duhigg and his colleagues laid out the human costs of that culture in the New York Times: Not only the immediate toll in suffering, injured or dead Chinese workers, but also the long-term effects on our own society.

In Thursday's article, Duhigg and David Barboza describe working conditions at Foxconn plants in Chengdu, where iPads and iPhones (and many non-Apple electronics too) are assembled: Workers forced to use toxic chemicals to clean iPhone screens; people working double shifts, standing so long their legs swell and they end up waddling rather than walking; workers killed in an explosion that could have been foreseen and prevented. They also described the underlying reason, quoting an unnamed Apple executive: "You can either manufacture in comfortable, worker-friendly factories, or you can reinvent the product every year, and make it better and faster and cheaper."

This is, of course, the reason that the factories making electronics must be in a country packed with poor people without many other opportunities, and not in Cupertino or Oakland. Duhigg and Keith Bradsher explained that in an earlier article this month. Expectations in consumer electronics are such that products have to be made in a place where workers can be woken up at midnight (in dormitories on the factory grounds) and put to work on a crash shift. In 2007, Steve Jobs decided that the soon-to-be-released iPhone had to have a glass screen instead of the plastic originally planned. "I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks," the article quotes Jobs as saying. it was clear that the only place to get that done was China.

You wouldn't get very far in business if you paused to ask, Why, exactly, was this worth doing? Why couldn't Jobs have had to live with the change taking 10 weeks, or six months, or even a year?

A first answer is that he had a vision, and he wouldn't accept anything less than perfection. And this is supposed to be admirable in every way. Trouble is, when an executive realizes an insanely great vision, the medium—that which is experimented with, molded into strange shapes, stressed with unforeseen tensions—is other people's lives. The executive isn't like a pianist pounding ivories or a sculptor twisting metal. In business creativity, what is pounded and twisted is other human beings. What I've seen of commercial visionaries up close is, frankly, pretty ugly. The Devil Wears Prada caught the vibe pretty well: People going without sleep, without peace of mind, without self-respect, without a family life, all in the service of … what? A product. A slick magazine that people will throw away after a week. An ad slogan no one will recall in a year. A gadget. That's all that results, in the end, from the crazed amphetamine atmosphere of a whole building in which no one has the simple confidence in normality to say: Why don't we all just chill? After all, it's just a phone.

The ultimate cause of this crazy subservience, though, isn't any one visionary tyrant. The ultimate cause is us—we who see ourselves as consumers, first and last. The moral link is obscured by design and marketing, but the Times article makes it clear. If we, the world's excited, entitled consumers, were willing to wait another year for the next iPhone, and pay maybe $65 more for it, then the people who make the things would have better lives. (Is it even possible that, if we were willing to wait two years and pay $80, the jobs could be repatriated?)