I'm going to quote Peter Drucker on this:
The history books record the squalor of early industry, the poverty of the industrial workers, and their exploitation. Workers did indeed live in squalor and poverty, and they were exploited. But they lived better than those on a farm or in a household, and were generally treated better.
Proof of this is that infant mortality dropped immediately when farmers and domestic servants moved into industrial work. Historically, cities had never reproduced themselves. They had depended for their perpetuation on constant new recruits from the countryside. This was still true in the mid-nineteenth century. But with the spread of factory employment the city became the center of population growth. In part this was a result of new public-health measures: purification of water, collection and treatment of wastes, quarantine against epidemics, inoculation against disease. These measures--and they were effective mostly in the city--counteracted, or at least contained, the hazards of crowding that had made the traditional city a breeding ground for pestilence. But the largest single factor in the exponential drop in infant mortality as industrialization spread was surely the improvement in living conditions brought about by the factory. Housing and nutrition became better, and hard work and accidents came to take less of a toll. The drop in infant mortality--and with it the explosive growth in population--correlates with only one development: industrialization. The early factory was indeed the "Satanic Mill" of William Blake's great poem. But the countryside was not "England's green and pleasant Land" of which Blake sang; it was a picturesque but even more satanic slum.
Lately I've been thinking about all of the various services and products I consume and how pretty much all of them are bad for the world in one way or another, large or small. Some of the problems associated with them I am less concerned about. Some of them could be construed as good things (i.e. sweat shop labor DOES provide jobs, whatever impact it might or might not have on the overall quality of life).
In general I'd like to live my life having as minimal a negative impact on the world as possible. But "negative impact" is a hugely broad topic and there are a million variables to consider and I just don't have time.
The best solution, I think, would be to have a wikipedia-like website where individual people with knowledge of specific problems can start tagging specific products with the types of negative consequences associated with them, and (somehow) sort those consequences into categories that individuals can decide how much to worry about. Over time it could eventually become a fairly efficient way to track the utility value of things.
I'm sort of hoping something like this already exists, even if in an infant form, and that someone here knows about it. But I doubt it, so the I guess this falls mostly under the post category of "hey someone other than me should devote a bunch of time and energy to this project that I myself am not qualified to do." But maybe a few people here at least have a better idea than I do of the scope of the requirements for it, so the idea can be refined a bit.