I've not read the book, but IIUC _The Four Hour Workweek_ has as its central idea that you can outsource most of your actual work to other people while accruing most of the wealth those others are creating.
Not exactly a mark of great compassion or kindness, if that's actually what's presented.
It goes deeper than that. He encourages this behaviour in all aspects of interactions - getting other people to look things up for you etc, while firewalling yourself from other people's requests for assistance, finding ways to be more efficient at your job and hiding this from your boss so you can use the time saving for your side hustle.
Well you can't scale a business if you rely on only yourself as the workforce, so you will at some point have to outsource work to other people. It doesn't matter where those people are located. It's certainly unkind to overwork or underpay people, no matter where they are in the world (which must be looked at relative to local salaries). But that's not at all what the book recommended.
We all profit off other people's work, and are profited off of. I personally don't find this inherently problematic, since it's not a zero sum game.
To reiterate my point: I think it's not per se unkind to profit off other people's work. It's all about _how_ it's done.
right, profiting from other people's labor is certainly not inherently wrong.
Collecting most of the income from a project while putting very little effort into it feels kind of skeezy to me, but I'm not sure I can tell you precisely what bothers me about that. There may not be any actual problems with it.
Not exactly a mark of great compassion or kindness, if that's actually what's presented.