The Travels of a T-Shirt In the Global Economy

This is just the kind of non-fiction I like–a journey in search of the truth filled with anecdotes about real people. The author, however, is an economist professor and one who upholds the ideals of the "free market" while acknowledging that one doesn't exist. Her quest is to find out whether the claims of recent student activists about the horrors of sweatshops are really justified.

The long view she offers through history taught me a lot about the influence of the textile industry as the primary driver of the industrial revolution—satanic mills and all that, not to mention driving the slave trade to work the cotton farms to supply those mills in England. Is this not an early example of globalization?

Then there's the history of protectionism which gave me a working knowledge of how politics work in the American congress and the role of the textile industry in the South re: trade and foreign policy. And the role these protectionist policies played in helping industrialize all the little players in all those third world countries that wouldn't have been able to compete with Japan or China, but were given their moment in the market because of US quota systems.

As a good economist would, the author sees this industrialization of all the corners of the world as a leg up out of poverty. She did give me pause in her claim that jobs for women in sweatshops working long hours for little money were an improvement over jobs at home on the farm working even longer hours for no pay under the authority of the family patriarch. We all know about the oppression of women in China, after all, so we'll go along with that.

The history of China's early textile manufacturing serves as an example of sustainable production. The farmers themselves, the entire family, carded the cotton, spun it into yarn and wove it into cloth on their home loom. They made their own clothes from it, then took the rest to market to sell. Her point is that this system created no bottlenecks so no Eli Whitney to invent the cotton gin or whatever was needed to ease those bottle necks, the solving of which would increase production (which would result in increased demand, but she doesn't mention that).

The most fun chapter is about the used clothing market. Unlike e-waste, dumping our used clothing on poor countries around the world isn't toxic. Though the documentary T-shirt Travels claims that such dumping destroys the local clothing industry, she makes the observation that it was already destroyed through mismanagement of the local governments and because socialism didn't work because factories didn't seem to produce and things just didn't get done.

Whenever pro free market writers talk about mismanagement by local governments, I've learned to read that as a sign of lazy thinking. Local governments may be mismanaged and corrupt, but they do not have nearly the power of destruction that large scale economic policies enacted by the World Bank and IMF do. Her anecdotes of the entrepreneurs she meets does convince me that socialism is miserable at providing incentives for workers to produce and innovate, but then she didn't see The Take about the power of democratically run cooperatives to produce for whatever markets they can find usually local.

It's too bad the student activist that inspired her didn't also shout something out about the deterioration of the planet because not once does she mention how industry impacts the earth, polluting it and using up natural resources and she was writing this in 2004, so no excuse.