Re: Wearing your conscience.

From: Peter Lawrence (peterl_at_netlink.com.au)
Date: 11/17/04 

Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2004 01:24:44 GMT

Jim Blair wrote:
>
> Wearing your conscience.
>
> The February 2004 issue of Isthmus (the local Madison weekly
> for the Politically Correct) ran a cover article titled
> WEAR YOUR CONSCIENCE ON YOUR SLEEVE. All about how hard
> it is to find MADE IN AMERICA clothing, and lamenting that
> so much of what is for sale in clothing stores today was
> made in such places as China, Philippines, Vietnam Thailand,
> Singapore, Pakistan, Dominican Republic and other poor
> 3rd World places.
>
> The author search in vain from Gap through Old Navy and
> Woolrich to Gander Mountain and K-Mart for MADE IN USA.
> All she found was in addition was Mexico, Bangladesh, and
> Bulgaria on labels.
>
> Now I could explain that several dollars a day paid in
> local currency is better than subsistence farming, and
> that living expenses can be much lower in poor countries,
> or point out that since Globalization living standards
> in most of the 3rd world are rising so fast that obesity
> is replacing starvation as the main diet problem, and some
> of them are now competing with the US for oil.

I've been over this area before. These things are only improvements FOR THOSE
WHO PARTICIPATE IN THEM. The rest get worse off, since the cheap food moves
out of their reach. In fact, the food only remains cheap for so long as there
are mouths it can easily be moved away from; once everyone moves up the
nominal cash income ladder, nobody is left to provide food so cheaply.

>
> Instead I'll just contrast this ideal of "clothing correctness"
> with the way it was viewed in the 1970's.
>
> Remember the 70's? That was when people worried about the
> environment and energy.
>
> I was teaching a Milton College in those days, and I even
> taught a course on environmental issues. The topic of
> clothes in those days was discussed in terms of energy
> consumption and environmental impact. The nationality of
> people who made the clothes was not even raised, that I
> can remember. But there was a big debate over cotton VS
> synthetic fabrics. As I recall, it started when some
> environmentalists made a point of wearing cotton shirts,
> claiming that synthetic fabrics were made from petroleum
> while plant matter was produced from sunlight.
>
> Well yes, but petroleum (in the form of diesel fuel and
> pesticides) is also used in growing and harvesting cotton.

This is what happens when the improvements are only partly worked through. If
you also have biodiesel, this doesn't happen - but it competes with food
production and gets in the way of overall improvements. The whole thing is
more complicated than it looks.

> So an article in American Scientist (I think) did a
> comparison of the energy consumption of cotton VS synthetic
> fiber clothes. While it was true that one pound of cotton
> took less petroleum to produce than one pound of various
> synthetic fabrics, the cotton clothes are heavier and so
> fewer shits and pants are made from that one pound. The
> conclusion was that it took about as much petroleum to
> produce a cotton shirt as a synthetic fabric one.

I wouldn't wear cotton *** if you paid me.

>
> But the cotton shirt typically does not last as long, and
> so factoring in the lifetime of the clothes, cotton is
> more expensive in energy terms. And if you include the
> wash/dry cycle and assume that gas or electric dryers
> are used, the cotton is MUCH more expensive over its
> lifetime . If both are hung on a line to dry in the
> sun, the cotton is just marginally more wasteful of
> energy. Some blends of cotton and synthetics were
> more energy efficient than clothes made from either alone.
>
> As for cold weather clothing, animal fur was favored
> in those days because it was "natural", biodegradable,
> and took less petroleum to produce than either cotton
> or synthetic fabrics. I did not expect that concern
> for the welfare of animals would someday trump concern
> for the earth, and make fur coats Politically Incorrect.
> Or that providing jobs for 3rd world workers would
> someday be viewed as something that Americans should
> go to great lengths to avoid.

At one level all change is for the worse, because of transition costs. You
just have to hope that there are other offsetting things that come through
fast enough - that the drivers of change trickle down well enough. The pace
of change is a large part of today's problems, since people don't have the
chance to get real improvement but are always having to wear (pun!) the cost
up front.

Off topic, I see you're no longer so scared of spam that you need to mask
your email address for replies. PML. 

-- 
GST+NPT=JOBS
I.e., a Goods and Services Tax (or almost any other broad based production 
tax), with a Negative Payroll Tax, promotes employment. 
See http://member.netlink.com.au/~peterl/publicns.html#AFRLET2 and the other 
items on that page for some reasons why.
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