The T-shirt argument
posted by saurabh in Robots, Schmapitalism |Lately I’ve been reading John Perkins’ “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”, which I heartily recommend if you are anxious to get steamed up about imperialism and debt slavery and the like. Anywho, therein Perkins says the following:
I recalled an economics professor from my business school days, a man from northern India, who lectured about limited resources, about man’s need to grow continually, and about the principle of slave labor. According to this professor, all successful capitalist systems involve hierarchies with rigid chains of command, including a handful at the very top who control descending orders of subordinates, and a massive army of workers at the bottom, who in relative economic terms truly can be classified as slaves.
This is a pretty powerful indictment of capitalism, if you have any kind of commitment to anti-poverty, equality, social justice, etc. And certainly many capitalist cheerleaders will promise you that capitalism will, indeed, inevitably lift everyone out of poverty and provide us all with the stable, eco-friendly utopia we’d all love to be a part of.* This led me to construct what I call “The T-shirt Argument”, which goes as follows:
Who will make the t-shirts?
This is a pretty simple question, but like most simple questions, chasing down the answer leads through enough winds and tangles to make a knot. A single observation is necessary, that t-shirts are cheap, and therefore their producers are necessarily ill-paid. The work is arduous and undesirable. So, who will make the t-shirts?
I believe there are two possible answers:
The first is the admission that capitalism cannot satisfy the demand of social justice, and, as Perkins’ professor suggested, relies on a mass of impoverished workers. In fact, we see this idea floating around in the mainstream all the time, alongside the promise of a capitalist utopia, in discussions of immigrant labor: “We need them to do the work Americans aren’t willing to do.” Someone has to be willing to earn pennies to do back-breaking labor - pick, box and ship the fruit, stock it, sell it, pick up the remains. After this admission, I think the argument is over. We no longer believe in divine rights or racial superiority, and so social justice is an absolute imperative; this moral pressure will eventually force our society into a new shape, and the above admission suggests that capitalism cannot satisfy that shape.
The second answer is: Robots.
But I don’t think this answer is really all that different from the first - a society where robots do all the labor is not REALLY a capitalist one - it’s a slave society, where the slaves just happen to be non-humans who we don’t have to feel guilty about oppressing. Is this a defense of capitalism? Only if we believe that capitalism will, inevitably, lead to robots.† This seems far from certain, to me, and in any case does not seem to be the way the great majority of capitalist effort is directed. Capitalism has never been interested in reducing human input into the labor process - except when that labor becomes too expensive. And I imagine the day is long distant where constructing a robot tailor will be cheaper than paying some Indonesians $1.10 an hour.
* Note that I ended this sentence with a preposition. You’ve likely done this yourself many a time, and you’ve probably also been told that this is grammatically poor form. This is bogus. English grammar obviously allows sentences to end with prepositions. However, Latin grammar does not, and apparently this rule is descended from over-eager grammarians, who believed that the rules of Latin grammar should be imposed on English. Similarly with splitting infinitives - in Latin, infinitives are a single word, and thus impossible to split. This grammatical aside has been brought to you by the Gerundive and the Past Perfect Indicative.
† Assuming a robot slave society is even desirable. I’ve previously made my arguments against such a society here. Can you believe that? I have an archived arugment against a robot slave society?!
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Why do t-shirts have to be cheap?
Or peaches for that matter?
Capitalism plus high and universal minimum wages can be a good start. Any product that can’t be produced by a high-paid worker at a price the public is willing to pay has shown itself to be unnecessary. If it’s a true necessity, people will pay more and sacrifice something else. For my part, I haven’t bought more than 1 t-shirt per year for the past decade.
Similarly people who spend higher portions of their income on food eat better and support local foods and farmers more than people who eat cheap. Hence the title “The high price of cheap food.”
cheap commodities leave more budgetary room for paying back large capital investment loans. good for progress, good for discipline.
But if large capital investment means merely the continuing and accelerating concentration of economic power into fewer and fewer hands, then is such “progress” and “discipline” really that worthwhile?
hush or i’ll smack you with my quantum ruler
hey! i tried to post something pro-capitalist (that wages in China are rising, contradicting predictions of unending oppression), and it never appeared.
so i guess the question is: have you programmed an anti-capitalist comment filtering robot? or are you doing this with cheap indian labor?
Sure, I’m not claiming that you can’t have rising wages under capitalism. Wages rose in the US throughout the twentieth century. But it also meant that by the end of the 20th century, our crap labor had to go elsewhere - like China. But what is the steady-state? Where does the process converge? Sure, wages are rising in China. But once everyone there is unionized and has a nice minimum wage, the crap labor must flow elsewhere.
As to high-priced T-shirts and high-end food and the like, perhaps its true that people will simply be forced to pay more for necessary goods. But the math doesn’t work out, for me. If I’m making t-shirt worker wages, I can’t afford expensive t-shirts, high-quality food, etc. People in the relatively affluent middle class can make those choices, but I don’t believe they’re open to everyone, or that minimum wages or consumer choice succeed in achieving that end.
liquidity would decrease. profits would subside. resources would be shared more effectively. revenue from successful gambles would be taxed more heavily. it would be ok. it would still be a flexible system and wouldn’t create totalitarian monsters.
people living 50 years from now will probably have other worries….
eh, sorry… income maps
Saurabh, This same argument is always being made against the minimum wage, and it’s fallacious. For one thing, the cheap labor in a t-shirt is a small part of the retail price. If a shirt sells for $10 and the labor portion is, say, 25 cents ($1/hour for 15 minutes, which seems like a long time) that you could multiply the workers’ wages 10-fold while increasing the embedded cost of the item by only $2.25. Even if that entire cost were passed on to consumers (rather than being shaken out of margins and other efficiencies), it’s hard to argue that the losses to consumers — an increase in t-shirt prices of 22.5%, and hence a 1/6 reduction in the number of t-shirts per year that a person can afford to buy — outweigh the benefits to workers of a 10-fold increase in pay.
Besides, higher pay is an incentive to replace workers with robots. In the U.S., Canada and Europe, even small organic farms use tractors because labor costs make hand-sowing and hand-reaping inefficient. As a result we have fewer people connected to the land (bad) and fewer people doing dull, exhausting work in the hot sun (good). In this manner you displace some workers, but over time they too find work at the new, higher minimum wage.
The price increases that result from a global minimum wage may be ok given that scarcity isn’t the great crisis in the world right now. People everywhere have t-shirts and snack food, be they brand name and new or generic and cast-off. I’m here in the “third world” where people living in general squalor are still well supplied with ham sandwiches and cable TV (drinking water is another story). There is plenty of stuff; if prices double and the wages of the poorest multiply 10-fold or 100-fold ($10 an hour instead of $1 a day), scarcity won’t be the problem.
There is no reason for t-shirts to be cheap. Made well, from good materials, a t-shirt can be worn every day for a year. You don’t need piles of t-shirts, you can get by with one a year and if you need to pay $100 for it, so it goes. If everyone is making $10 an hour they can all afford a t-shirt a year at that price and get a lot of other benefits as well.
Hapa, your arguments about liquidity seem specious. Nothing is less liquid than the investments of the rich — bonds, real estate, jewelry, art. The more cash that’s in the hands of the poor, the healthier the economy as a whole would remain. Poor people are very reliable consumers, with none of this discretionary boom-bust crap about “I’m just going to keep my powder dry now, I think I’ll put all my money in T-bills.”
I think the reason that the global minimum wage has never taken off is simple — the industrialists in the developed world have a powerful incentive to fight it, while those who would benefit are less organized and much less hopeful about their prospects for success. A classic case of diffuse and tremendous benefits for the world being outweighed by moderate but focused benefits for a special interest.
point taken. yeah, cash wise, i trust ordinary folks better, too. i meant more in the long term though, because i have this itch that says there’d be less upper-middle (PPP) money moving around because of greater interest in durability or upgrades instead of replacement. that’s a feature of a different economy and not really something i worry about and it’s probably as minor as you otherwise said.
in re: opposition, there are also state and non-state industrialists in non-rich countries who feel that building a strong local socio-economy is neither of their concern nor to their benefit and who enjoy hanging union member body parts in their salon.
I don’t remember offhand from my days in anti-sweatshop work, but $1.10 an hour for an Indonesian garment worker seems like a high estimate
estimates i saw for a beneficial hourly minimum were between 70¢ and $1.