The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy

By delving into the past of a single artifact (a t-shirt), digging deeper and deeper into its origin, this magnificent book forces all those facile judgements, explanations, and proscriptions that we have as liberals/conservatives, socialist/Democrats/Republicans/libertarians, rich/poor, etc., to just melt away in the face of such a complete picture of our world. All my ideological conventional wisdom is---not so much "debunked" as shown to be hopelessly inadequate given the intricate reality.

I would recommend this book especially for young people who have grown up with words like "economics" and "politics" and "society" and "right & wrong" (in the social sense) but can't have any kind of concrete idea what these mean. Learning about cotton farmers and their state-sponsored relationships with university R&D and industry, about Chinese labor systems and the history of textile manufacturing, about Congresspeople's addiction to protectionist policies, and about how the impeccable tastes of Tanzanians drives a chain of entrepreneurs to Salvation Army charities---I think that these vague words like "politics" will be replaced by a set of images that will make it harder to indulge conventional wisdom.

Nonetheless, the writer didn't intend Pyrrhonian skepticism to be a building block of her treatise, and the economics training showed through poorly in a handful of instances. Two of these were in the part on China and textile manufacturing. (1) The writer seeks to show how, from New England to the American South to Japan to Hong Kong and Taiwan, places that were once dominated by textile mills today have, partly due to their heritage as textile mills, diversified industries; I was not swayed by the line of reasoning presented here, since the author just handwaves away Manchester's case: the origin of all the world's textile mills is a pretty backwards place: "In and around the ruins of an empire, kids are dancing." We have a clear counterexample to the notion that "places that were once dominated by unpleasant textile mills are thriving today". (2) In the same chapter, the author espouses the shockingly naive belief that China's lack of democracy is a core obstacle to civic well-being. As many other parts of the book show, democracy is neither necessary nor sufficient for a nation to overcome obstacles. (3) In the final part, the author is a victim of academic specialization and demonstrates a lack of prehistory and archeology by naively alluding to Aristotelian and Biblical aversion to international trade in order to support the notion that moral considerations have always been more important than economic ones. This reminds me of something C.S. Lewis wrote in "Study in Words", that whenever you see people saying what a word doesn't mean, it was precisely the fact that that is what it did mean by then is what moved people to oppose it. Considering both the rarity of tin (the metal) and its importance to the Bronze Age of prehistory together, international trade has been a critical element of complex human societies since prehistoric times, and it is not clear whether the views of philosophers and priests on the subject have any more relevance than confirming trade's importance. (Wikipedia seems to have a good introduction to this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_sources_and_trade_in_ancient_times )

These few complaints are against second-order theorizing, which the book is in fact relatively light on. It is primarily a report of the author's travels and discussions with farmers and factory workers and merchants and politicians, and a detailed study of history, that combine to make an intricate and utterly fascinating story of unexpected outcomes, unintended consequences, and the raw vivacity of social life.

My favorite part was the one on textile manufacture, because it combines a modern snapshot of China with historic snapshots of previous places that engaged in the "race to the bottom" (cheapest places to have textile factories). The most interesting part was the one on American tariffs: this was a story that reminded me of "Game of Thrones" or "DaVinci Code" (not that I've read either, just what I can make out about their stories: endless and unexpected making and breaking of alliances, backstabbing, surprise attacks and even more surprising outcomes, legal chicanery, power corrupts, desperate last stands).