Category: Reading

I took a few minutes this afternoon in the Freetown airport to pen some thoughts on this audiobook that I recently listened to.  (Note: you need either a short title or a short sub-title; you can’t have a long title AND a long sub-title.  No good.)  My thoughts:

a brief history of EVERYTHING about your t-shirt, from birth in a Texan cotton field to re-birth in a Tanzanian second-hand clothing market

Allow me to provide a more descriptive title for this volume: What I did last summer + a history of cotton growing in America + a history of cotton mills around the world + a brief history of Shanghai + a brief history of child labor + a brief history of labor activism + a brief history of workplace safety regulations + a not-at-all-brief history of US textile protectionism + a characterization of the international market for used clothes. Interesting? Often.

In the course of all these histories – occasionally interspersed with a reminder that we are following Rivoli’s t-shirt around the world – we jump from England to Japan to Texas to West Africa; we leap back and forth (and back and forth) from century to century. By the middle of the book, I had gotten dizzy and wished it had been a long magazine article.

But in fact, the second half is the most interesting. Rivoli gives a detailed history of textile protectionism in the United States, giving a peek into the dizzying, constantly morphing tariff and quota systems as well as the huge bureaucracy the system supports. And finally, she gives an illuminating description of what happens to the t-shirts after they get donated to the Salvation Army and how they make it to market stalls in East Africa.

Rivoli is an economist and so recognizes that her inherent leaning is toward free trade, but she argues for the value of both sides of the textile battle, both the free traders and the student demonstrators.

The first half of the book feels too long (even though it isn’t that long), and Rivoli’s strength is in illuminating description rather than careful analysis. But if you get bored, just skip ahead to the next chapter: There’s plenty to choose from!

[I listened to the unabridged audiobook narrated by Eliza Foss, published by Recorded Books. The reading is fine, but Foss’s voice is too syrupy sweet and storybookish for 8 CDs (think the voice-over narration from Desperate Housewives).]

England, the 1700s:

In traditional methods, the spinning of cotton was far more labor intensive than weaving, as it generally required between four and eight spinners to keep one weaver supplied with yarn.  In desperation, the British government began to sponsor competitions and award prizes to those offering solutions to the
spinning bottlenecks.

James Hargreaves rose to the challenge and patented his spinning jenny in 1770.*

A modern application of this approach to innovation is Advance Market
Commitments for vaccines, announced in today’s news:

Vaccines Deal To Help Poor States

“Six donors are close to approving a groundbreaking $1.5 billion mechanism designed to boost the development and affordable supply of new vaccines to the developing world.

The governments of Italy, the UK, Canada, Russia and Norway, as well as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will by June agree their support for final recommendations released today on a pilot Advance Market Commitment (AMC) to supply vaccines against pneumococcal disease, which kills 1.6 million people a year.

The AMC provides a guaranteed market for pneumococcal vaccines, underwritten by donors but with an agreement that recipient countries will assume an increasing share of the purchase cost over its lifetime until 2020. …

If judged successful, existing and new donors including Spain, Ireland and the US have already expressed interest in supporting up to two further proposed AMCs: one for malaria vaccines and one for tuberculosis. Initial estimates suggest malaria AMC would require $2.3 billion. …” [The Financial Times (UK)]

* from the painstaking The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An
Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade, p74-75.

You read Tropical Gangsters.  You watched American Gangster.  You read about the Economic Hit Man.  But nobody’s safe when the Economic Gangsters come to town.

My friend and colleague Ted Miguel is coming out with a book this fall, bound to be a good time with insight to boot.  From the website:

Meet the economic gangster. He’s the United Nations diplomat who double-parks his Mercedes on New York streets at rush hour because the cops can’t touch him—he has diplomatic immunity. He’s the Chinese smuggler who dodges tariffs by magically transforming frozen chickens into frozen turkeys. The dictator, the warlord, the crooked bureaucrat who bilks the developing world of billions in aid. The calculating crook who views stealing and murder as just another part of his business strategy. And, in the wrong set of circumstances, he just might be you.

In Economic Gangsters, Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel take readers into the secretive, chaotic, and brutal worlds inhabited by these lawless and violent thugs.

I’m not sure if the double-parking diplomat was the most intimidating way to introduce the gangster, but still…  Recommended reading this October.

* My take on the prequels: Tropical Gangsters was great, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man was underwhelming, and I didn’t see American Gangster.