
The $3500 Shirt – A History Lesson in Economics - wallflower
http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-lesson-in.html
======
stegosaurus
I've posted in another thread about this but what interests me primarily is
how housing has changed over time.

In 'ancient history', it's fairly well known that people lived in ridiculous
conditions, ten to a house and so on.

But what strikes me is that in recent years (say, the last 50 or so), housing
has rocketed out of proportion around the Western world whilst other goods
have become basically irrelevant.

I could buy 1,000 decent spec laptops for the price of a modest home. Or over
a hundred thousand cups of Starbucks coffee. The car I have outside? Sixty of
them and I could get a bargain basement flat.

Renting? A brand new Android flagship for the price of a months' rent. An
utterly imaginably spectacular device.

I'd much, much rather live in a world in which a laptop was a huge expense
that I could only literally afford once every few years, but to be able to
afford to put a roof over my head without hustling 8 hours a day.

Will we ever get there?

~~~
jseliger
_Will we ever get there?_

At the moment, political and regulatory barriers dwarf technological ones, per
Yglesias in _The Rent is too Damn High_ :
[http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO).

In many areas, building with century-old technologies like steel frames and
elevators is effectively illegal. Where it isn't illegal, the approval process
is often so cumbrous that it substantially raise the price of building:
[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/a-tale-o...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/a-tale-
of-two-town-houses/306334).

We as a society have chosen to make a lot of housing very expensive.

~~~
stolio
It's a bit juvenile to blame building codes without also admitting why we have
them: they save lives. Look at the death tolls of earthquakes that happen in
countries with and without enforced building codes.

On the other side of the coin, thanks to deregulation houses are commodities
that people buy, sell and trade for profit, which raises their prices and
causes volatility in the market.

Is that Atlantic article really comparing the building codes of Dallas and
L.A. without admitting one of those cities has to plan for earthquakes and the
other doesn't? And that one of those cities is already too big while the other
is looking to grow? Where's L.A. going to get the water for these cheap new
housing developments?

TL;DR building codes and growth restrictions are a lot more complicated than
some rich people wringing their hands and using regulations to make themselves
money.

~~~
seanp2k2
It is more complicated than rich people gaming the system to get richer, but
that's definitely part of it, and the generations-long monopoly on land
("ownership", as much as any human can claim that a piece of the earth belongs
to them and them alone) enables basically unlimited rent-seeking priced at
whatever the market will bear.

[http://m.sfgate.com/homeandgarden/article/What-San-
Francisco...](http://m.sfgate.com/homeandgarden/article/What-San-Francisco-
didn-t-learn-from-the-06-quake-2520018.php) goes into what happens to building
codes after e.g. an earthquake. TL;DR not much, and I'm sure SF will get
absolutely wrecked in the next "big one", people will die because stuff is old
and not up to code, there will be public outcry for safer buildings,
developers will lobby against it and basically do anything they can to
continue to slap apartments up as cheaply as possible while charging $3000/mo
for a 500sqft studio, and they'll build even-more-expensive yet not much safer
buildings in the ruins. Then repeat.

~~~
obstinate
> developers will lobby against it

Eh. I don't believe this is true. For example, in the Great San Francisco
earthquake, something like 90% of the damage was caused by fires. Most of
these fires were and are caused by unsecured water heaters, rigid gas
connections, etc. There are now building codes that improve on these issues --
all water heaters are now strapped, gas connections are flexible, etc. Among
other protections that I know of, shear walls are mandated in certain cases,
engineering reviews are done, houses are bolted to foundations at more regular
intervals, the proportion of various walls that are windows is more limited,
etc.

Yes, regulations were slackened in 1906, but

1\. Earthquakes between 1906 and now show that regulations DO tighten over
time. If developers are trying to lobby against these, they are failing. (More
likely, the property owners paying the developers are the ones who would
lobby. It benefits the contractor to charge for more work.)

2\. Even if we didn't have historical evidence to discount your position, the
resources available to the people of that time and the people of our current
time are not remotely comparable. Our capabilities for manufacturing and
building are dramatically more vast.

More on the evolution of these codes, which further contradicts your view that
developers have been able to prevent their strengthening:
[http://quake06.stanford.edu/centennial/tour/stop10.html](http://quake06.stanford.edu/centennial/tour/stop10.html)

~~~
reality_czech
75% of all SF housing units are over 50 years old. Source: [http://www.sf-
planning.org/ftp/general_plan/Housing_Element_...](http://www.sf-
planning.org/ftp/general_plan/Housing_Element_Part_I_Data_Needs_Assmt_CPC_Adopted.pdf)
So the technlogical improvements in earthquake safety since the 1960s are
simply irrelevant for most residents. They're living an ancient, unsafe homes.

What ought to happen is proposition 13 ought to be repealed, along with the
restrictive zoning laws. Then people who are sitting on lots of undeveloped
property would have to sell it to developers, because the taxes would be
unaffordable otherwise. And developers would put up new properties. Prices
would then come back to earth and poor people would be able to live in houses
again.

But the prevailing mentality in the US is that houses are investments, not
places to live, so don't expect this to happen any time soon. Instead, you can
expect politicians to intervene if housing starts to become affordable again,
like they did in 2007. ("Oh no! Housing prices DECLINED!") It's basically a
giant transfer of wealth from the young to the old. But people are too
ignorant of economics to understand how and why it's happening, so you can
expect it to continue.

~~~
nowarninglabel
"So the technlogical improvements in earthquake safety since the 1960s are
simply irrelevant for most residents. They're living an ancient, unsafe
homes."

That's a nice theory, but it's wrong. The city is requiring buildings to get
retrofitted with earthquake safe structural foundations. It's every building
with greater than a few units, so the rather small 100+ year old Victorian I'm
in will be required to go undergo retrofitting by 2017.

~~~
raldi
Do you have a link for that? I follow this kind of thing pretty closely and
haven't heard anything like that, at least for private residences.

~~~
nowarninglabel
Here ya go: [http://sfdbi.org/mandatory-soft-story-
program](http://sfdbi.org/mandatory-soft-story-program)

P.S. Thanks for all the good work you did at Reddit.

~~~
raldi
Oh, I missed where you mentioned this only applies to buildings with a minimum
number of units -- I thought you meant there was a program that applied to
single-family homes.

Re: reddit, pshaw, I was only there two and a half years. :) Most of the hard
work was done before I showed up and after I left.

------
jedanbik
The sewing machine changed the world. I took a sewing class a few months ago,
and the instructor was very clear that before that machine was invented, women
would spend a significant portion of their time making clothing and other
textile items by hand, needle, and thimble. The sewing machine is a classic
example of how technology can fundamentally disrupt society by removing manual
tedium. All of us here on Hacker News can be inspired by this seemingly minor
piece of history. It's what we should strive for in our work.

~~~
DanBC
> The sewing machine is a classic example of how technology can fundamentally
> disrupt society by removing manual tedium. All of us here on Hacker News can
> be inspired by this seemingly minor piece of history. It's what we should
> strive for in our work.

The sewing machine shifted the tedium of manual pabor from most people onto a
much smaller number of very poor people who now work in conditions which are
illegal over here (and often illegal where they are too) for very little
money.

When I buy a shirt I don't know if it's expensive because a fair proportion of
the price is being paid to the people making it, or if someone near the sales
end of the chain has "added value" and is taking increased profit.

I don't find it inspiring. I guess I should be considering what these people
would have instead - looming carpets by hand perhaps, which would be worse.

I would really like to know that the £47 ($70) shirt I buy isn't exploiting
the very poor.

~~~
iopq
People who work in sweat shops would usually have much worse conditions to
live in if they didn't work in a sweat shop. They'd be probably trying to pick
things out of garbage dumps.

~~~
cauterized
A lot of people around here seem to think "economically rational" is the same
thing as "ethical". In a lot of places and times in the world (including US
cities in the early 20th century), due to crushing poverty and a glut of labor
it has been economically rational for people to accept work in factories with
horrific working conditions for wages that will barely feed them. That
includes where they're physically locked into massively unsafe buildings. Such
as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. That doesn't make the practice of offering
jobs in such conditions ethical.

~~~
mseebach
"Ethical" in these situations aren't black and white objective affairs. The
relevant metric is that whether pushing the levers we have available to us as
consumers, even policy makers, in the rich west, affects a _more or less
ethical_ outcome in the end.

We emphatically do not have the tools in our possession to make billions of
people in south east Asia rich enough and educated enough in one stroke to
avoid the situation you're describing ("crushing poverty and a glut of
labor"). The one tool we do have to affect such an outcome, although slower
than is desirable, is trade - and revoking that trade is pretty much the only
lever we have to push, and the outcome for these people will be drastically
worse.

That doesn't mean that there can't exist actions that businesses and
individuals could and should take to improve matters, but step 0 is realising
that those are drops on the ocean: We're not going to fix this wholesale,
except by trading as much as possible.

~~~
cauterized
By no means would I suggest cutting off trade as the solution to these
problems (not sure why you jumped to that particular idea). Just saying that
we shouldn't be _satisfied_ with having our clothes and electronics made in
death-trap sweatshops or factories where they're exposed to toxic chemicals
(or any number of other ethical violations related to hours worked, overtime
pay, or even freedom to leave) just because sweatshops are better places to
make a living than trash heaps.

That's not the only choice available. We can still pressure brands to pressure
factories to provide humane and safe working conditions, and hell - is it too
much to ask for brands themselves (and the purported human beings working
there) to make ethical choices without threat of bad press?

------
ciconia
One important fact to take into account is that the cost of labor in the
middle ages cannot really be compared to today's minimum wage. The calculation
based on $7.25 an hour, coming to $3500, is a bit of a hyperbole [1].

In fact, even today in many places in the world (India and Africa come to
mind), artisans still produce fabrics, clothes and other low-tech products by
hand for way less than American minimum wage [2].

I'm not a historian by any means, but it is my understanding that before the
industrial revolution the major cost of production was the cost of materials,
and the cost of labor was marginal. Contrast this with modern production,
which is continually occupied with reducing the cost of labor, either by
automation or by offshoring to third-world countries.

[1] Of course, any kind of cost comparison across 8 centuries is suspect. A
quick search produced this:
[http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng240/medieval_prices.html](http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng240/medieval_prices.html)

A peasant's linen chemise is listed as costing 8d in 1313, which is equivalent
in purchasing power to anywhere between GBP 22.30 to 5970, depending on the
index, according to this:

[http://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/result.php?year_sour...](http://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/result.php?year_source=1313&amount=0.03333333333333333&year_result=2015)

[2] [http://www.bls.gov/fls/](http://www.bls.gov/fls/) shows cost of labor for
different countries in recent years. According to the site the average hourly
compensation in India in 2010 was $1.46.

~~~
jholman
It doesn't matter whether $7.25 is hyperbole. What matters is whether or not
479 hours is hyperbole.

Let's see. IRL, I own around ten t-shirts, and they seem to wear out in 2-4
years, so let's say around 100 wearings. I'll stretch that out to 730
wearings, because I'm "wearing it until it disintegrates".

I'll hope to buy a shirt on odd-numbered years, and new pants on even-numbered
years. I won't buy any other cloth goods.

If I work 40 hour weeks, I have 2080 hours of labour in a year.

Suppose I am equally economically valuable to a spinner, such that I can trade
one hour of my productivity for one hour of theirs.

If I need a new 479-hour garment every year, then I need to allocate nearly a
quarter of my life to buying clothes, even though I wear clothes until they
disintegrate, and only own one shirt and one pair of pants. That is
fantastically expensive.

~~~
ars
Your shirts wear out much faster then theirs. The fabric is much thinner for
one, and you wash (and worse tumble dry) it often.

Your calculation of 40 hour weeks is quite wrong. 100 hour weeks were
completely normal back then.

So it took a month to make a shirt, and it should expect to last 10 years or
so.

The Talmud says that a poor person had a budget of 50 zuz per year per person
for adult clothing (not including shoes). Someone calculated based on the
price of bread that 50zuz is equivalent to $166. Other calculations find 50zuz
to be $1000.

One zuz was the average daily wage for an unskilled worker. So it would take
you about a month and a half to get clothing.

~~~
jholman
I agree that 40 hour weeks was silly. ;) 100 hour weeks are also silly,
however, especially when you consider the religious proscriptions against
working on the Sabbath. 100 hour weeks is almost 17 hours a day (six days),
leaving 7 hours for all sleep, eating, hygiene, recreating, family care, etc.
Pretty much physically impossible. Also, as I understand it (though I am no
expert), accounts of medieval life show that aside from sowing season and
reaping season (when everyone DID work 100-hour weeks for very short periods),
there was lots of leisure time. Let's compromise at 60-80 hour weeks.

I also agree with your points about my shirts (thin and tumble-dried). On the
other hand, my shirts are woven/knitted from a very consistent fabric, which
might help, and they're exposed to very little mechanical abuse outside of the
dryer (I do not do physical labour, I'm very sessile, and for that matter I
don't get much acidic sweat on them). And my shirts _are_ usually showing
multiple (small) holes after those ~100 days of wear. You really think their
shirts would last 3650 wearings, 36 times as much as my shirts? Thirty six
times? Nonsense. My 7x might be low, but I bet it's closer than your 36x.

Also, as I mention in a cousin-post, I think the author screwed up her math
twice, such that I think the correct number given her inputs is 879 hours,
which I'm gonna call 10-15 weeks of labour. And then once we account for other
clothing, as I did in my previous comment, by assuming that all non-shirt
garments collectively are as expensive as one shirt, we're up to perhaps 25
weeks of labour total.

So it takes four months to make a set of clothes, and the set lasts a few
years. So I'm no longer saying "one quarter of your life", I'm saying "more
than ten percent". When you wear your clothes until they fall off you.

The Talmud reference is very interesting. You say 50 workdays (that's 8
weeks... you agree that the people referenced in the Talmud didn't work the
Sabbath, right?) for 52 weeks of clothing, which is one sixth of one's life.

Sounds like our estimates agree.

~~~
ars
Yah, we do mostly agree.

A few points:

I've worn shirts for longer than 100 days with no holes. T-shirts are very
thin and don't last. Thicker fabric lasts exponentially longer, not just a bit
longer. And the dryer is really hard on fabric.

I stand by my 10 year guess-timate - especially when you include repair.

I don't think there was ever any real leisure time. Instead it was low-energy
time. For things like spinning and making cloth, but not hard work. So 90
hours a week might actually be right. (100 was too high.)

The Talmud numbers are for a poor person, not an average person. Those are the
numbers below which someone should get social help. Most people would spend
more I think.

The 1 zuz a day is income from outside work. A person would also work at home,
so their income could be another 50% on top of that (not as money but as made
at home goods). I assume the 1 zuz a day is for the poor person, not the
average.

I do wonder if other people worked 7 days a week, and the Tamlud figures are
not representative of the majority.

------
zaroth
Puts the 'are computers going to drive as all into unemployment' debate in
perspective. A 1,000 fold reduction in input costs has predated us, and the
economic results speak for themselves. What's another 10x reduction compared
to that?

Taking 500 hours (30,000 minutes) of labor to make a _shirt_ (and that's just
counting the final steps of production) and making it 30 minutes (if that),
for production of 1 billion shirts, turns what would have been full-time
employment for 240 million people into full-time employment for 240,000.
(Typing on a phone, no pen handy, need to double check that)

What's super cool is from our perspective on the curve, no matter how far
we've gone, a 99.99% reduction already, there's still always another 50% we
can remove in labor costs.

Will _true_ perfect AI let you jump the asymptote to absolute zero labor
costs? Then our creation will have surpassed us and made us like mice are to
humans today. Squeak!

The other really interesting subtext is the incredible input cost constraining
production and mandating complete use and recycling. No such thing as a
landfill when the inputs are precious even after being "worn to threads"!

~~~
facepalm
The transition was pretty gruesome, so your analogy is not all that
reassuring. Nobody thinks we will all die, just that a lot of us will be very
poor.

~~~
zaroth
I have the complete opposite interpretation. Life before was gruesome and
today we live in a world of relative _plenty_ if not obvious _excess_.
Reduction of input costs makes us more wealthy not less. How many shirts do
you own? How long do you work to afford a lavish bowl of berries and cream?

~~~
sukilot
Not everyone lives your lifestyle. Most of the people who manufacturer your
stuff are very poor and live in Asia.

~~~
tempestn
And yet even most of them are probably better off than the average middle-age
peasant.

------
swatow
Fascinating article. While the concept of a "real" dollar is a leaky
abstraction (hence the constant bickering about how the price indices that
determine pensions etc. should be calculated), it still is a striking way to
demonstrate how the relative prices of things have changed over time.

------
hristov
This is all well known stuff. But I am glad people are writing about it.
Sometimes people seem to worship the past without realizing the incredible
poverty people lived in back in the day.

Also, I like the jpeg of the black mask mag featuring the Maltese Falcon at
the end. The best american modern literature is pulp fiction.

------
pimlottc
> Oh, and in the middle ages, it would be expected that all of the inside
> sleeves would be finished.

What does this mean, that the "inside sleeves" be "finished"? And is an
"inside sleeve" different from an "outside sleeve"?

------
Animats
I think he's underestimating the yarn production rate for a drop spindle. But
it's quite correct that textiles were incredibly expensive before machine
production. Textile machinery launched the Industrial Revolution.

As for why textiles are so cheap now, search for "jet loom".

~~~
pcurve
just looked at toyota jetloom video on youtube. That was an eyeopener.

------
kaa2102
This article shows the true value of innovation over time in saving time,
money, and effort.

------
Someone
I think the article is incorrect in saying _". A shirt like this [...] would
be a fine weave"_

If it really took a quarter of a year to make a fine-woven shirt, poor people
wouldn't have worn fine-woven clothing. It's too expensive, firstly to make,
secondly because it doesn't last as long, and thirdly because it isn't warm
enough in the cold months (for poor people that could easily be more than half
the year. They wouldn't have glass in their window frames, and would have
little in the form of heating)

------
dhfromkorea
Might be slightly tangential, but reading the post reminded me of Rational
Optimist[1], a book about how key parameters of our lives are improving
despite constant global pessimism. (e.g. Food availability, income, and life
span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down)

[1][http://www.amazon.com/Rational-Optimist-How-Prosperity-
Evolv...](http://www.amazon.com/Rational-Optimist-How-Prosperity-Evolves-
ebook/dp/B003QP4BJM/ref=sr_1_1)

------
linuxhansl
I agree that we in most of the western world generally are awash in things and
that we all are "ungrateful bastards" (wording mine).

But then the author goes on about how time it would take to make a shirt in
the medieval age and then calculates the cost using today's minimum wage. That
make no sense at all, and dies give us any information.

Maybe compare it to price of a loaf of bread back then, that would give us an
idea. Then we'd have singing to go by.

~~~
ctdonath
Loaf of bread? Grind the wheat using a hand mill or mortar/pestle, mix
ingredients, knead, rise, bake. Doing it all low tech, takes about two hours
of work: price at least $14.50 per loaf on labor alone.

------
sidcool
>That's why single women were called "spinsters" \- spinning thread was their
primary job.

Quite a revelation for me. Very interesting read.

------
facepalm
I was expecting another story on Bitcoin :-) But this is great, too.

------
a8da6b0c91d
Good clothing is still surprisingly expensive relative to other goods. You can
get a perfectly good new mini-fridge or microwave oven for $100. A pair of
jeans that will last heavy usage for three years is over $100. I find that
confusing. I would expect the mini-fridge and microwave oven to be many times
the price of a pair of blue jeans.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Where are you buying your jeans? I live on a farm. A pair of jeans that will
last under heavy usage is about $30 at Tractor Supply.

~~~
a8da6b0c91d
Non-selvedge denim will begin fraying badly at the cuffs and probably have
holes in the crotch in well under a year of daily three mile walking,
nevermind more active wear. Any selvedge denim jeans cost over $100. Sitting
on a tractor or on various other farm machinery is not heavy wear.

~~~
avinashv
I manufacture jeans, and this is misleading.

The strength of any textile (knit or woven) is a first a function of the yarn
and then of the structure. Any heavy twill that remains unwashed for long
periods of time (as all "selvedge purists" seem to do) will last longer than a
pair of cheap jeans that get tumble-dryed twice a week.

Please stop perpetrating this myth that selvedge denim is somehow inherently
stronger or better than regular denim. It should be indicative that most
people need to turn the cuff of a pair of selvedge jeans to look for the
actual selvedge before they know for certain.

To your original point that you find it confusing that apparel is expensive
relative to other goods, it's probably because retail margins are
disproportionate to the amount of cost it takes to sell garments for a list of
reasons out of the scope of a Hacker News comment. Apparel is, at the point of
sale out the door of a manufacturer, cheaper than it has probably ever been
today. The amount of processes involved between planting a cotton seed and
loading a container of packed garments is absolutely awe-inspiring in scope,
and the fact that a pair of jeans is billed by a manufacturer at ~>$10 is
crazy.

~~~
shutupalready
> _retail margins are disproportionate to the amount of cost it takes to sell
> garments for a list of reasons out of the scope of a Hacker News comment_

I think it's perfectly appropriate for HN. Do tell us your thinking about why
apparel is expensive relative to other goods. I've wondered this myself.

~~~
avinashv
The emphasis of the scope was the word "comment" and not "Hacker News"; i.e.,
it's a lot to cram into a comment. Here are a handful of thoughts:

In a nutshell, I think apparel is too cheap, but raising prices isn't the
solution because of the bargain-hunting and markdown pricing expectations that
consumers have that is moving its way further upmarket every year. Brands are
scared to raise a penny on their prices, and are right to be fearful because
consumers don't have loyalty. While manufacturers are living on terrible
margins, retailers (who get decent margins) have to deal with the ridiculous
cost of retail real estate and stock write downs, which means that the only
person who really wins is the importer (in cases when the importer exists) and
the consumer. The importer can also lose this game if they work on a
replenishment basis (double storage cost there if you're following along).

Plenty of other reasons exist. If we use the earlier example of a
refrigerator, then things like automation come into the picture. The apparel
industry, for the most part, is not really automated. I've seen TV
manufacturing facilities, and they are so alarmingly automated it seems fake
at first glance. Even then, companies like Sony have lost money every year for
decades selling TV because the rest of the business can sustain huge losses so
Sony can have their logo staring at you every day of the week in your living
room. Apparel businesses don't have that kind of luxury because most are not
small hobby businesses of a larger conglomerate.

Then there are lots of political issues such as the United States customs
policies. FTA like CAFTA/NAFTA, AGUA, special treaties like the ones with
Jordan are all affecting apparel. Do you know a synthetic garment from a
country like Sri Lanka (lots of, for example, Nike production happens there,
so think about an athletic garment from them) will be imported at a 32% duty
rate?

"Fast fashion", which today basically means very cleverly convincing consumers
to buy more clothes means the SKUs have gone up for manufacturers, but since
nobody really gets paid anymore the margins get shrunk because of a loss of
economies of scale right from the start of the value chain until things are
put on retail shelves.

Etc. etc.

TL;DR Apparel costs about what it should, if we assume it should be a
reasonably low-margin, high-risk business. Comparing it to the lower-margin,
higher-risk electronics industry is not an easy comparison because of how
different the businesses are.

