[hintymad]

And I honestly do want a $400 sweater if we have a prospering manufacturing business. How many people stuff their house with clothes that they wear only once? How many people buy toys that their kids play only a few times? How many people hav a whole closet of shoes? Why do we have twice as large of closet room compared with people living in the 50s? Why do people just have to buy clothes every quarter, every month, every week? People around the world seem have been consumed by modern consumerism.

If people around me can get decent jobs because of local manufacturing, if US can keep developing talents in mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, and material engineering, hell yeah, bring me the $400 sweater.

[twblalock]

A lot of people can't afford a $400 sweater. What are they supposed to do?

Local manufacturing is for rich people who can afford it.

[triceratops]

A lot of now-developed countries had 100% domestic textile production 60-70 years ago and yet nobody went naked (OK not 0% obviously but very few). People owned fewer pieces of clothing overall, but everyone could still afford to be clothed.

If textile manufacturing became 100% local again, local wages would also rise by a similar amount. $400 wouldn't seem unaffordable for a sweater. Or the sweater would cost correspondingly less.

[Marsymars]

> People owned fewer pieces of clothing overall, but everyone could still afford to be clothed.

Note that owning fewer pieces of clothing overall doesn't significantly affect your yearly cost of clothing, it just affects your initial cost to fill out your wardrobe.

What drives up yearly costs is that most new low-cost clothing doesn't last for many wears - it either wears out quickly due to being of relatively low quality, or is eventually donated/thrown out after languishing in a closet for years.

[twblalock]

If local wages rise, wouldn't that include the wages of the people who work at the local cotton producers, textile workers, and clothing retailers? Thereby making the manufactured goods more expensive, rather than less?

If we could have cheap manufactured goods and also pay living wages to the workers who produce them, we would not have outsourced.

You can produce cheap goods with cheap labor (or robots), or expensive goods with expensive labor.

[triceratops]

I think there will be an equilibrium. Again refer to the argument in my previous post: production used to be 100% local and everyone could afford clothes. Not as many as now, but enough. The only thing that's changed is we now have more automation, so domestic production should be even more efficient than before.

Maybe sweaters will be $200 and wages will rise enough to be able to afford one every year. But we won't have $3 sweaters on Alibaba. From an environmental perspective, having more clothes than we need at dirt-cheap prices isn't all that great.

Some people may call this a reduced standard of living, and they are right from a reductive viewpoint where less stuff = lower standards. But isn't there more to quality of life than filling your closets with cheap shit you don't really need?

[powowowow]

Americans used to spend 15% of household income on clothing, and they got fewer items of clothing in return.

I understand that you think it best if the government force me to support my inefficient local textile manufacturer, my local cotton mill, and my local cotton grower. However I don't think that's best.

[triceratops]

I don't have an opinion on the subject frankly. There are plus and minus sides to both approaches. I was just pointing out the fallacy of the unaffordable "$400 sweater".

[hintymad]

See the second paragraph "If people around me can get decent jobs because of local manufacturing", and I'm not making that up. People used to buy $300 snickers (or loafer? I forgot) back in the late 80s.

[jrs95]

I get that it's just an example but there would be much lower priced locally manufactured goods if they didn't have to compete directly with imports in that market segment.

[seanmcdirmid]

Do you remember the early 90s and late 80s when clothes were much more expensive than in the late 90s on? That was really tough for a lot of us who didn’t come from rich families. I could probably deal with it now, but you aren’t considering a lot of people who would be absolutely ruined by a return to the old way.

[toomuchtodo]

Wages have been stagnant for 40 years. Fix wages (public policy, unions), not continually cutting cost to the bone to appease the shareholder class.

[AndrewKemendo]

The problem is the data doesn't support your position being even a minority position behaviorally - probably even for the things you own.

The results are in: The overwhelming majority of consumers buy the cheapest things/services that fit their need, and they do not price in externality discounts on their own accord.

[agumonkey]

But what knowledge is there to extract from people's behavior. It's massively dependent on context and paradigm. Give cheap cocaine to people they'll take it.

[Semaphor]

> How many people stuff their house with clothes that they wear only once?

Really? In what kind of bubble are you living?