[hackissimo123]

I can't find it now but I read an article once with a title like "The $10,000 Shirt" or something like that, which argued that in medieval times, the amount of labour that it took to produce a single shirt would cost about $10,000 at modern minimum wage.

If you were a peasant back then you might have owned two shirts: your regular one that you wore every day, and a 'fancy' one for church, weddings etc.. When your shirt got too ragged you cut it up and tailored it into clothes for your children, or used the material to patch up holes in other clothing. When even those got too decrepit you'd use them as kitchen rags etc. until they literally disintegrated. Cloth was too valuable to waste!

We truly do live in a world of abundant excess in the modern era, and we should appreciate it.

[nicoburns]

> We truly do live in a world of abundant excess in the modern era, and we should appreciate it.

We do, as in you and I, sure. But isn't the point here that those making things like mass-market t-shirt for very low wages are not sharing in that world of excess. At least not in an equitable manner.

Why is it that these people should work for low wages so that you and I can enjoy cheap T-shirts, but I'm not expected to produce websites and computer programs for low wages so that people can enjoy cheap business tools?

[sokoloff]

Scarcity of people who can create websites and computer programs as compared to the demand for that vs the lack of scarcity of people capable to make T-shirts vs the demand for makers of T-shirts.

This is in large part driven by most website development being semi or entirely custom. (People who use Shopify to make storefronts or Facebook to make company landing pages don’t make the same amount as Shopify or Facebook devs.)

[nicoburns]

It seems to me that much like remote workers often get location-based pay which is lower than that for someone for doing the same work in a location like San Francisco or NYC, it's less that there is oversupply of t-shirt makers, and more that the pay rates of their local market are lower overall which puts them in a weaker bargaining position.

And when you start looking at why that is you get pretty awkward answers like: because of selectively enforced free market ideals where capital is free to move across borders but labour isn't. Which are ultimately backed up by military power.