[WalterBright]

> Imported secondhand clothing is sold at prices that local textile producers cannot compete with. As a result, local garment industries collapse, unable to survive against the flood of cheap imports. Hence, jobs are lost in manufacturing and design, stifling innovation and economic growth.What was intended as charity often becomes a form of economic sabotage.

Isn't that another version of the Broken Window Fallacy? Destroying things to create jobs re-creating them is a net loss.

[xp84]

Well, it's pretty hard to generalize that to the entire globe, or universe. Imagine if an alien race started landing thousands of crates on Earth full of cars, computers, clothes, etc. Every day for 30 years the crates come, all of it's free. Several dynamics can arise:

1. The elites grab the crates and hoard them, leveraging their existing power to make sure they enrich themselves and extend their power. They sell the items, but at a lower price than the Earthly-produced items, which is easy since they have 100% margin.

2. Whether or not #1 happens, it becomes impractical to make any of these goods for a living, so people stop. Eventually, the factories are dismantled or simply crumble.

Now Earth is dependent on the aliens to keep sending the crates. If the aliens ever get wiped out, or just elect a populist who doesn't like to give aid to inferior planets, then we won't have any cars, or clothes, or computers.

[jjkaczor]

We don't even need to bring aliens into this scenario - as this is the direction we are already heading towards with fully automated manufacturing and AI replacing vast sectors of human labour...

(And yeah, I get it - no one "really" wants to work on a "soul-crushing" assembly/production-line... People want to make art (or games) or write novels... (both areas of creative work which are ALSO being targeted by AI)... but people definitely want to "eat" and have shelter and our whole system is built on having to pay for those priviledges...)

[WalterBright]

Or people do other things.

Around 1800, 95% of people worked on the farm. Today it is 2%. People do different things now.

[xp84]

This doesn't address my point though. You're talking about how it's okay if we lose all our factories to make the cars, computers, and whatever else is in the Crates. And sure, if all those workers can find new careers like they did when we industrialized farming, that's all well and good.

I'm talking about how our usage of the "Crate Goods" makes us incredibly vulnerable to a disruption in Crate delivery.

[em-bee]

this is not destroying things to create jobs. this is about globalization negatively affecting local culture. clothing especially represents culture. if people can not afford to create their own clothes then that has a negative effect on their culture as a whole.

[WalterBright]

I don't see how localized culture clothing styles would be destroyed by importing different styles from other countries.

[em-bee]

nobody buys the local style because it is more expensive than the imported stuff. as a result the local style dies out, or it doesn't get a chance to be developed in the first place.

[WalterBright]

Preventing imports will force them to pay the higher prices for the local stuff.

Maybe it's better to let them decide what they want to buy.

[em-bee]

that's how you protect your local economy. that's pretty normal everywhere. in europe people go on strike if imports threaten their livelyhood. dumping cheap clothing on an economy that can't handle it is not really helping. it's going to make the local stuff even more expensive because there is less demand for it.

local development simply does not happen if outside products are allowed to dominate.

if we were talking about a part, say less than half of the market, that would be fine, but the import of cheap clothing is so massive that there is no more room for a local market.

[WalterBright]

Yes, I know this practice is commonplace. What it does is "protect" a specific industry, but that results in less choice for consumers and higher prices.

Protectionism has value when applied to strategic industries, like chip making, that you cannot afford to have cut off.

Making local garments is not a strategic industry.

P.S. Every businessman believes in the free market for everyone except his own business, which the government should protect from competition. The same for unions.

[ragall]

Whether or not is a net loss for the planet as a whole is irrelevant. Africa countries need jobs to sustain a middle class so they no longer accept donations of clothes.

[WalterBright]

Just send them money, then, rather than breaking windows to provide fake jobs.

[xp84]

"Just send them money" implies that we don't use them as a dumping ground for the imperfect/unwanted goods, implying that we do destroy those goods.

If you want to compare this to broken windows, the controversy is: the developed countries produce so much glass that we don't know what to do with it. When we have extra and irregular pieces of glass, we can either melt the extra panes down, or we can just ship boatloads of "free glass" to Africa every week (likely result: Their glass factories will eventually shut down). Doing the former is simply not the same as breaking windows to make work for glaziers as in the analogy you're referencing.

[ragall]

You can start if you wish.