Here is a good example, among others, why there is no such thing as comparative advantage in the real world. Trade lanes are established after policies are set, and then there are winners and losers. Check out this very well done NPR series on garment trade.
Multi Fibre Agreement
The right policy is no policy, unilateral free trade. That is not going to happen, but the closer we get the better life is.
The NPR is government media, so it presents USA world trade policy in a warm and fuzzy way. They follow a shirt from cotton field to wearer, pursuant to a kickstarter campaign. They do cover the factory collapse, but otherwise feature real people at places such as Monsanto and other entities that are involved in big AG. We see university science, but don't note the closed system of subsidies to big Ag inherent... all warm and fuzzy.
I thought the presentation of real factory workers was an actual portrayal of mass merchandiser manufacturers, and presents as a trade off factory jobs making girls free to marry a warm and fuzzy thing.
But pause, girls free to marry whom they like, but must leave kids behind in the village to work in the factory. This misses the horrors of transforming a culture to adapt to USA policy. What is missing in the report is the alternative.
Our policies invite corruption, from the practical action of a USA education for foreign leaders who return and then pursue USA policy of corruption/lack of freedom in their own countries. There is an alternative.
Look at the young women giving up a happy potential to pursue an unnatural actuality: anbandon all to work in a factory. Look at the woman in front of sewing machine all day. Cheap materials and construction and low wages all day long makes for a $40 NPR kickstarter shirt.
I have a half dozen industrial sewing machines. If I could ship those to the two girls featured in this series, they could use the machines to use fabulously expensive materials, time consuming construction to make in a day what they now get paid for a month's work. And more Americans would be walking around in nicer clothes. And the used clothing market would be flooded with very nice cast-offs on a regular basis. But there are several dozen hard laws in both USA and Bengladesh that makes this impossible.
Instead we have adults in USA walking around in professional settings dressed as if they are children at play, wearing NPR T-Shirts and feeling good about themselves, since they identify with the warm and fuzzy portrayal or cultural genocide tarted up as some sort of Darwinian evolution.
The design on the T-Shirt, we are told is based on Keynes reference to Animal Spirits. Animism as the basis for economic theory. Apt.
The series is one of the best examples of an asynchronous online course you are likely to see, so it is a good view from that technical point as well. But I found the summary appalling.
Check it out...
http://apps.npr.org/tshirt/#/about
Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.
Multi Fibre Agreement
Help came from an unlikely source: President Richard Nixon. In the early '70s, clothes and textiles were pouring into the U.S. from South Korea and other countries and were threatening U.S. textile jobs. European countries were having the same problem. In response, Nixon worked with European leaders to create a global agreement called the Multi-Fiber Arrangement. The boring-sounding deal reshaped much of the global economy.
The MFA set firm quotas for how much clothing other countries could sell to the United States and European countries. The rules were incredibly detailed: Sri Lanka can sell only so many bras to the U.S. each year; China can sell this many T-shirts, and no more.Richard Nixon intervention is hardly an unlikely source... he was president over the secretary of agriculture who said "get big or get out..." and then, "food is a weapon (cotton is ag)". USA policy has had wide-ranging effects, such as propping up Islamo-socialist regimes, while making life easier for crybaby millionaires in USA. I'd guess that 80% of the USA import export is unnecessary, simply instances of pursuing loophole-provided tax-evasion and money laundering. That is not to say without those loopholes trade would not be as much, because in a free market it very well may be. That is just to say we trade the wrong things. We force our food on unwilling trade partners and refuse to buy their clothes. In a free market they would feed themselves, send us nice clothes and buy iPhones made in USA, something like that.
And, crucially, around the time Chowdhury made his trip to the Daewoo clothing factory, South Korea had hit its quota under the MFA. That gave Korean companies an incentive to set up shop somewhere else — like, say, Bangladesh — to be able to make clothes for export to the U.S.
The right policy is no policy, unilateral free trade. That is not going to happen, but the closer we get the better life is.
The NPR is government media, so it presents USA world trade policy in a warm and fuzzy way. They follow a shirt from cotton field to wearer, pursuant to a kickstarter campaign. They do cover the factory collapse, but otherwise feature real people at places such as Monsanto and other entities that are involved in big AG. We see university science, but don't note the closed system of subsidies to big Ag inherent... all warm and fuzzy.
I thought the presentation of real factory workers was an actual portrayal of mass merchandiser manufacturers, and presents as a trade off factory jobs making girls free to marry a warm and fuzzy thing.
But pause, girls free to marry whom they like, but must leave kids behind in the village to work in the factory. This misses the horrors of transforming a culture to adapt to USA policy. What is missing in the report is the alternative.
Our policies invite corruption, from the practical action of a USA education for foreign leaders who return and then pursue USA policy of corruption/lack of freedom in their own countries. There is an alternative.
Look at the young women giving up a happy potential to pursue an unnatural actuality: anbandon all to work in a factory. Look at the woman in front of sewing machine all day. Cheap materials and construction and low wages all day long makes for a $40 NPR kickstarter shirt.
I have a half dozen industrial sewing machines. If I could ship those to the two girls featured in this series, they could use the machines to use fabulously expensive materials, time consuming construction to make in a day what they now get paid for a month's work. And more Americans would be walking around in nicer clothes. And the used clothing market would be flooded with very nice cast-offs on a regular basis. But there are several dozen hard laws in both USA and Bengladesh that makes this impossible.
Instead we have adults in USA walking around in professional settings dressed as if they are children at play, wearing NPR T-Shirts and feeling good about themselves, since they identify with the warm and fuzzy portrayal or cultural genocide tarted up as some sort of Darwinian evolution.
The design on the T-Shirt, we are told is based on Keynes reference to Animal Spirits. Animism as the basis for economic theory. Apt.
The series is one of the best examples of an asynchronous online course you are likely to see, so it is a good view from that technical point as well. But I found the summary appalling.
Check it out...
http://apps.npr.org/tshirt/#/about
Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.
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