I am published by Cato this week:
Fast Fashion, Global Trade, and Sustainable Abundance
This is part of a 10-part series called “Defending Globalization: Society and Culture”
Imagine trying to explain the world today to a person who time traveled forward from 300 years ago. How could someone who lived in France in the year 1600 understand our modern problems?
Person from the Past: So, how is it with 8 billion people?
Me Today: It’s bad. We have too many clothes.
PftP: Right. With 8 billion you wouldn’t have enough clothes for everyone.
MT: Too many.
PftP: Not enough?
MT: I said we have TOO MANY clothes. Not even the poorest people in the world want them. Shirts pile up on the beaches and pollute the ocean.
PftP: …
My article highlights the fact that we live in an era of unprecedented clothing abundance. First, that was not always true.
Most of human history has been characterized by privation and low‐productivity toil. As one American sharecropper exclaimed in John Steinbeck’s Depression‐era novel The Grapes of Wrath, “We got no clothes, torn an’ ragged. If all the neighbors weren’t the same, we’d be ashamed to go to meeting.”
https://www.cato.org/publications/globalization-fashion
Secondly, not everyone is celebrating.
The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe called the fashion industry an “environmental and social emergency” because clothing production has roughly doubled since the year 2000. Their main concerns are fast fashion’s environmental impact and working conditions.
Some of my article is a response to the critics of modern low-cost mass production.
Thirdly, I explain how we could keep most of the benefits of cheap clothes with less litter in the environment. The item I am most optimistic about is using our new artificial intelligence tools to re-sort the world’s junk. We would produce and throw away fewer clothes if we had a better system for rearranging the stock of goods that we already have. The problem I see today is that I have “perfectly good” clothes in my house that I don’t really want; however, attention and time are so scarce that no one will pay me for them. Even if I donate them, I worry that half will end up in the trash. Someone on this earth could use them but identifying that someone and making the trade still has high prohibitively high transaction costs. Very smart AI could come to my house and scan my stuff and pay me for it because very smart AI could get it to someone with a positive value for it.
If you’d like to see a trail of blogs that I wrote while in the research phase for this article, use https://economistwritingeveryday.com/?s=fashion
Lastly, we thank Tyler for the Marginal Revolution link.
Economist Writing Every Day 
That was a great article you wrote on Cato. Intriguing macro musings from that article:
” Humans have been voting with their feet for hundreds of years, indicating a preference for factories over subsistence farming and rural life. Economic development requires moving up the chain in productivity.”
and
“Reshoring low‐productivity work in rich countries is not a guaranteed way to improve outcomes. If the goal is to generate a living wage for billions of people, then our focus should be on making stuff more efficiently, which can also be better for the environment.”
LikeLike