Books

Secondhand for AdamSmithWorks

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

Last month, I blogged about the book Secondhand. This week, I wrote a piece about it for AdamSmithWorks: THE INVISIBLE THREADS: ADAM SMITH AND THE GLOBAL SECOND-HAND CLOTHING TRADE

The author of Secondhand, Adam Minter, simultaneously appreciates the value created by large “impersonal” markets and also paints colorful pictures of the individual people involved. He has respect for individuals in the system who, using local knowledge, extract all the value out of what rich people consider to be trash. Minter sits in the seat of Adam Smith.

But it is not the popular movement, but the travelling of the minds of men who sit in the seat of Adam Smith that is really serious and worthy of attention.

Lord Acton, Letter of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone

Another piece about clothes from AdamSmithWorks is: “WHO ARE YOU WEARING?” FASHION PRODUCTION IN THE AGE OF ADAM SMITH. This article does “the pin factory” for clothes. The global supply chain is incredible, just looking at manufacturing alone. Minter takes it further by following goods all the way from their first consumer to their very last user.

There is some good news about how the world is getting better as the average person gets richer, but trash does also cause problems as we consume more stuff. Does Minter write about the environmental concerns of the “fast fashion” camp? He has a different idea than what others have proposed like taxing by volume or banning some commercial activity. In terms of practical advice, Minter advocates for labeling consumer goods by how long they are expected to last. It’s tragic when someone spends $20 on a good that will wear out after 1 year when they should have spent $30 on a good that will last 10 years. There are some “dollar bills on the ground” here because consumers don’t accurately assessing quality at the time of purchasing. The power of brands to signal quality helps with this problem, but if you don’t want washing machines piling up in landfills then you might want stores to put a greater emphasis on durability at the point of sale. We do something like that with nutrition labels, so it is possible.

Secondhand by Adam Minter

Joy Buchanan2 Comments

Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale is a great book in my summer stack on fast fashion. I have always been interested in the combination problem-blessing of too much stuff. Adam Minter explains perfectly what many of us have been curious about.

Secondhand is America-centric, but he also travels to Japan to observe a country that is ahead of us both in terms of the demographic crisis and the mechanisms for handling old stuff. The reports from Africa are very interesting.

I have been wondering what is happening with Goodwill and with recycling in general. What hope do we really have of keeping goods out of the landfill? What should I do with a shirt my kid has grown out of? (The lady at work I used to give clothes to now runs away at the sight of me. I gave her too many bags.)

The Goodwill collection center near me looks cluttered and weird. After reading Secondhand, I’m more optimistic about dropping off bags there.

The barrier to sorting the used goods of the rich world is the scarcity of time and attention. This paragraph about a used book seller in Japan is heart-breaking:

It’s a thirty-year-old hardback novel, and the edition is rare. If it were at a traditional bookstore, it’s command a premium price. But Bookoff is about volume, and there’s a problem: not only does it lack a barcode, but it lacks an ISBN… “So there’s no way to price it in Bookoff’s system,” Kominato says. With a grimace, he gently places it on top of the books filling the recycling cage and steps away. (pg 40)

At least the book will get recycled into new paper, and the reality is that it was providing negative value as clutter in someone’s home.

Back in America, Minter describes what happens to donated goods at Goodwill in detail. Sometimes high-quality clothes are identified, but it is hard to get a good price for them. Some customers expect to pay less than $5 for a shirt, no matter what.

Customers are all about price, not quality…They won’t buy a $6.99 shirt that will last.  If that’s the option, they’ll buy a $2.99 shirt from Walmart. (pg 57)

Some consumers are in the habit of treating clothes almost like disposable goods instead of durable assets. They won’t pay for quality. Going out and getting a new replacement shirt costs less than lunch.

I don’t want to give away too much, since you will want to go get the book yourself. Here’s the funniest page:

Lastly, I’ll share a personal win. I know that I’ll need a school backpack for my youngest in August. I went to a local rummage sale and went to the backpack section. I found one that is good enough (some scuffs but plenty of sparkles). I’m happy about keeping this sparkly pink backpack out of the landfill for a few more years. I walked out of the sale with a load of gear that cost a total of $10. Next, I went to a coffee shop to work where I also spent $10. Used textiles and books are dirt cheap.

The Part I Remember from Eat, Pray, Love

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love delivered an insight, second-hand from “Deborah the psychologist”.

I remember a story my friend Deborah the psychologist told me once. Back in the 1980s, she was asked by the city of Philadelphia if she could volunteer to offer psychological counseling to a group of Cambodian refugees—boat people—who had recently arrived in the city. Deborah is an exceptional psychologist, but she was terribly daunted by this task. These Cambodians suffered the worst of what humans can inflict on each other—genocide, rape, torture, starvation, the murder of their relatives before their eyes, then long years in refugee camps and dangerous boat trips to the West where people died and corpses were fed to sharks—what could Deborah offer these people in terms of help? How could she possibly relate to their suffering?

“But don’t you know,“ Deborah reported to me, “what all these people wanted to talk about, once they could see a counselor?“

It was all: I met this guy when I was living in the refugee camp, and we fell in love. I thought he really loved me, but then we were separated on different boats, and he took up with my cousin. Now he’s married to her, but he says he really loves me, and he keeps calling me, and I know I should tell him to go away, but I still love him and I can’t stop thinking about him. And I don’t know what to do…

This is what we are like.

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Practical Sewing, Washing, and Drying Tips

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

I don’t agree with Elizabeth L. Cline on everything, but she’s written a reasonable book for Americans today. The Conscious Closet has some good advice for everyone.

A decade ago, Cline wrote Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion which investigated the environmental toll of clothes and the labor controversies. Since then, she has been working on what consumers can do differently.

Not every American household has practical knowledge of laundry and sewing anymore. Cline offers suggestions on how to economically maintain clothes longer by making sensible home repairs or washing them less. (Don’t wash a pair of jeans after just one wear. I don’t.) The Conscious Closet came out in 2019, so it’s up-to-date concerning chemicals and certifications and websites that operate today.

The way we wash and dry our clothes uses a lot of water and energy. If a person was looking for a way to lower their environmental footprint, then a marginal reduction of laundry loads might be a relatively easy way to do it. Since almost every American has an electric dryer, we have lost the tacit knowledge of how to air dry clothes. She gives the practical reminder, for example, that dark color clothes will fade if exposed to extended sunlight.

I feel like Cline could be even more conscious about the opportunity cost of time. She does explicitly acknowledge that in her chapter about re-selling your unwanted clothes.

To Dunk or Not to Dunk

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

I’m writing an article about fast-fashion, so I’m reading Fashionopolis by Dana Thomas. 

This paragraph is from the intro chapter:

Since the invention of the mechanical loom nearly two and a half centuries ago, fashion has been a dirty, unscrupulous business that has exploited humans and Earth alike to harvest bountiful profits. Slavery, child labor, and prison labor have all been integral parts of the supply chain at one time or another – including today. On occasion, society righted the wrongs, through legislation or labor union pressure. But trade deals, globalization, and greed have undercut those good works.

She invokes religion with “good works.” Thomas and I are of different opinions concerning globalization and “greed” and legislation. My instinct is to rip this paragraph apart. Has legislation never been motivated by greed? Has globalization not improved the lives of children? Has the mechanical loom not improved the lives of women who used to spend hours spinning and weaving by hand?

I am also reading pastor Tim Keller’s biography right now, so I’m having a What Would TK Do moment.

With his gifts (smart, funny, articulate…), Keller could have made a fortune by taking a side. He could have picked the Right or the Left. He could have expertly appealed to a Side, convincing them that they were good-smart and the Other is evil-stupid. Instead, Keller relentlessly stayed in the center. One of his books is actually called Center Church.

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Intro to Textual Indices: Ngrams & Newspapers

Zachary BartschLeave a comment

There have been a lot of popular papers in the past decade or so that make use of textual analysis. A fun one is “The Mainstreaming of Marx” by Magness & Makovi. They use Google Ngram to analyze the popularity of people mentioned in books and determine when Karl Marx became popular.  “Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty” by Baker, Bloom, & Davis is one of my favorites. They use set theory to detect terms in newspapers that denote economic policy uncertainty. In this post, I’m just going to describe practical differences between the two data sources and how the interpretations differ.

Ngram

Ngram measures takes a term and measures how popular that term is in its corpus of book text, which is about 6% of all books ever written (in English, anyway). Because popularity is expressed as a percent, we can make direct popularity level comparisons among words. For example: “Cafe” & “Coffee Shop”. In the figure below, we can see that the word “cafe” was more popular in books until very recently.

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You Cannot Cut Nominal Wages: Weavers in 1738

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

I’m reading The Fabric of Civilization (see my AdamSmithWorks on specialization). This is a fascinating story about cloth and markets:

In November 1738, clothier Henry Coulthurst informed weavers that he was cutting their piecework rates and would henceforth pay them in goods rather than cash. Needless to say, they were upset. Food prices were rising, and lower wages meant hunger and want.

Over three days in December, the weavers rioted. They smashed Coulthurst’s mill, wrecked his home, and “drank, carried out, and spilt, all the Beer, Wine and Brandy in the cellars.” They returned the following day to demolish Coulthurst’s house…

Wow. Our paper on cutting nominal wages is called “If Wages Fell During a Recession” We ran an experiment in which workers could retaliate if they experienced a nominal wage cut. They did! They couldn’t smash their employer’s house, but some of the slighted workers dropped their effort level down to the minimum level which meant that their employer made no more money in the experiment.

In my talk at IUE (show notes here and YouTube video), I connect the wage cut paper to another experiment on beliefs. One wonders, considering how serious the consequences turned out to be for Henry Coulthurst, why he was not able to anticipate the backlash against wage cuts. Being wrong was costly for him.

People are not always good at appreciating how strongly others have become attached to their own reference points. That’s why the paper on beliefs is called “My Reference Point, Not Yours“

Pins to Patterns at AdamSmithWorks

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

I’m at AdamSmithWorks this week with “FROM PINS TO PATTERNS: FOLLOWING THE THREADS OF PRODUCTIVITY”

In the tapestry of human progress studies, two authors, Adam Smith and Virginia Postrel, have left their mark on the story of productivity and innovation. Their books, written centuries apart, both explore the power of specialization and the division of labor.

Part of the reason this came out this week is that I’m reading The Fabric of Civilization. So good! It had come highly recommended before, but I finally have an excuse to read it because I’m working on an article about fashion.

The Value of Student Organizations and On-Campus Education: Anecdotal Evidence from Tim Keller

Joy Buchanan6 Comments

Tim Keller, who was the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, died last week. Starting and growing a church in Manhattan takes talent. I am reading Tim Keller’s biography by Collin Hansen through the lens of Tyler’s Talent book.

How did a successful leader and famous speaker get started? Keller is not described in the book as an outgoing child. Although academically gifted, “He grew up socially awkward, a wallflower…”

In 1968, Keller started at Bucknell University. Keller, who would go on to write multiple best-selling books, may have refined some of his writing skills through his coursework. From my reading, the most important aspect of his college experience was not the classes but the chance to be a leader of a campus (religious) club and having so many peers close by to practice “working” with. “Some 2,800 students lived within short walking distance of each other…[on campus].”

He planned retreats and invited famous guest speakers who appealed to his audience. He got feedback on the effectiveness of different messages and programs. Due to Keller’s efforts, the college club chapter meetings more than doubled in size. You can see the beginnings of the man who would go on to manage a large organization and attract over 5,000 people to hear him on the Sunday after 9/11.

In the debate over the value of a college education, the value of the experience students gain from holding officer positions in campus clubs is underrated. The information or credentials that can be obtained through online classes doesn’t build this kind of social capital. For leaders of organizations, college clubs are how some of them gained momentum and developed confidence.

Students can learn in a low stakes environment. For example, an ambitious club president can get 20 students to show up for pizza instead of 8. Club leaders get to make the key decisions and solve the problems that determine the success of their organization, because the faculty are too busy to micromanage club meetings. This gives students accurate feedback on the success of their own ideas.

In-person campus-based education is more than acquiring knowledge from textbooks. It is a dynamic environment in which students can develop social skills and form their network for future professional support. By participating in these organizations, students learn collaboration, decision-making, problem-solving, and mentoring — skills that are transferable across various domains of life.  

Chat Transcripts from Property Experiments

Joy Buchanan2 Comments

I’m reading The Property Species by Bart Wilson. I like chapter 4 “What is Right is Not Taken Out of the Rule, but Let the Rule Arise Out of What Is Right,” partly because I got to play a small part in this line of research.

Along with several coauthors, Bart Wilson has run experiments in which players have the ability to make and consume goods. According to the instructions that all players read at the beginning of the experiment, “when the clock expires… you earn cash based upon the number of red and blue items that have been moved to your house.”

Property norms can emerge in these environments, and sometimes subjects take goods from each other in an action that could be called “stealing.” The experimental instructions do not contain any morally loaded words like “stealing,” but subjects use that word to describe the activities of their counterparts.

Here is a conversation from the transcript of the chat room players can use to communicate while they produce and trade digital goods:

E: do you want to do this right way?

F: wht is the right way

E: the right way is I produce red you make blue then we split it nobody gets 100 percent profit but we both win

F: tht wht I been doing then u started stealing

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