The $3500 Shirt – A History Lesson in Economics

http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-lesson-in.html

by wallflower • 11 years ago

404 216 11 years ago

swatow3• 11 years ago

Fascinating article. While the concept of a "real" dollar is a leaky abstraction (hence the constant bickering about how the price indices that determine pensions etc. should be calculated), it still is a striking way to demonstrate how the relative prices of things have changed over time.

jedanbik2• 11 years ago

The sewing machine changed the world. I took a sewing class a few months ago, and the instructor was very clear that before that machine was invented, women would spend a significant portion of their time making clothing and other textile items by hand, needle, and thimble. The sewing machine is a classic example of how technology can fundamentally disrupt society by removing manual tedium. All of us here on Hacker News can be inspired by this seemingly minor piece of history. It's what we should strive for in our work.

elmin• 11 years ago

As said in the article though, spinning and weaving actually takes up much more time than sewing. I would say the biggest innovations in clothing were the cotten gin, the power loom, and dry cleaning. Before dry cleaning, a suit had to be unstitched to be cleaned.

DanBC• 11 years ago

The sewing machine is a classic example of how technology can fundamentally disrupt society by removing manual tedium. All of us here on Hacker News can be inspired by this seemingly minor piece of history. It's what we should strive for in our work.

The sewing machine shifted the tedium of manual pabor from most people onto a much smaller number of very poor people who now work in conditions which are illegal over here (and often illegal where they are too) for very little money.

When I buy a shirt I don't know if it's expensive because a fair proportion of the price is being paid to the people making it, or if someone near the sales end of the chain has "added value" and is taking increased profit.

I don't find it inspiring. I guess I should be considering what these people would have instead - looming carpets by hand perhaps, which would be worse.

I would really like to know that the £47 ($70) shirt I buy isn't exploiting the very poor.

jedanbik2• 11 years ago

While I agree that sweatshop labor is deplorable, the flip side of that can be seen by looking at the number of tailor shops in your area or mine. It won't cost $3500 for any of them to make you a bespoke shirt, that's a guarantee.

Now a bespoke pair of shoes on the other hand...

iopq3• 11 years ago

People who work in sweat shops would usually have much worse conditions to live in if they didn't work in a sweat shop. They'd be probably trying to pick things out of garbage dumps.

icebraining• 11 years ago

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/19...

stegosaurus8• 11 years ago

I've posted in another thread about this but what interests me primarily is how housing has changed over time.

In 'ancient history', it's fairly well known that people lived in ridiculous conditions, ten to a house and so on.

But what strikes me is that in recent years (say, the last 50 or so), housing has rocketed out of proportion around the Western world whilst other goods have become basically irrelevant.

I could buy 1,000 decent spec laptops for the price of a modest home. Or over a hundred thousand cups of Starbucks coffee. The car I have outside? Sixty of them and I could get a bargain basement flat.

Renting? A brand new Android flagship for the price of a months' rent. An utterly imaginably spectacular device.

I'd much, much rather live in a world in which a laptop was a huge expense that I could only literally afford once every few years, but to be able to afford to put a roof over my head without hustling 8 hours a day.

Will we ever get there?

stegosaurus8• 11 years ago

Adding to this; I could totally conceive of a situation in which I could end up homeless but still rocking a modern smartphone - because it just simply is an irrelevant expense in the grand scheme of things. It'd buy me 2 weeks worth of food and shelter, in exchange for losing my 'window on the world'.

richardbrevig• 11 years ago

I've seen homeless youth charging their phones at outside outlets.

brazzy• 11 years ago

And if that amazes you it marks you as old - because you remember a time when a mobile internet device was a frivolous luxury rather than a not-cheap-but-not-truly-expensive necessity. Ancient people can be recognized for having the same attitude about cell phones in general :)

0942v8653• 11 years ago

I doubt it. You can't exactly mass-produce houses or land, so it seems that the gap will only grow as factory efficiency rises.

dalke3• 11 years ago

Average size of a home in the US is 2,600 sq. ft (2013), says http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/04/real_estate/american-home-si... . 40 years previous it was 1,725 sq. ft. The number of people per household has dropped, though only by a little.

(2.63 now and 2.7 in the early 1980s. FWIW, in 1950 it was 3.37. See http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0884238.html and http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html .)

So something has changed to encourage people to buy larger homes for the same number of people.

mtbcoder• 11 years ago

In the US, especially in the Midwest, former farm fields are quickly flipped and filled with stick-built homes in mere months. Seems pretty "mass-produced" to me.

gnoway• 11 years ago

Sure you can, at least with houses: that's what a manufactured/mobile home is.

The problem is that in the US a manufactured home is usually considered substandard, low class or otherwise undesirable.

zimbu668• 11 years ago

You can't exactly mass-produce houses

There are certainly companies trying, depending on your definition of "mass produced". http://www.bluhomes.com/our-process

Doesn't seem much cheaper than conventional housing, but they are built inside, so your framing isn't getting rained on before the house is done.

sosborn• 11 years ago

An utterly imaginably spectacular device.

Maybe, but it is also entirely unessential. Nobody has to sell you on the need for a roof over your head.

rithmoflife• 11 years ago

Nobody has to sell you on the need for being connected to society, which is why millions of people living in wretched conditions spend what little they have on cell phones.

And while shelter is necessary for survival, most of the walls, rooms, windows, wires, etc. of a modern home are entirely unessential.

spcoll• 11 years ago

As the trend towards urbanisation (rural flight) continues worldwide, and as population continues to grow, the rent isn't going to get any cheaper in the decades to come, anywhere.

Even imagining that 3D printing techniques can significantly cut down the cost of new construction (as is starting to happen in China), land scarcity will be the overriding factor. Save building cities on the ocean, we can't escape it.

nugget• 11 years ago

There's plenty of land, the problem is that everybody wants to be in the same dense urban cores. Drive 3-4 hours north or south of San Francisco and you have lots of cheap, beautiful coastal land available.

stegosaurus8• 11 years ago

Are we really short on land, though?

It strikes me that by combining building high-rise blocks with expanding out into the countryside we could manage it.

The planning situation in the UK (which is a particularly dense country) seems utterly despicable to me at present. The game being played is essentially 'haves' bemoaning the loss of small amounts of countryside while 'have nots' are stuck paying dramatic portions of their income to the former group.

Add to that the long arm of the law (buy a field and stick a trailer on it? expect a visit) and it's almost dystopian.

(please read my comments if you're interested more on the UK situation - others have shown me that in the US rural land is actually affordable, if you have savings)

BerislavLopac• 11 years ago

We already are there; this is pretty much the situation in most of the world.

nsxwolf• 11 years ago

Out here in the Midwest, my quarter acre plot didn't cost a whole lot - but the house itself cost a fortune in materials and labor. Maybe I wouldn't have needed a 30 year mortgage if the place could have been 3D printed with novel materials.

I'd still need a job to pay my property taxes, but wouldn't have to bust my ass as much.

qopp• 11 years ago

As others have said, you can machine print cars, laptops, and phones, but you can't machine print desirable land.

The price you pay for rent is the price to keep everyone else off of that land for some period of time (or 1000x that to gain the right to 'own').

The idea is that if you can't afford the cost, you should give up that space to someone who can (presumably is making more money).

Resource scarcity is a "hard" problem, and the hard truth is that because something aren't unlimited, not everyone can get what they want.

There may come a day where we can't feed everyone.

jseliger• 11 years ago

Will we ever get there?

At the moment, political and regulatory barriers dwarf technological ones, per Yglesias in The Rent is too Damn High: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO.

In many areas, building with century-old technologies like steel frames and elevators is effectively illegal. Where it isn't illegal, the approval process is often so cumbrous that it substantially raise the price of building: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/a-tale-o....

We as a society have chosen to make a lot of housing very expensive.

iopq3• 11 years ago

No, the people who own houses have chosen to make them expensive. Because it is expensive, those people are quite rich. This gives them political power to make it more expensive. See: San Francisco regulations on construction.

stolio6• 11 years ago

It's a bit juvenile to blame building codes without also admitting why we have them: they save lives. Look at the death tolls of earthquakes that happen in countries with and without enforced building codes.

On the other side of the coin, thanks to deregulation houses are commodities that people buy, sell and trade for profit, which raises their prices and causes volatility in the market.

Is that Atlantic article really comparing the building codes of Dallas and L.A. without admitting one of those cities has to plan for earthquakes and the other doesn't? And that one of those cities is already too big while the other is looking to grow? Where's L.A. going to get the water for these cheap new housing developments?

TL;DR building codes and growth restrictions are a lot more complicated than some rich people wringing their hands and using regulations to make themselves money.

justincormack• 11 years ago

Land is the main cost of buildings in most of the developed world, not building.

baddox3• 11 years ago

I agree with everything except that "we as a society have chosen" this. A very very tiny portion of people (far smaller than "the 1%") have chosen this.

Retric• 11 years ago

The actual cost of constructing a house is almost meaningless in most areas people want to live. What your paying for is the infrastructure around houses. So, if we really want cheap housing find out how to make cheap roads, bridges, water and sewer systems, electrical systems, schools, hospitals, ... etc.

That said, people are also living in much larger houses with more amenity's like AC, and dishwashers.

PS: There is a completely reasonable argument that building a new house or apartment complex should pay their fair share of existing infrastructure ~10k-50+k/person in most areas. That this does not happen is simply a form of corruption as zoning becomes a quick way to massively change the value of land after purchase.

brudgers2• 11 years ago

In most of the US it's pretty easy to entitle the construction of a new dwelling. The difficulty tends to be proportional to demand - i.e. regulatory requirements reflect market forces as the result of political action by the citizens of a representative democracy.

In practice building with steel and elevators is more expensive than using traditional American methods involving stick framing and low rise construction. The more expensive methods only make sense when demand is high enough to justify the additional costs.

A primary constraint on development density in the US is parking. By the time resources are committed to accommodating residents' vehicles, only higher housing prices associated with 'luxury' class housing make development of a site with dense housing feasible. Again, it's a market dealing with the parking regulations. Parking regulations reflect the body politic's interest in protecting the commons that is our roadways.

There's cheap housing in Detroit. There isn't in Mountain View. That's just the nature of markets.

vacri• 11 years ago

People will spend their money somewhere. As everything else gets cheaper, they dump more of their money into accommodation.

dagw• 11 years ago

housing has rocketed out of proportion around the Western world whilst other goods have become basically irrelevant.

Only if you want to live where everybody else wants to live. I mean if I really wanted to I could sell my small flat in town and buy a nice enough house for less than 20% of what I got for my flat. The only problem is that the house would be in the middle of nowhere and I don't want to live in the middle of nowhere.

hueving2• 11 years ago

Only if you want to live where everybody else wants to live.

There is no such place where everyone wants to live. SF is desirable to only a very small percentage of the population. Yet it has some of the highest housing costs in the world. All it takes is an imbalance of supply for the demand. If there are only two houses available in a location that 200 people are interested in, they are going to go for very high prices regardless of what the rest of the world thinks of them.

notahacker• 11 years ago

You can afford to put a roof over your head without hustling 8 hours a day. Even in the UK you can get two bedroomed terraced houses for the equivalent of around 20 decent-spec MacBooks, or less than a basic-spec Vauxhall Insignia. Or 25 years worth of drinking Starbucks on a daily basis

The compromise is that your house is in Burnley or Accrington with an oversupply of housing, rather than the South East, with an oversupply of purchasing power seeking to get on the property ladder.

stegosaurus8• 11 years ago

Thank you for the tip on Burnley/Accrington, I genuinely appreciate it and will be looking into it more. Quite a bit cheaper than the North East, I was looking at about 60-70K GBP for ex council. Would leave a lot more leeway for a lower paid job.

It doesn't really help that much though, unless you're willing to live hundreds of miles from family, friends, potentially split with your partner, etcetera.

The decent spec MacBook chat is interesting if you're a well paid worker, but not really otherwise. I can't see myself ever buying a full price MacBook or a new car unless my situation changes dramatically.

It's not really even the pricing that bugs me as much as the complete lack of understanding demonstrated by the Government. Every single policy is aimed at inflating house prices to the sky seemingly indefinitely.

elsporko• 11 years ago

The business model for a laptop and technology in general has become one of planned obsolescence. Products need to be cheap so that a new one can be purchased in a short time.

I do not necessarily subscribe to that notion myself. My phone is a Samsung Fascinate that was purchased in 2010 and runs Froyo. I have no tendency toward latest and greatest however I do not dictate the market either.

You make an interesting point on housing.

sliverstorm6• 11 years ago

The planned obsolescence came from the huge strides the market was making. I don't care that old Pentium 3 chips don't last for fifty years, because they are already relics twenty years later.

Making consumer goods bombproof when they will be comically obsolete in a decade or two seems like a waste of time, money, and resources.

segmondy• 11 years ago

Yes you can, but you don't want to. You can afford $1 houses, come to Detroit. But no, you probably rather live in silicon valley or New York.

ctdonath3• 11 years ago

An amusing exercise is to visit http://zillow.com and search for properties <= $10000, $1000, $100, $10 & $1. You have to dig thru a lot of distractions, but in some large areas you can find some reasonable options (given circumstances).

Kiro2• 11 years ago

I don't understand how a house can cost $1. What prevents me from buying 100 of $1 houses just for fun? Seems like a pretty decent investment if nothing else.

crimsonalucard2• 11 years ago

You describe a paradox.

The cheap laptops and Android devices exist only because the population is manufacturing the devices by hustling 8 hours a day to keep a roof over their heads.

learnstats2• 11 years ago

The parent suggested he would prefer a world where housing was cheaper but was willing to concede that electronics could be more expensive. Not a paradox.

crimsonalucard2• 11 years ago

Also I want to mention that it is unlikely we will ever get "there" as property is not a good that can be mass produced. If I spend 1 million dollars designing a phone, I only need 20 dollars to instantiate a physical model.

Property cannot be instantiated. It is only bought, sold, taken or discovered and there's no more left to discover.

ANTSANTS2• 11 years ago

Land cannot be mass produced, but dwellings certainly can be. There is plenty of unused or underutilized land in the US waiting for a high-rise to be plopped on it.

saalweachter• 11 years ago

Well, there's also a question of what you're getting for your money.

A ten-by-ten one-roomed shack with a stove in the middle, no running water, no bathroom and no foundation can be had for about a few thousand dollars, and if you put it on an undesirable quarter acre in the middle of nowhere the land will cost you another thousand.

A well-built small home, a few hundred square feet with a well, a septic tank, electricity and the appropriate four or five rooms will cost you thirty to fifty thousand dollars.

The problem isn't just economics or regulations or technology; it's also one of standards and social status. I'm willing to wager that far more people buy a big expensive house because either they want the extra features -- air conditioning, plumbing, and enough bedrooms and bathrooms to qualify as a small mansion -- or because they want to impress their friends, family and neighbors, than do because the market doesn't make small, cheap houses available.

davidf182• 11 years ago

The high cost of housing is caused by "rent seeking" -- a microeconomics term in which politics rather than wealth creation is used to increase someone's wealth. Harvard economist Edward Glaeser and many others have written about this. Zoning is used to regulate housing density and overuse of historic landmark preservation both artificially increase the price of land. Thus, landowners with billions of dollars in property are made all the more wealthy.

a8da6b0c91d3• 11 years ago

Middle and upper class people are always desperately trying to figure out ways to keep people with anti-social tendencies out of their neighborhoods and away from their kids. As it stands in America there's no legal mechanism to banish annoying people, as was the historical way to handle this. Lower income is a very flawed but still useful proxy for criminal or otherwise annoying tendencies. So you get folks everywhere consistently trying to erect cost barriers to housing, because affordability excludes lower income residents. This is in reality one of the main reasons for the original suburban flight. The cost of car ownership necessary for suburban residency excluded social elements the new suburbanites were trying to evade.

If somehow there were a legal mechanism where people on a block could collectively say "No, these people aren't allowed to move in. Go away." Then housing would be way, way cheaper. Nobody would have nearly so strong an interest in driving up prices with artificial scarcity.

Terr_2• 11 years ago

The high cost of housing is caused by "rent seeking" -- a microeconomics term in which politics rather than wealth creation is used to increase someone's wealth.

I disagree with the term "politics" here, because rent-seeking behavior is much broader and can involve other tactics.

zaroth8• 11 years ago

The "cost" of a house is not the sticker price! Due to mortgages and resale market and inflation and such the actual cost of a house is two things; 1) taxes, 2) upkeep. Better materials will continously reduce upkeep over time so it's really just taxes and utilities.

You really don't need to hustle 8 hours a day to own a house. You need to pick one and live in it for 60 years or whatever and then give it to your kids and then they give it to theirs, etc.

It doesn't jive with modern western culture, but if the first things you did after high school wasn't to pile on x-million of consumption for college, housing, wedding/honeymoon, a whole new set of 'stuff', etc. then there would be little need to work at all.

sliverstorm6• 11 years ago

It also helps a lot if you're cool with picking a house that isn't in the middle of the United State's most popular cities. As best I can tell, demand for property in San Francisco, Manhattan, etc has never been higher. The affordable homes of yore were not located in Times Square.

bane• 11 years ago

I think another interesting bit is how little other stuff we're buying now. I'm finding it's becoming harder and harder to find birthday and christmas presents for friends and relatives...once you have a decent computer and smartphone, so much other stuff simply becomes irrelevant.

Thinking back 20 or 30 years ago, there simply used to be many more kinds of things that people would buy. As a child I had a toy closet full of games and toys of infinite variety. My friend's kids all seem pretty happy with a tablet and maybe some legos and that's about it.

Domenic_S3• 11 years ago

Lego are still a thing! My friend and I discovered this. He bought me the Imperial Star Destroyer set for my birthday. We drank whiskey and built it all night -- it was one of the best nights I've had recently!

joelhooks• 11 years ago

This is interesting in that I look at all the crap my kids have and was thinking the exact opposite. I had a handful of things. A few games. A few outfits. These kids have piles of stuff (alongside their laptops, smartphones, and consoles). We are always throwing out/donating stuff too.

Maybe they are just spoiled...

minthd2• 11 years ago

True. This article gives further support to this:

Teenagers Favor Tech Over Clothes

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/business/less-prep-more-pl...

Tl;dr teens buy less clothes, prefer tech, and restaurants. Why restaurants ? because of the wifi.

graeme• 11 years ago

A bit part of it is that people like to live either in the center of things, or out at the edge with a nice green property.

That makes much of the in between land non valuable.

New York City has property worth almost a trillion dollars. That would be the economic return if someone could clone the city.

But we can't clone the city. We can only build out along the edges of existing cities. Or try to build dense in the middle and complain about regulations.

Why not grow smaller cities into New Yorks? Because the core of New York was built at a time when we built differently. Cities grow differently now thanks to cars, and it's very hard to build a new old city.

So places in the middle or on the edges of old cities are expensive. There are many places you could live for very little, but who wants to live there?

ericd6• 11 years ago

What's preventing people from making dense, mixed-zoning walkable cities with good public transit like NYC elsewhere? Why it a requirement that cities have their commercial areas mostly separate from the residential areas?

snowwrestler2• 11 years ago

You can buy a house for literally $1 in several neighborhoods in Detroit right now. Perfectly livable houses are available for the cost of a few MacBook Pros in other depressed cities and towns.

I think the issue is really that the places you want to live are also the places lots of other people want to live--not that the absolute floor on housing costs has risen so far.

In ancient history the people who lived 10 to a house also rarely owned the house or land where they lived. Either they lived in a society with little organized sense of individual property rights (really ancient history), or they were sharecropper tenants on some lord's land. Not so different from young people in a popular metro area today, except that back then there was almost no possibility of ever changing their lot in life.

zrail• 11 years ago

As with most things, the one dollar Detroit houses are far more complex than that. For example, typically you will pay taxes on the appraised value rather than the one dollar. You're also buying into a neighborhood with little in the way of city services, although the city is working on that.

visural• 11 years ago

As with the shirt example in the original article, the cost of labour (i.e. paying people for their time) represents the majority of the cost in building a house. The other items you list are using cheaper overseas labour in their construction, whereas if you're building a house by definition you need to pay local craftspeople for their time. Also due to their physical size, houses require lots of people to put together (i.e. the time is in some sense proportional to size of the item being constructed).

ommunist• 11 years ago

Land in the city is a scarce resource. You can have a very cheap house in Siberia. Will you move there? I doubt.

fleitz• 11 years ago

We are already there. See Detroit.

whybroke• 11 years ago

The retirement systems is utterly inadequate and pensions are non-existent. Thus the middle class is entirely dependent on effectively a housing ponzi scheme to avoid squalor (or even homelessness) in old age. So they will always fanatically, desperately vote to raise property values whatever the long term consequences.

Even more importantly, mortgage holders and other large institutions have a vested interested in raising property values and will guarantee that polices drive that.

Obviously housing prices can't outpace wages forever so one generation, probably the current one, is going to be screwed with houses that can't raise enough in value and yet have no real retirement security.

kimdouglasmason• 11 years ago

Even better, once house prices stop outpacing wages and the average Joe realizes, we'll be in the situation where it is much cheaper to rent than buy, and stuff the difference into an index fund, which will yield much better than housing capital gains.

At that point, you're looking at long term house price declines which only stop when buying becomes cheaper than renting.

The next 30 years are not going to look like the previous 30 in the west. However, consumer goods will keep getting cheaper.

Shivetya• 11 years ago

people buy too much house.

Its as simple as that

ap22213• 11 years ago

Two thoughts.

First, I'm currently in the process of remodeling my basement. And, it's quite expensive. What I'm spending on remodeling 1500 square feet is approximately the cost of 5 inexpensive cars. Although some of these costs have come from the building supplies, most of the costs have come from labor. Labor in expensive areas is more expensive.

But, then the cost of land is expensive. There are network effects. Upper-middle income people want to live around people like them. Educated people want to live around other educated people. Educated people want to live in nice climates, in places where they can go out into nature, where they can have ready access to nice shops, art galleries, clean cafes, etc. There are not enough of these types of areas to meet the demand.

Alternatively, one can buy an old house in a rust belt city for $25,000. People don't want to move there. It's cold, the people are less educated, there aren't fancy shops around, no good coffee, no hiking, no pleasant strolls around the neighborhood. There are fewer high-paying jobs.

In a rust belt city, you can build a brand new house for less than $90 a sq-ft. Sure, it won't have the nicest fixtures, but you can.

In rural areas, outside of the rust belt, you can buy an acre of land for $1000. You can build a nice place for under $100,000. But, do educated, upper-middle income people want to live there?

Some possible solutions: 1) reduce the costs of building. Services should pop up that import labor from less expensive areas. The rise of more modular housing, 3D printing of houses, etc. should lessen the costs. 2) create more areas where upper-middle income, educated people want to live. This is harder, because there needs to be jobs, first. It's a chicken/egg problem. How do you get employers to set up shop where there aren't any educated workers?

throwaway90999• 11 years ago

" A brand new Android flagship for the price of a months' rent. An utterly imaginably spectacular device."

But this isn't an utterly imaginably spectacular device. It's merely a run of the mill consumer-grade portable computer according to modern standards.

Your rent would be insignificant compared to, for example, the cost of a truly spectacular computer by modern standards, such as a modern search engine cluster with a price tag of perhaps a half billion dollars not counting ongoing opex.

tormeh• 11 years ago

Think of it this way: Whenever residents in a sought-after area get cheaper computers, that means they have more money. Since everyone (also outside the area) gets more money that means they have more money to pay for housing. And voila! The prices of housing in the desired area rises and all savings are gone.

Since desirable land is a limited resource, it's' price will simply rise with people's ability to pay for it.

sanderjd• 11 years ago

I agree that the price of land is a tough nut to crack, but the cost of actually building stuff on that land could be reasonably expected to fall at a rate similar to the rate of other manufacturing. That it hasn't is, I think, largely because we build buildings right where they end up, so we can't take advantage of the efficiencies afforded by assembly lines and outsourced labor. This mostly seems like a good thing to me. The notable exception is trailer homes, for which the price of the land really does dominate the cost.

scottlocklin• 11 years ago

"Will we ever get there?"

Sure; move to Wyoming. San Francisco Bay Area and NYC do not reflect reality in the rest of the country, let alone the world.

blueskin_• 11 years ago

I'd much, much rather live in a world in which a laptop was a huge expense that I could only literally afford once every few years, but to be able to afford to put a roof over my head without hustling 8 hours a day.

I'd rather have the opposite, to be honest. Houses are affordable because there are mortgages; most people need lots of hardware in their life and only one house.

kbart• 11 years ago

Who would be slaves then if not decades of mortgage or expensive rent? Nobody (with power) wants people to be too free and happy, because that won't make them work; only pressure will (physical in less advanced countries or economical in more so).

facepalm3• 11 years ago

I was expecting another story on Bitcoin :-) But this is great, too.

kaa2102• 11 years ago

This article shows the true value of innovation over time in saving time, money, and effort.

hristov• 11 years ago

This is all well known stuff. But I am glad people are writing about it. Sometimes people seem to worship the past without realizing the incredible poverty people lived in back in the day.

Also, I like the jpeg of the black mask mag featuring the Maltese Falcon at the end. The best american modern literature is pulp fiction.

ciconia• 11 years ago

One important fact to take into account is that the cost of labor in the middle ages cannot really be compared to today's minimum wage. The calculation based on $7.25 an hour, coming to $3500, is a bit of a hyperbole [1].

In fact, even today in many places in the world (India and Africa come to mind), artisans still produce fabrics, clothes and other low-tech products by hand for way less than American minimum wage [2].

I'm not a historian by any means, but it is my understanding that before the industrial revolution the major cost of production was the cost of materials, and the cost of labor was marginal. Contrast this with modern production, which is continually occupied with reducing the cost of labor, either by automation or by offshoring to third-world countries.

[1] Of course, any kind of cost comparison across 8 centuries is suspect. A quick search produced this: http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng240/medieval_prices.html

A peasant's linen chemise is listed as costing 8d in 1313, which is equivalent in purchasing power to anywhere between GBP 22.30 to 5970, depending on the index, according to this:

http://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/result.php?year_sour...

[2] http://www.bls.gov/fls/ shows cost of labor for different countries in recent years. According to the site the average hourly compensation in India in 2010 was $1.46.

jholman3• 11 years ago

It doesn't matter whether $7.25 is hyperbole. What matters is whether or not 479 hours is hyperbole.

Let's see. IRL, I own around ten t-shirts, and they seem to wear out in 2-4 years, so let's say around 100 wearings. I'll stretch that out to 730 wearings, because I'm "wearing it until it disintegrates".

I'll hope to buy a shirt on odd-numbered years, and new pants on even-numbered years. I won't buy any other cloth goods.

If I work 40 hour weeks, I have 2080 hours of labour in a year.

Suppose I am equally economically valuable to a spinner, such that I can trade one hour of my productivity for one hour of theirs.

If I need a new 479-hour garment every year, then I need to allocate nearly a quarter of my life to buying clothes, even though I wear clothes until they disintegrate, and only own one shirt and one pair of pants. That is fantastically expensive.

nfm• 11 years ago

Depending on the era and location, slave labour totally skews the calculation too.

swalsh• 11 years ago

The numbers seem to be based off current days knowledge of old world methods. I'd imagine after spending so much time doing a task, they must have found a way to be at least a bit more efficient at using their own tools to do the job.

ars2• 11 years ago

Your shirts wear out much faster then theirs. The fabric is much thinner for one, and you wash (and worse tumble dry) it often.

Your calculation of 40 hour weeks is quite wrong. 100 hour weeks were completely normal back then.

So it took a month to make a shirt, and it should expect to last 10 years or so.

The Talmud says that a poor person had a budget of 50 zuz per year per person for adult clothing (not including shoes). Someone calculated based on the price of bread that 50zuz is equivalent to $166. Other calculations find 50zuz to be $1000.

One zuz was the average daily wage for an unskilled worker. So it would take you about a month and a half to get clothing.

brc3• 11 years ago

One thing that is in historic accounts, is that people used to die in the street in London quite frequently. This is probably related to the fact that their dwellings were so small.

If the person died in a not-so-good area street gangs would strip the corpse of clothes because they were so valuable.

That alone speaks to the relative value of clothes. Most of us wouldn't wear a piece of clothing we found, even if it was in good condition.

linuxhansl• 11 years ago

I agree that we in most of the western world generally are awash in things and that we all are "ungrateful bastards" (wording mine).

But then the author goes on about how time it would take to make a shirt in the medieval age and then calculates the cost using today's minimum wage. That make no sense at all, and dies give us any information.

Maybe compare it to price of a loaf of bread back then, that would give us an idea. Then we'd have singing to go by.

ctdonath3• 11 years ago

Loaf of bread? Grind the wheat using a hand mill or mortar/pestle, mix ingredients, knead, rise, bake. Doing it all low tech, takes about two hours of work: price at least $14.50 per loaf on labor alone.

swatow3• 11 years ago

It's not really possible to compare prices across such large time periods. The author chose to fix the price of one commodity (unskilled labor), while you chose a difference commodity (food).

Someone• 11 years ago

I think the article is incorrect in saying ". A shirt like this [...] would be a fine weave"

If it really took a quarter of a year to make a fine-woven shirt, poor people wouldn't have worn fine-woven clothing. It's too expensive, firstly to make, secondly because it doesn't last as long, and thirdly because it isn't warm enough in the cold months (for poor people that could easily be more than half the year. They wouldn't have glass in their window frames, and would have little in the form of heating)

zaroth8• 11 years ago

Puts the 'are computers going to drive as all into unemployment' debate in perspective. A 1,000 fold reduction in input costs has predated us, and the economic results speak for themselves. What's another 10x reduction compared to that?

Taking 500 hours (30,000 minutes) of labor to make a shirt (and that's just counting the final steps of production) and making it 30 minutes (if that), for production of 1 billion shirts, turns what would have been full-time employment for 240 million people into full-time employment for 240,000. (Typing on a phone, no pen handy, need to double check that)

What's super cool is from our perspective on the curve, no matter how far we've gone, a 99.99% reduction already, there's still always another 50% we can remove in labor costs.

Will true perfect AI let you jump the asymptote to absolute zero labor costs? Then our creation will have surpassed us and made us like mice are to humans today. Squeak!

The other really interesting subtext is the incredible input cost constraining production and mandating complete use and recycling. No such thing as a landfill when the inputs are precious even after being "worn to threads"!

facepalm3• 11 years ago

The transition was pretty gruesome, so your analogy is not all that reassuring. Nobody thinks we will all die, just that a lot of us will be very poor.

zaroth8• 11 years ago

I have the complete opposite interpretation. Life before was gruesome and today we live in a world of relative plenty if not obvious excess. Reduction of input costs makes us more wealthy not less. How many shirts do you own? How long do you work to afford a lavish bowl of berries and cream?

snowwrestler2• 11 years ago

Average global living standards have gone up, not down, during the time period covered by this article. In fact they have never been higher than they are now.

Some might say that happened in spite of the economic disruptions caused by technology, but the truth is that it happened because of those disruptions.

a8da6b0c91d3• 11 years ago

Good clothing is still surprisingly expensive relative to other goods. You can get a perfectly good new mini-fridge or microwave oven for $100. A pair of jeans that will last heavy usage for three years is over $100. I find that confusing. I would expect the mini-fridge and microwave oven to be many times the price of a pair of blue jeans.

HeyLaughingBoy• 11 years ago

Where are you buying your jeans? I live on a farm. A pair of jeans that will last under heavy usage is about $30 at Tractor Supply.

a8da6b0c91d3• 11 years ago

Non-selvedge denim will begin fraying badly at the cuffs and probably have holes in the crotch in well under a year of daily three mile walking, nevermind more active wear. Any selvedge denim jeans cost over $100. Sitting on a tractor or on various other farm machinery is not heavy wear.

sidcool• 11 years ago

That's why single women were called "spinsters" - spinning thread was their primary job.

Quite a revelation for me. Very interesting read.

Animats2• 11 years ago

I think he's underestimating the yarn production rate for a drop spindle. But it's quite correct that textiles were incredibly expensive before machine production. Textile machinery launched the Industrial Revolution.

As for why textiles are so cheap now, search for "jet loom".

pcurve• 11 years ago

just looked at toyota jetloom video on youtube. That was an eyeopener.

dhfromkorea• 11 years ago

Might be slightly tangential, but reading the post reminded me of Rational Optimist[1], a book about how key parameters of our lives are improving despite constant global pessimism. (e.g. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down)

[1]http://www.amazon.com/Rational-Optimist-How-Prosperity-Evolv...

pimlottc4• 11 years ago

Oh, and in the middle ages, it would be expected that all of the inside sleeves would be finished.

What does this mean, that the "inside sleeves" be "finished"? And is an "inside sleeve" different from an "outside sleeve"?

The $3500 Shirt – A History Lesson in Economics

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