Planet money did a fantastic series on the textile industry several years ago when they decided to make a t-shirt and wanted to trace the whole thing.
Turns out textiles is sort of the cheapest industry. It’s unique in that it requires capital in the form of machines, but doesn’t require a high skill labor force and the machines tend to be highly portable. So it ends up being an industry to follow if you want to know where the cheapest labor is. Basically what happens with textiles, is that every so often the standard of living in a country goes up, and the factory owners look around to try to save on labor, and hope to find a cheaper place to move to. What’s sort of interesting is that there aren’t many places left that have enough political stability that owners are willing to risk moving equipment to that are cheaper than bangledesh. This was like 10 years ago though, I’d be curious where textiles are located now.
Vietnamese textile manufacturing is moving towards Cambodia and Laos (both figuratively and literally - lots of garment factories starting to open in Tay Ninh and Gia Lai).
The Bangladeshi textile industry will continues to remain for the foreseeable future, but textile manufacturing has started to return to India now that unskilled manufacturing wages are starting to reach the $150-200/month mark globally. When Bangladeshi and Indian unskilled labor starts going for $300-400/montn it will move to Nepal and then Eastern Africa (or Pakistan+Myanmar if their politics stabilizes).
FWIW, I recently purchased a pack of Kirkland Signature T-shirts from Costco, which were made in Ethiopia. It's the first time I've noticed my clothing coming from Africa.
This is not at all what happens but ok. This is sort of the capitalist fable on what’s happening.
Read “How Asia Works” for how things actually work in industrialising a country and its stages.
Countries actively choose to seek to develop an industrial base and they start with textiles. Then they evolve their industrial base to a higher income industry, and they let go of textiles over time.
That’s how it happens in an organised industrial development plan. In disorganised industrialisation, you have everything going on at once and you get Brazil.
This narrative doesn't falsify or go against the one you're replying to. Both things can be true - investors follow incentives and some countries try to manage incentives in a certain way.
> clothing manufacturing ... [and] many other industries ... the infrastructure is gone ... the social infrastructure... as well
You fail to show what exactly in a social infrastructure inhibits clothing manufacturing or other industries.
One example that may come to mind is a possible cultural refusal of jobs offering low wages - yet there exist societies in which it is difficult to find personnel for menial jobs and yet clothing manufacturing still thrives.
My parents and extended family owned and operated clothing factories in two countries and in the US for some time. The idea that clothing manufacturing (as in mass products, not niche items) will come back to the US (or Europe) is unimaginable.
There are so many layers to this. At $15 per hour minimum wage the math simply does not add-up. People are not willing to pay enough for clothing to be able to support mass US or European manufacturing. That cork was put on that bottle a long time ago. This, BTW, is the case for lots of other sectors, not just clothing.
My family had a textile factory in Israel from the 1970s until the mid 90s - it used to be very, very profitable until the market opened up to imports from China/India in the 90s. Within a few short years my parents had to shut down the factory because they couldn't compete with countries where the prevailing wage was < 1/10th as much as Israeli minimum wage.
Given that a pair of Jeans in Europe costs usually 100 EUR or more in retail, I never understood why the manufacturing couldn't cost more than 5 USD somewhere in South East Asia.
Because the retailers and the manufacturers aren't the same companies - the retailers are looking for the cheapest goods to buy and have a lot of other expenses as well (rent, wages for shop staff, capital for maintaining inventory, etc).
Imagine a software company with a 50M LOC codebase that shuts down and lays off all workers. The office is still there, servers are still running, and nothing has been touched--but the employees are all gone.
How easily do you think a new team of the same size could come in and restart operations? Most likely it would take a long time and a lot of capital before that company was productive again.
That's what the parent means by social infrastructure: institutional knowledge--all the stuff that isn't written down anywhere.
I do go over it in the linked entry. It's not a particularly long or technical article.
Basically, it's the social structure that is built around a community's Raison D'etre, or reason for existence.
This is schools, housing, curriculum (there's a reason that RIT is based in Rochester, for example), as well as oral and learned tradition.
"Tribal knowledge" is a dirty word to efficiency nerds, but that doesn't change the fact that it exists, and is highly effective, for a reason.
There are entire districts, known for the finest $WHATEVER. Lübeck, Germany, is known for marzipan (I don't really like it, but lots of others do). Bordeaux is known for wines and cooking, Afghanistan has some of the best opium, etc. Some of these are due to climate and soil, but others can be lost to other areas (Sonoma, for instance).
They may have great soil, but they also have great farmers, who have been handing their skills down, for generations, etc.
Once that is gone, there ain't no making new ones.
Exactly. And it is not just knowledge, it's not even just ways of thinking - it's ways of being.
For our own sanity we have to believe we have at least some handle on the reality unfolding around us - but even a cursory examination shows this cannot be true. Our lives are so brief, so localised, when set against the totality of all that is, was, and will be. Instead, as we shape the world, the world shapes us, and it is this emergent collective consciousness that conspires to give us all that we have.
I believe the missing part is that it takes a lot of work to create that social network. Without a driving economic reason or lots of time and regional interest (ie generations) it would be difficult to redevelop.
Much of this social capital requires lots of folks being interested in something since they were young and "playing" at it. Play is an important way to learn and understand it. Also I believe social capital requires adults to respect and take interest in the item, as children often take their cues from that.
That said, I wonder if industrial clothing manufacturing requires that much social infrastructure? That industry seems to move very couple of decades to a new country with the cheapest labor.
Not OP, but I assume in regards to the garment district it means people with the requisite skills aren’t around anymore. Back in the day, nearly every woman knew how to sew and make clothes. Nowadays, do you know a single woman (or man!) who knows how to sew and make clothes? I don’t. People could learn, buts it’s a lot easier when you already have a large population with the required skills to draw from.
The main missing ingredient is "Pattern Makers." These are the Garment District equivalent of Engineers. They are still around, but in far lower numbers.
It's fairly obvious that people think that these folks can be replaced by software, but they say the same thing about engineers.
Also, entire communities were built around textile mills and transportation/consolidation/intermodals. When we shut down the Garment District, and shipped all the work overseas (and my friend freely admits his company did the same), it destroyed these communities. Lot of skilled labor left, and stopped training the next generation.
And, to answer another question, I don't have to "prove" anything. I was simply telling something that I heard from an extremely relevant source. I'm sure as hell not going to ask my friend to "prove what he said," for the convenience of Internet randos.
Oddly enough, I do know how, both via school (home ec) and more importantly, due to older relatives who were into quilting. I have zero interest in ever doing it, but I absolutely do know far more than I ever wanted to about sewing.
I think you can find a few who still do such things in maker spaces, as well, but it only seems to be taken up by people who are already gainfully employed in things that make a lot more than low end manufacturing work.
I don’t think they mean professionally, but rather being able to create clothing from scratch.
How many people do you know that could turn raw fabric into a dress? I have can do the simplest repairs and even used a sewing machine a few times but that’s not particularly useful to a garment factory.
My daughter has made at least 10 dresses before graduating from high school. She's now progressed into a textiles program at our university. My step-sister made very elaborate dresses for her daughter throughout school as well.
Sewing/dressmaking is a lot like woodworking. Being able to visualize things well in 3D is an asset, but also having good tools helps as well.
> Can you explain what is this secret sauce social infrastructure?
The NASA-industrial complex that built the Saturn V rocket is largely gone: The engineers, factory workers, etc., who had the necessary knowledge — much of it tacit — are retired or dead.
I tried multiple times to pay more for textiles. I wanted to have some T shirts made at very good American wages, preferably in America. No one was able or interested in accommodating me. Admittedly it would have made their work much more complicated for a small order.
There are some companies that make textiles in the US. American Giant makes hoodies and sweatshirts that are MIUSA, and their quality is excellent. Flint and Tinder makes shirts, coats, hoodies/sweatshirts MIUSA and their 10-year pullover hoodie is the best hoodie I've ever owned.
Try buying something from the German company Trigema, the exclusively produce in Germany. Here a translation from the German wiki article:
“ Grupp [ the owner] is publicly committed to Germany as a production location and advertises that all raw materials for the clothing are purchased in EU countries, that all production takes place in Germany, that there has been no short-time work or layoffs for over 30 years, and that Trigema guarantees employees' children a job or apprenticeship.”
I mean if of course it’s not coming back. Clothing has a huge labor component and labor is expensive in the USA. Way cheaper to pay 1$ a day than 20$ an hour.
But even if you fixed that the sub component infrastructure isn’t there. The raw fabrics are simply not available here so even if you did pay labor of 160/$ a day you would still not be able to get raw materials
How do you explain the success of American Giant? They use US grown cotton, make all their clothes in the US. Granted, you're not going to be able to buy a $5 t-shirt from them, but a $40 t-shirt that doesn't rely on crappy labor practices seems like something people have gotten behind.
Same with New Balance. Their shoes compete with Nike made in Asia, and are MIUSA.
We've just become addicted to cheap crap shoveled into Walmart and Amazon.
Hypernormalizing human agency in terms of fiat economics is political propaganda to maintain contemporary economic tradition where wealth management middleman create the pipeline of raw textile to product in store shelf.
We should greatly simplify the pipeline to raw textile to end user.
Give people something todo in the evening but passively consume other’s emotional dynamism via TV, YouTube and TikTok.
We make it cheap in fiat dollars to use up a shit ton of resources on enriched middlemen roleplaying American civic life.
It’s gonna cost a lot because their buying power isn’t going to get deflated, that’s for sure. Keep public access to commodities mired in legal obligations of recent history, yet more roleplay in accordance with tradition, which tons of money is put into reminding us we must obey.
We’re such a wacky culture of willful ignorant while proclaiming to be data driven and science minded.
I sometimes wonder whether that’s long-term truly the case. When I see various advanced aramid weaving processes and techniques designed and built in the US, I wonder if they had to scale a dizzying skills and operational mountain by themselves with the lack of a US domestic textile industry, or whether there isn’t much of a cross-fertilization in the entire journey from R&D through scale-out mass manufacturing.
I’m personally inclined to believe an innovation-oriented, Burkes’ian Connections-style society is only feasible when the Brownian motion of ideas occurs within a dense fabric of interplaying, fractally-complex industrial relationships between a massive number of different industries.
I’m not sure I see things the same way. I could definitely be wrong. I frequently am.
Define “strategic.”
If you mean a vital military asset, remember that clothing factories were an important industry during the wars (including the Revolutionary and Civil wars, in the US).
Military uniforms are critical. Ask any soldier. Just a couple of days ago, a friend that is an ex-marine, was telling me about the marvelous gear he had for winter exercises in Lake Tahoe. Watch any show about the siege at Stalingrad, to see what improper uniforms can mean.
If you mean a vital financial asset, then think about the economic vitality that is created by any industry. All the factories, brokers, marketers, transporters, etc. Lots of busy little ants. The garment industry is huge. My friend is extremely wealthy from a fairly small, undistinguished corner of it.
If we think of “fashion,” as a flighty, will o’ the wisp “hobby,” then consider the amazing amount of money sloshing around the world, from it. I’m not a fashionista, and the company that my friend owns isn’t really a high-fashion outfit. They do high-quality “every[wo]man” clothes, for reasonable costs. If you spent an hour, talking to him about the logistics of his operation, your jaw would hit the floor.
Many folks would argue that alcoholic beverages are an unnecessary, and possibly immoral, product, but, once again, we have an enormous industry around it. I have a couple of other friends and acquaintances that are fairly wealthy, from selling booze. Prohibition taught us a pretty big lesson.
Many folks would say that advertising, mobile games, and “vanity apps” are “not strategic,” but I’ll bet there’s a ton of folks here, that would take issue with that statement.
He said that the Garment District is "never coming back." I suspect that this could be extrapolated to many other industries, for the same reason.
The issue is that the infrastructure is gone. Not just the physical and logical infrastructure, but the social infrastructure[0], as well.
Social infrastructure is ignored by everyone, but I think that it's the most important type of infrastructure, and the most difficult to [re]build.
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/infrastructure/