The problem isn't the cost to customers, it's about externalities. Those cheap clothes are subsidized by slave labor and pollution. If you turn a blind eye to that you're complicit.
Most of clothes are subsidized by slave labour or pollution [1] [2]. The question is, who gets the margins. Somehow when it's Shein or Teemu it's "fast fashion bad", and when it's Adidas or Levi's it's "let's close our eyes and pretend that not happened".
Why do you think we don’t care about US brands? H&M, Nike, Adidas are all built on slave labor and pollution. I didn’t know that Levi’s was as well until reading your comment.
I do think the scale and the race to the bottom in terms of price and disposability is slightly worse with these newer companies, though.
It’s not clear that people get more for less in practice so there’s also a question of cost to the consumers.
If you buy 10 pieces of clothing for the price of 1, but those cheaper ones last for 1/100th the number of uses the more expensive one does, and the more expensive one can also be repaired to further extend the life, are those 10 pieces actually cheaper?
What’s really annoying are comments like the GPs which essentially complain about even doing research on identifying whether there is more to something beyond the surface.
It’s such an awful attitude I can’t even understand how people come up with it. Especially since many are the consumers themselves who will benefit from the information being identified. Ive started wondering whether there is a significant (if not majority) of people who are aggressively defensive of their ignorance and prefer it to knowledge.
While this is almost definitely the case, in general supply chains are completely opaque to the consumer. Anything you buy could and probably has involved exploitative labor practices in some place. As for pollution, everything uses energy. Even using if something uses green energy in its production, it will cause someone else who otherwise would have used that green energy to use some polluting energy instead. There is no standardized labeling scheme and nobody can be trusted. I mean if the person selling stuff is telling me it's "ethical" -- okay so I'm just meant to take that a face value am I? Where's the proof? What's penalty if it turns out you've lied? What are the chances someone will even be able to investigate the whole supply chain after the fact and then they'll actually do it?
You are responsible for your actions, but you act according to imperfect information, so your actions are never going to be perfectly virtuous. But then again, even with perfect information, that is rarely the case.
There's a pretty big difference between knowing full well something comes at a huge cost of human suffering and turning a blind eye to that, and inadvertently participating in something that turns out has unanticipated externalities. The two are not the same, and relying on the possibility of the latter scenario to justify the former is bad faith.
> knowing full well something comes at a huge cost of human suffering
Well over half the things I need in life fall into the category of "I know this came at the cost of human suffering". There's not a lot of options for me as a consumer.
Much of the food I buy in supermarkets are harvested and processed by people in misery. I can't afford a car and when I Uber/Lyft to the hospital, I know the drivers aren't making ends meet and the nursing assistants make paltry wages that cannot pay rent in my city. When I do eat in a restaurant, having worked in restaurants for quite a few years, I'm fully aware that many of the staff aren't making living wages. When I visit my family, I know that the rookie flight attendants on Southwest Airlines are making just $22,000/year[0]. The maintenance workers at my apartment complex aren't able to afford fixing their car to take their kids anywhere and have to eat the fast-food chicken at the gas station next door (only food within 3 miles) unless they splurge on UberEats that they can't afford. Their children are being supervised by substitute teachers making $12/hr with very limited and sporadic hours each week.
What can I do differently as someone barely treading water myself?
From the article:
> This is an era of Shopping as Entertainment—shopping not out of need, but to scratch an itch, to feel like you did something, to kill time.
Maybe this is the difference. I only have enough money to buy a tiny bit more than I need. I actually really need to make the money stretch.
When it comes to "fast fashion" that's all anyone can ask of you. The complaints are leveled at those who treat garments as literally disposable, worn just once or twice then tossed to make room for a new thing.
It's an entire ethos that fashion requires constant change. It's no longer seasonal, but weekly.
It's an interesting point. Where do my responsibilities end as a consumer? I suppose "inadvertently participating" is qualified by the degree to which you believe it is likely that buying a more expensive product also causes negative externalities. (I am assuming I am meant to use price as an indicator.) If I believe that this is also highly likely, by paying more, I am simply giving more money to the exploiter. Is it not worse to reward them more for their actions?
> Those cheap clothes are subsidized by slave labor and pollution.
Yes, if something is cheap, it must necessarily have been produced by either (1) a person who wasn't paid very much ("slave labor"), or (2) a machine (which means pollution).
Is the conclusion that it's bad for things to be cheap?
Well, no? That doesn't actually follow. This is akin to countering the claim that a dog is an animal by pointing out the absurdity that this would mean all animals are dogs, when there clearly are cats and cows and so on.
These statements are true about the fast fashion industry. The clothes are cheap because these things are true, they aren't true because they are cheap.
They are accidental properties of cheap clothes, not necessary properties; but they are still properties of the fast fashion industry.
There are many reasons production costs could be low though. I don't think it follows that the cheapest option by necessity the most inhumane and destructive. Perhaps a more effective means of production has been invented, a new more effective machine for example.
My claim is that a more effective method of production or may not pollute more than a less effective method. There is essentially no reason to assume that an increase in productivity comes at an increase in pollution. Foregoing environmental concerns may in some cases allow increased productivity, but that does not imply that all increases in productivity are increases in pollution, that would be affirming the consequent.
What does this comment have to do with your claim above that modern clothes are "subsidized by slave labor or pollution"?
To the extent that that claim is true, it is equally true of future clothes, unless those clothes are very expensive. Nothing you've said here connects to what you said above.
You appear to be arguing the position that, if this year we produce X tons of clothes at the cost of emitting Y tons of pollution, and next year we produce 2X tons of clothes at the cost of Y tons of pollution, next year's clothes are not being subsidized by pollution, even though this year's clothes are. But that position is self-evidently insane. Were you trying to say something different?
I'd word the conclusion as: it's bad for things to cheaper than what they would cost in a world without slave labor and environmental destruction.
Alternatively, a slightly different conclusion is that in some situations it is bad for the market to optimize for cheapness over quality. E.g. perhaps it would be better if we optimized for people to have fewer, higher quality garments. This conclusion gets into the boot theory of poverty.
