Someone's been having me on
I picked up (virtually) the 1934 Sears catalog today. The inside cover features a smart wool men's overcoat for $9.50, some nice-looking shirts for $1.19. Good deals!
But are they? I decided to take a look, by adjusting the numbers for inflation. They're ok, I guess... The shirt would run about $20 today, the hat and shoes about $30 each... The coat, a smart wool number, would run you $150. That's odd, that's almost exactly what I'd expect to pay today - well, except for the shoes, where nice leather ones like that would run you more nowadays.
Which bugs me. I've always been taught that the Internet and free trade have made commodities - like apparel - cheaper. Now I find that an American-made wool jacket bought from a catalog in a world without free trade...costs about the same as something roughly comparable from Overstock.
Wool blankets? $4.00 then, $64.00 in today's dollars. Today I can get a cheap one at the Army Navy for $29.96, or a nicer one at Wal-Mart for $85-$125.
Not much improvement. Except for the shoes, which are going to run you more.
You know the dollar store...here on the Peninsula they actually have $1.50 stores now. Here is the equivalent page from the Sears catalog.
Damn, those shoes are cheap!
But...if they're charging the same price for the items...and the costs are lower...then that means they must be making a bigger profit, and that the benefits of globalization are not accruing to consumers, but to the shareholders and managements of the companies that are shifting production to low-wage countries at the expense of American workers...
But if we look at executive compensation and corporate profit margins in recent years we discover...that before the economy crashed, they were at or near all-time highs. Executive pay still is.
Hmm. Maybe these guys were right.
posted by The Front at 4:09 PM
2 Comments:
There's a song recorded by Flight of the Conchords called Think About It, with the verse:
They're turning kids into slaves just to make cheaper sneakers,
But what's the real cost, cuz the sneakers don't seem that much cheaper,
Why are we still paying so much for sneakers when you got little kid slaves making them?
What are your overheads?
Worse than this, the vastly increasing imbalance of wealth has propped up a persistent wealth-dominance of the national agenda. As a direct result, the nation is at hideous risk of decline, at the very moment, and for the same reasons, that there is an internationalist rise of the Chinese capitalist dictatorship.
Like it or not, the President's leadership is the only real path I can see to reverse the decline of the world's greatest democracy. We don't have time for either centrist apologists (the health care debate should settle the value of self-serving centrism) or reflexive left-wing obstructionism.
The GOP is disloyal to the national interest and should be treated as such.
To be clear, as a progressive, I have far less interest in correctness than in real results.
The benefit of globalism was so completely limited to a small segment, and whose costs were socialized to the point that the survival of the earth is in question, that it can be dismissed as policy in service only of capitalist ideology- which I continue to argue is wholly different from a nation working with markets to achieve at the very least achieve social utilitarian ends.
My respect for an economist, such as Dr. X, who understands the great distinction between economic science and capitalistic ideology is very strong.
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