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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Clothing remains expensive, except we don't see the true cost.

> Clothing remains expensive, except we don't see the true cost.

Not really comparably. Lots of externalities and some weird market distortions, sure. But still, we're an order of magnitude or two cheaper now at minimum. Especially if you are comparing day-to-day functional clothing, where it's more likely 3.

More like three. Went from $1500 to $1.50. At a minimum wage job in the US, you can buy multiple shirts per hour worked. It would literally blow the mind of ancient people (maybe even moreso than something like a Computer), as it's something they have and work with - but the price is so different.

Yes, I'm handwaving that even if you very conservatively estimate factoring back in for the externalized costs etc., you still are a couple of orders at least for cheapest garments.

i.e. the GP has a valid point but it doesn't undermine OP article at all. I expanded a little.

The idea that someone on a laborers salary could afford the material standard of people in much of the world today would be astonishing. My own grandmother grew up wearing clothes made from repurposed flour sacks, and that was only 90 years ago. The last two centuries of human progress are staggering to think about.

There's a book called Why the West Rules--For now that basically explores the social development of the Western and Eastern cores since the dawn of civilization. One of the striking things in the book is that the author charts social development as measured by a formula with lots of variables. The kicker is that if you zoom out to look at the whole history, at that scale, the chart is basically flat-lined near zero until a couple hundred years ago.

flour and grain companies used to put floral designs on their sacks because they knew that buyers would repurpose the bags as clothing.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4b/80/d6/4b80d65a7d8ebf737eed...

Yeah, that's a pretty neat bit of history. I wish I had some photos but alas the oldest photo of them I'm aware of is sometime after WWII.

Basically only the sewing is done by hand now, and that's done with the aid of machines. That alone saves mountains of labor. Cotton has some problems with water and pesticide use, but it's insanely productive today even compared to 50 years ago. Even if you priced in every externality it would probably still be cheaper to buy a shirt today than it would have been 50 years ago.

Au contraire, it’s even cheaper than portrayed. Even though a “basic tunic” today can be had for less than an hour of minimum wage work under very comfortable conditions, the price additionally covers advertising, intercontinental shipping, extensive regulatory compliance, extensive insurance, great HVAC, etc.

Yes you can find “tragedy of the commons” and other concerns for modern production. Realize the tradeoffs, that ancient circumstances denied many benefits enjoyed today, that were we to subject workers today to those circumstances you’d be far more outraged.

What hidden costs are accounting for the 2-3 orders of magnitude difference in clothing prices vs. minimum wages?

In at least part, environmental damage, fuel, and resource costs.

The actual input cost of fossil fuels is ~5 million times the market price based on the time-cost of formation.

See Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine", 2003.

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