> Shein has repeatedly come under fire for just about everything you can do wrong with a company, including [..] high levels of toxic chemicals in its clothing
Comparative advantage: outsource your industry to someone that can do it cheaper, so you can focus on what you can do better. Both come out ahead.
That your trading partner is doing it cheaper because they're literally selling you poison is not part of the model, and doesn't stop economists from extolling the virtues of liberalizing trade.
I think what we've slowly come to realize is that "liberalizing trade" only really works if everyone shares roughly the same values. Even trade between the EU and US can be stressed at times due to this, and they largely share the same high-level values. But not always, and can differ quite a bit on details.
Does high-level mean "commoditizing qualities that don't increase the costs of amortization?"
Because the premium EU and US markets pay for clothes that don't poison customers doesn't seem to come strictly from societal values (we still permit some amount of pollution and harmful compounds in our products and environments, just not obvious or acute ones), but a healthy respect of the mechanisms and agency these groups have to affect a business's revenue.
"Values" could also reasonably be euphemism for "finance".
> Still, the brand’s low prices and incredibly fast production have cemented it as a Gen-Z favorite.
In the timeframe of human history we haven't evolved at all.
No mater the amount of noise[1] made about the evils of historical slavery in the West when given the choice been expensive and cheap but slave made people still reach for cheap.
Regulation, whether it's environmental concerns, worker conditions or even originality, costs you money. If you don't know why one product is so much cheaper than another you should probably assume the worst.
1. I don't wish to diminish that but I really wish we would put more effort into stopping slavery going on right now in our lifetime.
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[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 23.4 ms ] threadComparative advantage: outsource your industry to someone that can do it cheaper, so you can focus on what you can do better. Both come out ahead.
That your trading partner is doing it cheaper because they're literally selling you poison is not part of the model, and doesn't stop economists from extolling the virtues of liberalizing trade.
Because the premium EU and US markets pay for clothes that don't poison customers doesn't seem to come strictly from societal values (we still permit some amount of pollution and harmful compounds in our products and environments, just not obvious or acute ones), but a healthy respect of the mechanisms and agency these groups have to affect a business's revenue.
"Values" could also reasonably be euphemism for "finance".
In the timeframe of human history we haven't evolved at all.
No mater the amount of noise[1] made about the evils of historical slavery in the West when given the choice been expensive and cheap but slave made people still reach for cheap.
Regulation, whether it's environmental concerns, worker conditions or even originality, costs you money. If you don't know why one product is so much cheaper than another you should probably assume the worst.
1. I don't wish to diminish that but I really wish we would put more effort into stopping slavery going on right now in our lifetime.