> If Africa doesn't need to get into the textile industry, that frees up labor and investment for more productive industries and everyone wins. If you look at

> If Africa doesn't need to get into the textile industry, that frees up labor and investment for more productive industries and everyone wins. If you look at the development of East Asia (presumably the same elsewhere) post-WWII, the high-GDP societies have generally started at the bottom of the value chain and moved up and maybe out of manufacturing into services. Not many investors are going to, say, pour foreign capital and education investment into a society to develop, say, a finance industry or tech industry just because they have textile workers out of a job, even though those are among the most "productive" industries.