I really appreciate the sentiment of the article. I am always annoyed when colleagues say that clothing is made by robots or something like that. To the extent

I really appreciate the sentiment of the article. I am always annoyed when colleagues say that clothing is made by robots or something like that. To the extent that textiles can b automated they have been automated. A wool sweater has a lot of steps each of which involve a mixture of advanced power tools and human hands. A few things to add to the author's points: the 70s-90s mark the big change in clothing with the phasing in of the multi-fiber agreement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi_Fibre_Arrangement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi_Fibre_Arrangement). This basically opened the door for outsourcing of garment manufacture from 1st world to 3rd world countries. It also meant the end of the first world textiles industry, and a serious drop in quality. To a certain extent this might have been an inevitable measure, but that also feels like a cop out for the ability of the most influential group of people in history to make policy decisions. Something that kind of annoys me about the author's take is that while they profess a lot of empathy for the third world workers who are being (heavily) exploited in textile manufacturing (which is terrible), they don't mention their first world neighbors who were also put out of a job by such outsourcing arrangements. The author is correct that people elsewhere are just as capable as people here, but there is more too it than that. Outsourcing is/was inspired by a desire for lower costs and higher margins, but it is a very anti-social way to achieve these goals. The problem with outsourcing arrangements is that the decision makers cared about cost more than anything else and they had a lot of contempt for the people doing the actual work. Naturally these forces combine to lower the quality. It is easy for the modern left in America to see this contempt for labor as racism when it happens in foreign countries, but they don't seem to see that this same animosity is applied to their neighbors. This feels a bit callous and I think this misses the bigger point that when we devalue work and when we devalue craftsmanship we get lousy outcomes.