16 ms·

The $3500 Shirt – A History Lesson in Economics

404 points by wallflower 12y ago

swatow 12y ago
Fascinating article. While the concept of a "real" dollar is a leaky abstraction (hence the constant bickering about how the price indices that determine pensions etc. should be calculated), it still is a striking way to demonstrate how the relative prices of things have changed over time.
jedanbik 12y ago
The sewing machine changed the world. I took a sewing class a few months ago, and the instructor was very clear that before that machine was invented, women would spend a significant portion of their time making clothing and other textile items by hand, needle, and thimble. The sewing machine is a classic example of how technology can fundamentally disrupt society by removing manual tedium. All of us here on Hacker News can be inspired by this seemingly minor piece of history. It's what we should strive for in our work.
- elmin 12y ago
  As said in the article though, spinning and weaving actually takes up much more time than sewing. I would say the biggest innovations in clothing were the cotten gin, the power loom, and dry cleaning. Before dry cleaning, a suit had to be unstitched to be cleaned.
- DanBC 12y ago
  > The sewing machine is a classic example of how technology can fundamentally disrupt society by removing manual tedium. All of us here on Hacker News can be inspired by this seemingly minor piece of history. It's what we should strive for in our work. The sewing machine shifted the tedium of manual pabor from most people onto a much smaller number of very poor people who now work in conditions which are illegal over here (and often illegal where they are too) for very little money. When I buy a shirt I don't know if it's expensive because a fair proportion of the price is being paid to the people making it, or if someone near the sales end of the chain has "added value" and is taking increased profit. I don't find it inspiring. I guess I should be considering what these people would have instead - looming carpets by hand perhaps, which would be worse. I would really like to know that the £47 ($70) shirt I buy isn't exploiting the very poor.
  - jedanbik 12y ago
    While I agree that sweatshop labor is deplorable, the flip side of that can be seen by looking at the number of tailor shops in your area or mine. It won't cost $3500 for any of them to make you a bespoke shirt, that's a guarantee. Now a bespoke pair of shoes on the other hand...
  - iopq 12y ago
    People who work in sweat shops would usually have much worse conditions to live in if they didn't work in a sweat shop. They'd be probably trying to pick things out of garbage dumps.
    - sukilot 12y ago
      Because the sweatshops destroyed their agrarian culture, by selling a lie about economic opportunity.
      - ghshephard 12y ago
        Depending on the quality of the Garbage dumps, picking through them would be a step up from some of the third-world agrarian agriculture that I've seen - which is unsafe, backbreaking, soul crushing labor. (Note - even in the United States, Agriculture is less safe than your typical chinese manufacturing factory)
    - cauterized 12y ago
      A lot of people around here seem to think "economically rational" is the same thing as "ethical". In a lot of places and times in the world (including US cities in the early 20th century), due to crushing poverty and a glut of labor it has been economically rational for people to accept work in factories with horrific working conditions for wages that will barely feed them. That includes where they're physically locked into massively unsafe buildings. Such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. That doesn't make the practice of offering jobs in such conditions ethical.
      - mseebach 12y ago
stegosaurus 12y ago
I've posted in another thread about this but what interests me primarily is how housing has changed over time. In 'ancient history', it's fairly well known that people lived in ridiculous conditions, ten to a house and so on. But what strikes me is that in recent years (say, the last 50 or so), housing has rocketed out of proportion around the Western world whilst other goods have become basically irrelevant. I could buy 1,000 decent spec laptops for the price of a modest home. Or over a hundred thousand cups of Starbucks coffee. The car I have outside? Sixty of them and I could get a bargain basement flat. Renting? A brand new Android flagship for the price of a months' rent. An utterly imaginably spectacular device. I'd much, much rather live in a world in which a laptop was a huge expense that I could only literally afford once every few years, but to be able to afford to put a roof over my head without hustling 8 hours a day. Will we ever get there?
- whybroke 12y ago
  The retirement systems is utterly inadequate and pensions are non-existent. Thus the middle class is entirely dependent on effectively a housing ponzi scheme to avoid squalor (or even homelessness) in old age. So they will always fanatically, desperately vote to raise property values whatever the long term consequences. Even more importantly, mortgage holders and other large institutions have a vested interested in raising property values and will guarantee that polices drive that. Obviously housing prices can't outpace wages forever so one generation, probably the current one, is going to be screwed with houses that can't raise enough in value and yet have no real retirement security.
  - kimdouglasmason 12y ago
    Even better, once house prices stop outpacing wages and the average Joe realizes, we'll be in the situation where it is much cheaper to rent than buy, and stuff the difference into an index fund, which will yield much better than housing capital gains. At that point, you're looking at long term house price declines which only stop when buying becomes cheaper than renting. The next 30 years are not going to look like the previous 30 in the west. However, consumer goods will keep getting cheaper.
- 12y ago
facepalm 12y ago
I was expecting another story on Bitcoin :-) But this is great, too.
kaa2102 12y ago
This article shows the true value of innovation over time in saving time, money, and effort.
hristov 12y ago
This is all well known stuff. But I am glad people are writing about it. Sometimes people seem to worship the past without realizing the incredible poverty people lived in back in the day. Also, I like the jpeg of the black mask mag featuring the Maltese Falcon at the end. The best american modern literature is pulp fiction.
ciconia 12y ago
One important fact to take into account is that the cost of labor in the middle ages cannot really be compared to today's minimum wage. The calculation based on $7.25 an hour, coming to $3500, is a bit of a hyperbole [1]. In fact, even today in many places in the world (India and Africa come to mind), artisans still produce fabrics, clothes and other low-tech products by hand for way less than American minimum wage [2]. I'm not a historian by any means, but it is my understanding that before the industrial revolution the major cost of production was the cost of materials, and the cost of labor was marginal. Contrast this with modern production, which is continually occupied with reducing the cost of labor, either by automation or by offshoring to third-world countries. [1] Of course, any kind of cost comparison across 8 centuries is suspect. A quick search produced this: http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng240/medieval_prices.html http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng240/medieval_prices.html A peasant's linen chemise is listed as costing 8d in 1313, which is equivalent in purchasing power to anywhere between GBP 22.30 to 5970, depending on the index, according to this: http://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/result.php?year_source=1313&amount=0.03333333333333333&year_result=2015 http://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/result.php?year_sour... [2] http://www.bls.gov/fls/ http://www.bls.gov/fls/ shows cost of labor for different countries in recent years. According to the site the average hourly compensation in India in 2010 was $1.46.
- jholman 12y ago
  It doesn't matter whether $7.25 is hyperbole. What matters is whether or not 479 hours is hyperbole. Let's see. IRL, I own around ten t-shirts, and they seem to wear out in 2-4 years, so let's say around 100 wearings. I'll stretch that out to 730 wearings, because I'm "wearing it until it disintegrates". I'll hope to buy a shirt on odd-numbered years, and new pants on even-numbered years. I won't buy any other cloth goods. If I work 40 hour weeks, I have 2080 hours of labour in a year. Suppose I am equally economically valuable to a spinner, such that I can trade one hour of my productivity for one hour of theirs. If I need a new 479-hour garment every year, then I need to allocate nearly a quarter of my life to buying clothes, even though I wear clothes until they disintegrate, and only own one shirt and one pair of pants. That is fantastically expensive.
  - 12y ago
linuxhansl 12y ago
I agree that we in most of the western world generally are awash in things and that we all are "ungrateful bastards" (wording mine). But then the author goes on about how time it would take to make a shirt in the medieval age and then calculates the cost using today's minimum wage. That make no sense at all, and dies give us any information. Maybe compare it to price of a loaf of bread back then, that would give us an idea. Then we'd have singing to go by.
- ctdonath 12y ago
  Loaf of bread? Grind the wheat using a hand mill or mortar/pestle, mix ingredients, knead, rise, bake. Doing it all low tech, takes about two hours of work: price at least $14.50 per loaf on labor alone.
- swatow 12y ago
  It's not really possible to compare prices across such large time periods. The author chose to fix the price of one commodity (unskilled labor), while you chose a difference commodity (food).
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Someone 12y ago
I think the article is incorrect in saying ". A shirt like this [...] would be a fine weave" If it really took a quarter of a year to make a fine-woven shirt, poor people wouldn't have worn fine-woven clothing. It's too expensive, firstly to make, secondly because it doesn't last as long, and thirdly because it isn't warm enough in the cold months (for poor people that could easily be more than half the year. They wouldn't have glass in their window frames, and would have little in the form of heating)
zaroth 12y ago
Puts the 'are computers going to drive as all into unemployment' debate in perspective. A 1,000 fold reduction in input costs has predated us, and the economic results speak for themselves. What's another 10x reduction compared to that? Taking 500 hours (30,000 minutes) of labor to make a shirt (and that's just counting the final steps of production) and making it 30 minutes (if that), for production of 1 billion shirts, turns what would have been full-time employment for 240 million people into full-time employment for 240,000. (Typing on a phone, no pen handy, need to double check that) What's super cool is from our perspective on the curve, no matter how far we've gone, a 99.99% reduction already, there's still always another 50% we can remove in labor costs. Will true perfect AI let you jump the asymptote to absolute zero labor costs? Then our creation will have surpassed us and made us like mice are to humans today. Squeak! The other really interesting subtext is the incredible input cost constraining production and mandating complete use and recycling. No such thing as a landfill when the inputs are precious even after being "worn to threads"!
- facepalm 12y ago
  The transition was pretty gruesome, so your analogy is not all that reassuring. Nobody thinks we will all die, just that a lot of us will be very poor.
  - zaroth 12y ago
    I have the complete opposite interpretation. Life before was gruesome and today we live in a world of relative plenty if not obvious excess. Reduction of input costs makes us more wealthy not less. How many shirts do you own? How long do you work to afford a lavish bowl of berries and cream?
    - sukilot 12y ago
      Not everyone lives your lifestyle. Most of the people who manufacturer your stuff are very poor and live in Asia.
      - 12y ago
a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
Good clothing is still surprisingly expensive relative to other goods. You can get a perfectly good new mini-fridge or microwave oven for $100. A pair of jeans that will last heavy usage for three years is over $100. I find that confusing. I would expect the mini-fridge and microwave oven to be many times the price of a pair of blue jeans.
- HeyLaughingBoy 12y ago
  Where are you buying your jeans? I live on a farm. A pair of jeans that will last under heavy usage is about $30 at Tractor Supply.
  - a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
    Non-selvedge denim will begin fraying badly at the cuffs and probably have holes in the crotch in well under a year of daily three mile walking, nevermind more active wear. Any selvedge denim jeans cost over $100. Sitting on a tractor or on various other farm machinery is not heavy wear.
    - sukilot 12y ago
      Even my crappiest old jeans with holes at the knees (which could be patched, or built thicker in the first place) have never worn out the crotch. Washing/drying wears clothes more than walking
      - Kiro 12y ago
        I think you have your body to thank for that. All my jeans get completely destroyed at the crotch within a year. I just think that different body types create different movements and wear.
        avinashv 12y ago
        Crotch bursting (which is the hilarious technical term for it) is more common than you'd expect. Major reasons are over-washing, but a bad fit, stretch fabric, too-thin fabric, and poor stitching are the major reasons for failure. If you are finding that your jeans are always bursting at the crotch, identify first if it's happening at a seam. If so, buy a different brand. If it's not, wash your jeans less. If you must wash them, do it inside out, and always let them air dry. Don't use bleach, or any detergent with oxidizing chemicals (this is more common than you'd think). Ideally you should't even wash them in a machine. I think the absurd movement to wear jeans for months without washing is unacceptable if you ever plan to wear them outside of sitting down at a coffee shop, but hand washing them is much gentler and will have your jeans last for years. I own more than one pair of jeans that are years old, and have seen hundreds of days of use without any damage.
lxc 12y ago
>Tfw live in 3rd word >tfw housing prices low as fuck >feels good.svg
sidcool 12y ago
>That's why single women were called "spinsters" - spinning thread was their primary job. Quite a revelation for me. Very interesting read.
Animats 12y ago
I think he's underestimating the yarn production rate for a drop spindle. But it's quite correct that textiles were incredibly expensive before machine production. Textile machinery launched the Industrial Revolution. As for why textiles are so cheap now, search for "jet loom".
- pcurve 12y ago
  just looked at toyota jetloom video on youtube. That was an eyeopener.
dhfromkorea 12y ago
Might be slightly tangential, but reading the post reminded me of Rational Optimist[1], a book about how key parameters of our lives are improving despite constant global pessimism. (e.g. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down) [1]http://www.amazon.com/Rational-Optimist-How-Prosperity-Evolves-ebook/dp/B003QP4BJM/ref=sr_1_1 http://www.amazon.com/Rational-Optimist-How-Prosperity-Evolv...
pimlottc 12y ago
> Oh, and in the middle ages, it would be expected that all of the inside sleeves would be finished. What does this mean, that the "inside sleeves" be "finished"? And is an "inside sleeve" different from an "outside sleeve"?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

404 points by wallflower 12y ago

Fascinating article. While the concept of a "real" dollar is a leaky abstraction (hence the constant bickering about how the price indices that determine pensions etc. should be calculated), it still is a striking way to demonstrate how the relative prices of things have changed over time.

jedanbik 12y ago

The sewing machine changed the world. I took a sewing class a few months ago, and the instructor was very clear that before that machine was invented, women would spend a significant portion of their time making clothing and other textile items by hand, needle, and thimble. The sewing machine is a classic example of how technology can fundamentally disrupt society by removing manual tedium. All of us here on Hacker News can be inspired by this seemingly minor piece of history. It's what we should strive for in our work.

elmin 12y ago
As said in the article though, spinning and weaving actually takes up much more time than sewing. I would say the biggest innovations in clothing were the cotten gin, the power loom, and dry cleaning. Before dry cleaning, a suit had to be unstitched to be cleaned.
DanBC 12y ago
> The sewing machine is a classic example of how technology can fundamentally disrupt society by removing manual tedium. All of us here on Hacker News can be inspired by this seemingly minor piece of history. It's what we should strive for in our work. The sewing machine shifted the tedium of manual pabor from most people onto a much smaller number of very poor people who now work in conditions which are illegal over here (and often illegal where they are too) for very little money. When I buy a shirt I don't know if it's expensive because a fair proportion of the price is being paid to the people making it, or if someone near the sales end of the chain has "added value" and is taking increased profit. I don't find it inspiring. I guess I should be considering what these people would have instead - looming carpets by hand perhaps, which would be worse. I would really like to know that the £47 ($70) shirt I buy isn't exploiting the very poor.
- jedanbik 12y ago
  While I agree that sweatshop labor is deplorable, the flip side of that can be seen by looking at the number of tailor shops in your area or mine. It won't cost $3500 for any of them to make you a bespoke shirt, that's a guarantee. Now a bespoke pair of shoes on the other hand...
- iopq 12y ago
  People who work in sweat shops would usually have much worse conditions to live in if they didn't work in a sweat shop. They'd be probably trying to pick things out of garbage dumps.
  - sukilot 12y ago
    Because the sweatshops destroyed their agrarian culture, by selling a lie about economic opportunity.
    - ghshephard 12y ago
      Depending on the quality of the Garbage dumps, picking through them would be a step up from some of the third-world agrarian agriculture that I've seen - which is unsafe, backbreaking, soul crushing labor. (Note - even in the United States, Agriculture is less safe than your typical chinese manufacturing factory)
  - cauterized 12y ago
    A lot of people around here seem to think "economically rational" is the same thing as "ethical". In a lot of places and times in the world (including US cities in the early 20th century), due to crushing poverty and a glut of labor it has been economically rational for people to accept work in factories with horrific working conditions for wages that will barely feed them. That includes where they're physically locked into massively unsafe buildings. Such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. That doesn't make the practice of offering jobs in such conditions ethical.
    - mseebach 12y ago

stegosaurus 12y ago

I've posted in another thread about this but what interests me primarily is how housing has changed over time. In 'ancient history', it's fairly well known that people lived in ridiculous conditions, ten to a house and so on. But what strikes me is that in recent years (say, the last 50 or so), housing has rocketed out of proportion around the Western world whilst other goods have become basically irrelevant. I could buy 1,000 decent spec laptops for the price of a modest home. Or over a hundred thousand cups of Starbucks coffee. The car I have outside? Sixty of them and I could get a bargain basement flat. Renting? A brand new Android flagship for the price of a months' rent. An utterly imaginably spectacular device. I'd much, much rather live in a world in which a laptop was a huge expense that I could only literally afford once every few years, but to be able to afford to put a roof over my head without hustling 8 hours a day. Will we ever get there?

whybroke 12y ago
The retirement systems is utterly inadequate and pensions are non-existent. Thus the middle class is entirely dependent on effectively a housing ponzi scheme to avoid squalor (or even homelessness) in old age. So they will always fanatically, desperately vote to raise property values whatever the long term consequences. Even more importantly, mortgage holders and other large institutions have a vested interested in raising property values and will guarantee that polices drive that. Obviously housing prices can't outpace wages forever so one generation, probably the current one, is going to be screwed with houses that can't raise enough in value and yet have no real retirement security.
- kimdouglasmason 12y ago
  Even better, once house prices stop outpacing wages and the average Joe realizes, we'll be in the situation where it is much cheaper to rent than buy, and stuff the difference into an index fund, which will yield much better than housing capital gains. At that point, you're looking at long term house price declines which only stop when buying becomes cheaper than renting. The next 30 years are not going to look like the previous 30 in the west. However, consumer goods will keep getting cheaper.
12y ago

facepalm 12y ago

I was expecting another story on Bitcoin :-) But this is great, too.

kaa2102 12y ago

This article shows the true value of innovation over time in saving time, money, and effort.

hristov 12y ago

This is all well known stuff. But I am glad people are writing about it. Sometimes people seem to worship the past without realizing the incredible poverty people lived in back in the day. Also, I like the jpeg of the black mask mag featuring the Maltese Falcon at the end. The best american modern literature is pulp fiction.

ciconia 12y ago

One important fact to take into account is that the cost of labor in the middle ages cannot really be compared to today's minimum wage. The calculation based on $7.25 an hour, coming to $3500, is a bit of a hyperbole [1]. In fact, even today in many places in the world (India and Africa come to mind), artisans still produce fabrics, clothes and other low-tech products by hand for way less than American minimum wage [2]. I'm not a historian by any means, but it is my understanding that before the industrial revolution the major cost of production was the cost of materials, and the cost of labor was marginal. Contrast this with modern production, which is continually occupied with reducing the cost of labor, either by automation or by offshoring to third-world countries. [1] Of course, any kind of cost comparison across 8 centuries is suspect. A quick search produced this: http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng240/medieval_prices.html http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng240/medieval_prices.html A peasant's linen chemise is listed as costing 8d in 1313, which is equivalent in purchasing power to anywhere between GBP 22.30 to 5970, depending on the index, according to this: http://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/result.php?year_source=1313&amount=0.03333333333333333&year_result=2015 http://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/result.php?year_sour... [2] http://www.bls.gov/fls/ http://www.bls.gov/fls/ shows cost of labor for different countries in recent years. According to the site the average hourly compensation in India in 2010 was $1.46.

jholman 12y ago
It doesn't matter whether $7.25 is hyperbole. What matters is whether or not 479 hours is hyperbole. Let's see. IRL, I own around ten t-shirts, and they seem to wear out in 2-4 years, so let's say around 100 wearings. I'll stretch that out to 730 wearings, because I'm "wearing it until it disintegrates". I'll hope to buy a shirt on odd-numbered years, and new pants on even-numbered years. I won't buy any other cloth goods. If I work 40 hour weeks, I have 2080 hours of labour in a year. Suppose I am equally economically valuable to a spinner, such that I can trade one hour of my productivity for one hour of theirs. If I need a new 479-hour garment every year, then I need to allocate nearly a quarter of my life to buying clothes, even though I wear clothes until they disintegrate, and only own one shirt and one pair of pants. That is fantastically expensive.
- 12y ago

linuxhansl 12y ago

I agree that we in most of the western world generally are awash in things and that we all are "ungrateful bastards" (wording mine). But then the author goes on about how time it would take to make a shirt in the medieval age and then calculates the cost using today's minimum wage. That make no sense at all, and dies give us any information. Maybe compare it to price of a loaf of bread back then, that would give us an idea. Then we'd have singing to go by.

ctdonath 12y ago
Loaf of bread? Grind the wheat using a hand mill or mortar/pestle, mix ingredients, knead, rise, bake. Doing it all low tech, takes about two hours of work: price at least $14.50 per loaf on labor alone.
swatow 12y ago
It's not really possible to compare prices across such large time periods. The author chose to fix the price of one commodity (unskilled labor), while you chose a difference commodity (food).

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

Someone 12y ago

I think the article is incorrect in saying ". A shirt like this [...] would be a fine weave" If it really took a quarter of a year to make a fine-woven shirt, poor people wouldn't have worn fine-woven clothing. It's too expensive, firstly to make, secondly because it doesn't last as long, and thirdly because it isn't warm enough in the cold months (for poor people that could easily be more than half the year. They wouldn't have glass in their window frames, and would have little in the form of heating)

zaroth 12y ago

Puts the 'are computers going to drive as all into unemployment' debate in perspective. A 1,000 fold reduction in input costs has predated us, and the economic results speak for themselves. What's another 10x reduction compared to that? Taking 500 hours (30,000 minutes) of labor to make a shirt (and that's just counting the final steps of production) and making it 30 minutes (if that), for production of 1 billion shirts, turns what would have been full-time employment for 240 million people into full-time employment for 240,000. (Typing on a phone, no pen handy, need to double check that) What's super cool is from our perspective on the curve, no matter how far we've gone, a 99.99% reduction already, there's still always another 50% we can remove in labor costs. Will true perfect AI let you jump the asymptote to absolute zero labor costs? Then our creation will have surpassed us and made us like mice are to humans today. Squeak! The other really interesting subtext is the incredible input cost constraining production and mandating complete use and recycling. No such thing as a landfill when the inputs are precious even after being "worn to threads"!

facepalm 12y ago
The transition was pretty gruesome, so your analogy is not all that reassuring. Nobody thinks we will all die, just that a lot of us will be very poor.
- zaroth 12y ago
  I have the complete opposite interpretation. Life before was gruesome and today we live in a world of relative plenty if not obvious excess. Reduction of input costs makes us more wealthy not less. How many shirts do you own? How long do you work to afford a lavish bowl of berries and cream?
  - sukilot 12y ago
    Not everyone lives your lifestyle. Most of the people who manufacturer your stuff are very poor and live in Asia.
    - 12y ago

a8da6b0c91d 12y ago

Good clothing is still surprisingly expensive relative to other goods. You can get a perfectly good new mini-fridge or microwave oven for $100. A pair of jeans that will last heavy usage for three years is over $100. I find that confusing. I would expect the mini-fridge and microwave oven to be many times the price of a pair of blue jeans.

HeyLaughingBoy 12y ago
Where are you buying your jeans? I live on a farm. A pair of jeans that will last under heavy usage is about $30 at Tractor Supply.
- a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
  Non-selvedge denim will begin fraying badly at the cuffs and probably have holes in the crotch in well under a year of daily three mile walking, nevermind more active wear. Any selvedge denim jeans cost over $100. Sitting on a tractor or on various other farm machinery is not heavy wear.
  - sukilot 12y ago
    Even my crappiest old jeans with holes at the knees (which could be patched, or built thicker in the first place) have never worn out the crotch. Washing/drying wears clothes more than walking
    - Kiro 12y ago
      I think you have your body to thank for that. All my jeans get completely destroyed at the crotch within a year. I just think that different body types create different movements and wear.
      - avinashv 12y ago
        Crotch bursting (which is the hilarious technical term for it) is more common than you'd expect. Major reasons are over-washing, but a bad fit, stretch fabric, too-thin fabric, and poor stitching are the major reasons for failure. If you are finding that your jeans are always bursting at the crotch, identify first if it's happening at a seam. If so, buy a different brand. If it's not, wash your jeans less. If you must wash them, do it inside out, and always let them air dry. Don't use bleach, or any detergent with oxidizing chemicals (this is more common than you'd think). Ideally you should't even wash them in a machine. I think the absurd movement to wear jeans for months without washing is unacceptable if you ever plan to wear them outside of sitting down at a coffee shop, but hand washing them is much gentler and will have your jeans last for years. I own more than one pair of jeans that are years old, and have seen hundreds of days of use without any damage.

lxc 12y ago

>Tfw live in 3rd word >tfw housing prices low as fuck >feels good.svg

sidcool 12y ago

>That's why single women were called "spinsters" - spinning thread was their primary job. Quite a revelation for me. Very interesting read.

Animats 12y ago

I think he's underestimating the yarn production rate for a drop spindle. But it's quite correct that textiles were incredibly expensive before machine production. Textile machinery launched the Industrial Revolution. As for why textiles are so cheap now, search for "jet loom".

pcurve 12y ago
just looked at toyota jetloom video on youtube. That was an eyeopener.

dhfromkorea 12y ago

Might be slightly tangential, but reading the post reminded me of Rational Optimist[1], a book about how key parameters of our lives are improving despite constant global pessimism. (e.g. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down) [1]http://www.amazon.com/Rational-Optimist-How-Prosperity-Evolves-ebook/dp/B003QP4BJM/ref=sr_1_1 http://www.amazon.com/Rational-Optimist-How-Prosperity-Evolv...

pimlottc 12y ago

> Oh, and in the middle ages, it would be expected that all of the inside sleeves would be finished. What does this mean, that the "inside sleeves" be "finished"? And is an "inside sleeve" different from an "outside sleeve"?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]