Monday, May 11, 2009

A Testimony To Trade

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the 100 mile suit, the suit made entirely* from resources from within 100 mile radius of Philadelphia.


As you can see, despite the benefit of professional garment makers and 500 man hours of labor, the suit is awful. The people behind this suit are also sincere, as they seem to think they are making a statement about our detachment from the manufacturing process. Congratulations to them, as their suit will now be used in economics courses (at least mine) to demonstrate comparative advantage and the importance of trade. This suit cost 20 people using 500 labor hours to make one (lousy) suit. Instead, we import them from someplace where the people are much more effective at making (nice) suits, and we use those 500 labor hours to do something else useful.

*Actually is only 92%, according to the makers. Not to mention they probably didn't locally produce their own needles, or countless other necessary tools they would have required.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Say what you want, I think that suit is pretty sweet.