Part II April 30

a. The history of the location of the textile industry illustrates that the global economy is ever changing and that success may only be temporary, and in the case of textile production, success is most likely temporary.  Success in the textile industry has been due to the exploitation of the “poor and powerless” in a “race to the bottom.”  The shift of British dominance to New England to the American South to Asia illustrates the competitiveness of the global economy that in this case depended on a supply of cheap eager labor.  

b. Rivoli does a great job to present both positive and negative consequences of industrialization and definitely changed my opinion.  Negative consequences were more obvious and included pollution and poor working conditions.  On pg 102, “Female cotton workers in prewar Japan were referred to as “birds in a cage,” given their grueling schedules- 12-hour days and two days off per month.”  On pg 89, “of the 20 cities in the world with the highest levels of air pollution, 16 are in China, and the majority of the water in the country’s largest river systems is unsuitable for human contact.”  On the other hand, industrialization has shown to be an improvement for laborers and also proves to lead to cleaner environmental conditions as richer economies are more willing to spend on cleaner air and water.  On pg 119, “The countries that have lost the race to the bottom are some of the most advanced economies in the world today, but they share a common heritage in the cotton mill and the sweatshop as the ignition switch for the urbanization, industrialization, and economic diversification that followed, as well as for the economic and social liberation of women from the farm.”  I now think that industrialization is a necessary and inevitable and in the long run will be beneficial.  I still think that improvements can be made to the “bottom”, but improvements have already been seen and I imagine that they will continue. 

c.  A passage that I found interesting was the analysis of the economic impact of a t-shirts production.  On one hand there is “pesticides, herbicides, water, bleach, energy, fuel, and chemical dyes” involved in the production of a t-shirt.  But a study revealed, “the impacts of the “consumer use” phase of the T-shirts life dwarfed the impacts of production and transportation.”  This was interesting to me because it is easy to push responsibility of environmental issues to others that seems to be larger contributors, like the textile industry, when in reality we play a large part as consumers.  Another interesting aspect was the environmental Kuznets curve, which suggests that industrialization is part of the environment solution rather than the problem.  This was a new idea to me, as I too had assumed that industry was the problem.  The relationship between environmental quality and industrialization, like so many other economic and ecological relationships, are much more complex then they seemed.  Now that I see that ecological quality needs industrialization in this developing world, it will be important to raise the bottom in the “race to the bottom” so as to keep environmental degradation in the process of making a country developed at a minimum.