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This was said a little obnoxiously, but he has a point. Making pants in China takes about three labor hours[1]. Given that about 50% of the cost of pants is the retail/wholesale markup, that leaves $15 to pay for materials, shipping, and labor. It's hard to squeeze a living wage out of that.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=unXGqA4st54C&pg=RA2-PT56&l...

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I presume it takes that long because having Chinese work in sweatshop conditions to make pants still beats the price of automating it.

When that workforce eventually goes away and we have machines doing it, will we then have $40 pants? I very much doubt it.

Automating the confection of clothes is VERY challenging from an engineering point of view. We need far better robots to automate that.

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