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Comment by arximboldi | Hacker News Reader

I've heard that argument from various people but I don't understand it. If you don't need to produce clothes you have more energy and workforce available to produce other things, like infrastructure, and run schools, hospitals and build other industries. What is the value in having a textile industry for the sake of having it? I'd imagine that the best industry is the one that you don't even need...

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Unlike many other industries, textiles are all of:

(1) relatively low capital to get started due to the relative simplicity of the equipment and the age of the industry and equipment designs

(2) mostly low skilled, meaning that the government doesn’t have to invest a ton in training or wait a long time for enough folks to get the needed skills

(3) safer than most industries

(4) more or less guaranteed domestic market (everyone needs clothes)

True, but you really want to be making textiles for rich countries, not for your local market.

Not to mention the potential export market. Textiles are a great example of comparative advantage at work--even if a richer country can manufacture better textiles than a poorer country, importing textiles from the poor countries frees up resources for the rich country to manufacture other goods. There are good reasons Bangladesh is a major player in the textile industry.

My guess is the idea is to grow the textile industry beyond just making domestic products and to start selling exports. Once you have a homegrown operation, people like Nike are willing to let you make their clothes.

Basically using it as the first step towards industrialization.

Why textiles? Because its the easiest thing to manufacture. Clothing is light. So textiles are often made wherever there is cheap labor. They'd rather get a factory making iPhones, but that isn't happening.

This is a similar dilemma as the one caused by job automation. If you automate all the jobs people can readily do, you do not instantly make them able to perform more complex jobs. They might be unlikely to learn to do anything else in a reasonable amount of time.

This is exactly my thought. If you get clothes by the ton at less than cost because they're used, you don't need a domestic textile industry. Your local fashionistas can still buy the same fabrics and designs as New York or Paris, if they want them.

Besides that, if you stop soaking up the supply by accepting imports, you certainly aren't going to be able to export competitively.

In my opinion, third world countries should be sending their folks to Delaware to study corporate law, and to various island nations to study offshore banking. After they have the principles down, pass legislation that turns the country into a sweatshop/boiler-room for intellectual property lawsuits and tax avoidance schemes.

The current state of the world is that you have to be rich to get rich, so if you pretend to be rich for long enough, you have a decent chance of either making that real or collapsing in a boneless pile of fraud. And if the latter would happen anyway, there's really no point in actually doing anything useful or productive to keep up appearances.

Its the ecosystem around it. Textiles were one of the first industrial scale operations for a reason. It generates complimentary business like trucking, chemicals, packaging, mechanical trades, etc.

"If you don't need to produce X you have more energy and workforce available to produce Y."

At some point, the contents of category Y start looking a little thin on the ground.

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