Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway66920 | Hacker News Reader

Well, for one, that would vastly reduce economic growth. But aside from that, there’s not many things that fit X in the scheme of things you purchase frequently. Packaging / containers of consumed items is a big one. Fashion might be but probably not.

The example I hear a lot for some reason is power tools. Yeah it would be great to share power tools because you only need them once or twice... but you only buy them once or twice otherwise. It’s a good idea to help poor communities consolidate resources but it’s hard to help large communities reduce their eco foot prints

View on HN

I think that treating fast fashion as a driver of economic growth is an example of the broken window fallacy.

That is to say that I don't actually think it drives economic growth overall. It may do within a specific sector at the expense of others.

Fast fashion is bad. But I think the broken window fallacy is poorly matched to modern times. It’s useful to demonstrate why war is bad even if it boosts our GDP, but there’s so much nuance to things like repairs, obsolescence, globalism, switching costs, etc.

If something is bad for economic growth, whose growth matters? Ecological arguments are perhaps one of the better things to consider because at the end of the day it may kill everyone. shrug

The broken window fallacy requires forcefully destroying someone’s property to get them to replace it with the same thing. This doesn’t fit that model at all.

You could argue that purposely designing things to last only a year when they could last ten years is purposeful destruction though

No, because people know that at this point.

> Well, for one, that would vastly reduce economic growth.

Yes, that's the point! I take the world without the economic growth where people are happy with what they have over one with economic growth and unsustainable level of CO2 emissions.

Not to start an argument, but that's easy to say when you have a comfortable life and already experienced abundance.

You know, people of poor and underdeveloped countries have the right to aspire to a better life (and yes, that means owning more than a couple of ragged t-shirts and eat meat often than twice a month)

Sure, me too. But historically, and also literally right now, lack of economic growth leads to revolutions and protest if people are poor.

Genuine question from an ignorance of macroeconomics:

Wouldn't the money going to clothing just go to something else? It's not like the workers or company owners would sit on their hands when fashion stops being profitable.

The money would go into something else, but it would probably be something stupid. A lot of the dumb startups we see now that are burning cash on obviously bad strategies exist because at a global financial scale, there’s not enough opportunities to invest all of the capital in. There’s obviously lots (LOTS) of work to be done that could use capital still but current financial system want to believe in a high rate of return so they look to things like Uber. Note, Uber’s of the world are a drop in the bucket still, but the symptom is growing in prevalence. This is also not to say that fast fashion is a good idea or an efficient use of resources. It’s not.

The people... well this hypothetical is extreme so it’s hard to say. But populations of workers have been abandoned in the past before and it varies. It’s fully believable that they would just not have anything to do and would... idk... protest.

If people are spending it on ‘something stupid’ that’s is a sign that resources are unequally and inefficiently distributes. There are plenty of people in the world who would spend additional cash on food or fuel.

I mean... yeah, that’s correct. The world’s resources are overtly unequally and inefficiently distributed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com