Nike Mayfly
Aug. 21st, 2003 01:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davywavyReading the paper the other day, I was struck by some correspondence about the Nike ‘Mayfly’ running shoe; a shoe which is so light and sleek that it will disintegrate after about 60 miles of running but reduces the weight carried by marathon runners by that vital extra pound. The correspondence wasn’t about this being a waste of resources (Nike actually will take them from you & recycle them when the shoes give it up), but rather about the perceived iniquity between the shoes costing about $100 a pair and the fact that Vietnamese workers for Nike get about $1 to actually make a pair.* Not for the first time (and no way will it be the last) I was struck by the astounding ignorance of my fellow man. Several things struck me about this.
1) If people perceive an injustice being done within the international world of Nike training shoes, the easiest way to tackle that is simply not to buy their goods. Manufacturers are in the business of making money and if they don’t make money from one product then they’ll either go out of business of make a different one.
2) More notably, whilst it is easy for happy, comfortable, plump westerners like you & I to rail about the evils of global capitalism, the thin, unhappy, third world recipients of it are only too delighted. It’s quite rare that Nike is held up as a shining example of capitalism with a conscience and so I expect that it’ll come as a surprise to most that quite recently it was just that, and the organisation doing the praising was the Vietnamese Communist Party. For all that $1 might seem a nugatory amount to you & I, in Vietnam it is three times the average daily wage and the people who work in Nikes factories are loaded in comparative standards. This influx of relative wealth has brought schools, sanitation, wealth, and health to a town which formerly had none of those.
Now I know that my various socialist friends will claim for some tortuous reason or other that the Vietnamese Commies aren’t proper commies (except when they’re talking about the Vietnam war, when suddenly that perception changes), but I tend to discount such claims as spurious at best and actively disingenuous at worst.
So it seems to me that a net result of global capitalism is that a bunch of people stupid enough to buy shoes designed to fall to bits after a week are bringing happiness, education, and health to people on the other side of the world whose lives, until only recently, had been blighted by the malignant curse of Socialist government.
I find it remarkably ironic that the anti-capitalism protestors who travel the world smashing the windows in Gap could make a much more significant impact on improving the lives of Vietnamese peasants by buying a pair of shoes that will have dropped to bits by the middle of next week, but just try pointing that out to them and see how much fun you have.
* EDIT: This figure is incorrect and I'm quoting the fool who wrote to the paper, not accurate pay figures or costs.
1) If people perceive an injustice being done within the international world of Nike training shoes, the easiest way to tackle that is simply not to buy their goods. Manufacturers are in the business of making money and if they don’t make money from one product then they’ll either go out of business of make a different one.
2) More notably, whilst it is easy for happy, comfortable, plump westerners like you & I to rail about the evils of global capitalism, the thin, unhappy, third world recipients of it are only too delighted. It’s quite rare that Nike is held up as a shining example of capitalism with a conscience and so I expect that it’ll come as a surprise to most that quite recently it was just that, and the organisation doing the praising was the Vietnamese Communist Party. For all that $1 might seem a nugatory amount to you & I, in Vietnam it is three times the average daily wage and the people who work in Nikes factories are loaded in comparative standards. This influx of relative wealth has brought schools, sanitation, wealth, and health to a town which formerly had none of those.
Now I know that my various socialist friends will claim for some tortuous reason or other that the Vietnamese Commies aren’t proper commies (except when they’re talking about the Vietnam war, when suddenly that perception changes), but I tend to discount such claims as spurious at best and actively disingenuous at worst.
So it seems to me that a net result of global capitalism is that a bunch of people stupid enough to buy shoes designed to fall to bits after a week are bringing happiness, education, and health to people on the other side of the world whose lives, until only recently, had been blighted by the malignant curse of Socialist government.
I find it remarkably ironic that the anti-capitalism protestors who travel the world smashing the windows in Gap could make a much more significant impact on improving the lives of Vietnamese peasants by buying a pair of shoes that will have dropped to bits by the middle of next week, but just try pointing that out to them and see how much fun you have.
* EDIT: This figure is incorrect and I'm quoting the fool who wrote to the paper, not accurate pay figures or costs.
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no subject
Date: 2003-08-26 06:20 am (UTC)Isn’t it amazing how much we disagree on stuff? I was surprised by your statement that the internet was the greatest innovation of the 20th century, as I consistently argue that it was actually reliable female contraception, and the social revolution that created.
As for people being happier in the past, I can think of a certain 50% of the population who aren’t tied to the home for their entire lives producing children, and who can now get out and have lives. And good on them too, I say. If you think that people were happier in the good olde days, ask any of your female friends if they’re rather be alive now or in the days before the pill and social equality and see what answer you get.
5. Often, however, the developers misrepresent the benefits to be had from adopting the consumerist lifestyle, and the tribesmen (in what I'll grudgingly call their naievety) believe them. They don't necessarily realise before it's too late that they are less happy and worse off.
That’s a question of human honesty, rather than a fault of the economic system. Next you’ll try and tell me that people will suddenly become lots more honest in the Communist world of milk & honey…
Sadly, they won’t. You’re attempting to socially engineer human nature, and it won’t work. I’m sorry, it’d be nice if it would. But it won’t. It’s been tried before, in many places, and once the failure begins, out come the guns to force people to act in this ‘ideal’ way…and it’s downhill from there.