Pietra Rivoli, "Dogs Snarling Together: How Politics Came to Dominate the Global Apparel Trade "
As consumers, we only see goods at the very end of their life cycles, when they are waiting in stores or online to be bought. What shoppers don’t see is the long and complicated journey that consumer products now take to reach stores where we find them. Even something as simple as a T-shirt, which we buy, wear, and dispose of with hardly a second thought, arrives by way of an increasingly intricate and contested route. Pietra Rivoli, a professor of finance and international business at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, tracks this process step by step in The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade (2005). She begins by purchasing a discounted T-shirt from a convenience store and then works backwards across the world to see how it got to be in that store, waiting for her. Widely acclaimed for its unique and engaging approach to globalization, this book was designated the best scholarly book of 2005 in the category of finance and economics by the American Association of Publishers.
“Dogs Snarling Together” is a chapter from The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy that traces a particularly contentious issue in the T-shirt trade. As the economy has become an increasingly complex global system, “the market mechanism” has abutted against traditional economic nationalism. The snarling dogs of the chapter’s title are the lobbyist and American textile industry representatives who “can speak with one voice—or snarl together” to ensure that their interests are protected. Rivoli details the strengthening and the unraveling of the protectionist measures as national interests, the drive for profit, and the global economy come into conflict.
“When I decided to follow my T-shirt around the world,” Rivoli writes in a reflective article, “what I wanted most of all was to tell a great story.” By setting aside her assumptions and any didactic motivation, Rivoli is able to tell a story without villains, one in which “every business, every entrepreneur, every politician…was just trying to make their way in a competitive market, a market that often changes under their feet.” In doing so, she is able to draw our attention to the complexities of trade and business and our own complex role in the global economy.
Rivoli, Pietra. “Dogs Snarling Together.” The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2005. 111-138.
Biographical information drawn from http://faculty.msb.edu/rivolip/#; quotes in the terminal paragraph are drawn from a reflective article at the Powell’s Books web site.
Digital image drawn from Pietra Rivoli's MSB faculty profile.
Link to Explore:
The Marketplace of Ideas: A podcast interview with Pietra Rivoli.
Audio and video of a talk given by Pietra Rivoli at the Cato Institute.
Tell Me More: A clip of Pietra Rivoli on an NPR radio show.
Question for Connecting:
- In “’Market Fundamentalism’ Versus the Religion of Democracy,” Bryan Caplan asserts that it “is more important for students to understand that self-interest often encourages socially beneficial behavior, than to understand that this mechanism falls short of perfection.” Does the textile trade, as Rivoli describes it, serve to illustrate Bryan’s central point? Would Bryan focus on individual agents or groups to illustrate the value of self-interest or would he focus on the collective value derived from the actions of all at once? Or is it that any specific instance of economic activity can be construed as “encourag[ing] socially beneficial behavior” of some kind? Write a paper where you explore the role of self-interest in the creation and maintenance of the textile industry.
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