Recent Reading

Travels of A T-Shirt In The Global Economy. (I was going to have a picture of it, but Amazon won't play nice.)

Back in 1992 I was a graduate student at the London School of Economics, and one day just for fun an American friend and I went to see Michael Palin speak. He had just made another travel show for the BBC (Pole to Pole) and he welcomed us all to a "shameless attempt to flog more books." He showed slides of his trip accompanied by delightful off-the-cuff commentary. He was every bit as funny as you'd expect.

But the funniest thing for us wasn't something he said, it was a slide he showed. He showed a picture of a man in Africa, and the man was wearing a t-shirt that said "When I die, don't send me to Heaven, just send me to Myrtle Beach." This was before Myrtle Beach, SC, had re-invented itself as a land of golf and family-friendly vacations, and more when we thought of it as the land of spring break and drunken debauchery. The sheer strangeness of sitting in a theater in London watching a member of Monty Python show a picture of a man in Africa wearing a Myrtle Beach t-shirt just seemed to sum up our London experience. The whole world was in London. Here was proof.

And while I found "The Travels Of A T-Shirt In The Global Economy" fascinating and educational, it did ruin a little of the magic of that memory for me. I found out why that guy in Africa had the t-shirt. He bought it in a secondary market of American used clothing. You know those clothes you gave to Goodwill that they couldn't sell? They were re-sold in Africa, in pretty much the only free market for clothing. (Yes, Goodwill still made money off them).

I'm not an anti-globalization person, or even an anti-commerce person. Though my politics tend to the left, I have an MBA and tend to be a free-trade type. But this book really opened my eyes both about the extent of government regulation of trade, and about the strange ways that government regulation actually sometimes creates an advance in the industry.

Plus, this book was a light, easy read, which is nice when my time for reading is limited. It reminded me a bit of Freakonomics in that it was reasonably analytic, but clearly written so my foggy night-nursing brain could slog through it. It helped me feel I still could think, though if I really could think I'd probably be more articulate in recommending it.