Comment by abdullahkhalids
2 days ago
Apparel markets are much more free and competitive than housing markets, and have basically no restrictions on supply. Yet, the quality of available clothing across the world have fallen. And we get incredibly cheap incredibly low-quality garbage.
These things are much more complex than simplistic single-variable models.
I don't think clothing quality has fallen. Quite the opposite. We are able to buy high quality clothing at a very low price. More advanced materials, more consistent construction, better construction, greater selection, etc.
Much of what you can buy today did not even exist 30 years ago. For example, trail running shoes more or less did not exist. Perhaps you could have had a pair custom made, at a high price, with the worse materials available at the time, but today you can them "off the shelf".
Even the many shirts I've received for free are very high quality and have endured years of abuse.
This is substantially better than really bad apartments that are expensive or nice apartments that are very expensive!
It is not actually more complex, you don't spend ~40% of CPI on apparel.
> the quality of available clothing across the world have fallen
Do you have a source for this? Anecdotes along the lines of "they don't make 'em like they used to" are incredibly common but often fail to stand up to scrutiny.
Circumstantially, the dominance of fast fashion, produced quickly and sold cheaply, suggests that some aspect of production is more "efficient" than historically so. I've seen YouTube fashion experts explain exactly how (lower quality fabrics, simpler and less durable sewing, cuts that use less fabric than would be so in higher quality garments), and while I'm not experienced enough to corroborate, they were convincing.