In B School, there's a classic tale of unbalanced industry influence in Vlasic Pickles v Wal-Mart only a decade ago, where Wal-Mart got Vlasic to offer a gallon of pickles at bargain basement prices, and then wouldn't let them stop til bankrupt - a variant of Sinbad's Old Man of the Sea.

A similar case of riding it to the bottom is portrayed in Andrew Morgan's The True Cost, an expose on the effects of "Fast Fashion", when a Bangladeshi sweatshop manager notes the pressure to lower his cost per shirt from ridiculous to subridiculous, all to allow the US shop to sell a shirt for $3.

One of the claims of international trade is that the low pay of workers will eventually rise to pull people out of poverty, that a rising tide lifts all boats. This is true in the case of China, which has seen wages rise hugely over the last 3 decades. But it's arguably a fantasy or missing context in the case of the Bengal shop where a female seamstress starts at $10 per month and even after years is forced to send her daughter to live with her mother, seeing her twice a year, in order to afford the cost of living, all the fees from child care to school to food. It's a fantasy in the Cambodian factory where workers asking for $160 a month are locked in a room and beaten. 

There's renewed talk of the working class being abandoned in France as in the United States, but I'd argue the issue is more that few know what to do. Because the company selling that shirt for $3 isn't making a lot of money either - any study of commodity markets in open competition notes they compete out at zero profit - simply covering costs.

The exception for China seems to be a quirk in the analysis - China has done better because of non-transparency, extortion, limiting access to its market, forcing foreigners to divest or share ownership shares in order to gain access to either China production or the market itself. The added iota is the amount of IP theft as whatever's produced "falls off the back of the truck" to be replicated over and over - the cut-throat competition then continues in Asian climes.

Some years ago, the Asian Tigers fought off similar wage deflation, and to survive currency speculation, it was mostly the Malaysian government shutting down access that saved their economy - hardly the free market paraded around. But they survived. In the current standoff, there are fewer local solutions to combat the global trends without repercussions, a reversed trade wr, or simply the loss of right to play in the game. Unlike the Asian crash 20 years ago, if Malaysia tries not to play, there are plenty of other Asian Tigers to take over production. TPP was partially (and imperfectly) designed to counter the Chinese heavyweights, but the fact is, much of production is commodity by nature, and much of Asia has tooled up to handle it quite ably. And thus like any situation of oversupply, prices are going to give, as are real people's lives.

To watch The True Cost is hopefully to realize this isn't a "close the borders"/"stop trade" simple solution, and hopefully it highlights the horrid ethics and unacceptable solution of  simplyabandoning the poor in Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Vietnam, Mexico and elsewhere just to try to bring back those "good jobs" of yesterday. It was a century ago that New York had its own sweat shop fires that rivaled Dhaka's Rana Plaza collapse. China's improved standard of living is a good thing, even if we're not sure of the next step. New jobs and increased salaries are needed in Phnom Penh as much as Topeka and Gadsden and Youngstown, or Toulouse and Leeds and Cadiz.

But we largely don't know how to do that. We know how to increase competition, but not how to guarantee a profit. We know how to bring disruptive technology on the market, but not how to guarantee it does good. We know how to race to the bottom, but not so much how to float - either still underwater or slowly to the surface. It's not so much the politicians have lost touch with the worker as it is that the problems are so complex and entrenched, they don't have anything real to promise.

250,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide the last 2 decades, over the cost of buying seed or other rising expenses or the general difficulties of staying profitable on your own farm, not to mention the increased illness from farm contamination and pollution and the stepped up competition.

But there's nothing that unique between our agricultural production and the steady conversion of the auto industry and Uber's frontal attack on taxis, and restaurant work, and a dozen other industries. We're just trying to survive. But what does that mean for our theory of productivity, what all our theories of GDP and priming the economy, and how much control we have over things.

In short, The True Cost may be about costs, but the real questions involve how different the fashion industry is from any other, and how much longer any of these have to last do to whichever pressure of survival.

In 2003, the 14.9m workers in retail beat out the 14.5 million workers in factories. These are less dangerous jobs overall (unlike sweatshops), but there's a low wage penalty for working without fear and danger. There's a steady movement to automate and otherwise defray the costs of paying a decent wage, and instead shifting to lower-paid labor to compensate. Where something's scalable, it's not people - it's software as a service, Clouds, robots, anything that can add another 1x, 2x, 5x capacity for roughly the same cost as before - this is investor grail, and will obviously be the end result.

So what happens to the rest? Quite simply, we don't know - it's not found from reading Keynes or Milton Friedman or even Marx - it's new territory, our next moonshot - except we largely don't know what we're shooting for. A livable wage? A chicken in every pot? When we did the Apollo program, we were talking about one tin can sent off to a lunar crater - not 7 billion people. But that's what we're faced with for any kind of economic overhaul - shooting for less misses half the point, and leaves the potential for a good bit of the planet to revolt in various unpalatable ways. Or simply starve and die out, another rather unseemly approach.

The movie shows a "Fair Trade" effort, but it never quite shows them designing a business that supplies millions while employing say a hundred thousand. There's talks about H&M, but not a sit-down to get H&M pressured into delivering a living wage even for the pittance that means in Bangladesh. The one glimpse of a union showed that union going down to total defeat, while folks in the industry in New York were unconcerned - much ado over shirts and such.

Except even the idea that charity for Haiti would help was debunked - just more unneeded, badly sized clothes piling up in lots, with perhaps 1/10 sold off to fabric grabs and second hands - not the clothing of the poor we imagine with our charitable efforts. And worse, it's destroyed Haiti's own fabric and design industry. I discovered this long ago - who's going to buy a nice t-shirt when the market's flooded with ugly crawdad and "Big Sleep" fare at 1/3 the price?

LBJ didn't invent the ideas of The Great Society - he made sure interesting trends & innovations were funded through Congress. Similarly, few of our politicians have any creative gene for that next breakthrough technology or social order - we're fooling ourselves if we think that's where it comes from. Instead, it's new ideas vetted through obscure corners. We hope to make it out in one piece, with most parts intact, but we still haven't written that part of the script, and it's us - the crowdsourced science, news, jobs and innovation force that will make the difference, with some clusters of experts and non-experts along the way to carry the heavier load. Sounds pretty abstract and unconvincing, don't it? But that's where the internet's brought us. As I think they said in Princess Bride - "prepare for disappointment". Such is our New World Order - not the True Cost, but the uncertain benefit. It all looks like Fake Gold from here.