Monday, November 28, 2005

T-shirt globalization

Pietra Rivoli's book The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade was the subject of a recent (10/19/05) IMF book forum. The transcript is available. Rivoli gives an overview of the book, as well as a fascinating look at globalization today. She uses the honored dialectical method of starting with one thing, and by exploring all of its interconnections, coming to an understanding of the whole (like Marx did by starting Capital off with an investigation of "commodity" to get to the workings of capitalism). In Rivoli's case, she uses a the life of a t-shirt to explore the global economy. (From one of the "list" links on Amazon, I see there is actually a genre of "commodity biography".) The transcript is worth the read.

jd

[P.S. - NPR did a series based around Rivoli's book in April '05, called The World in a T-Shirt. The NPR page has a map and links to book excerpts.]

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