The Economics of Happy Feet
Gary North recently suggested that we count our capitalist blessings and name them one by one,
while inviting people to add to a list that would be inexhaustible.
My addition, shoes.
For years I've read to my kids a story about a cobbler and his wife,
who can't seem to make enough shoes to bring in enough revenue to put food on the table.
One day they wake to find a pair of fabulous, fully finished shoes on the work table.
They put them in the display case.
The shoes sell immediately and for a high price.
The same happens the next night.
They stay up the next night to discover tiny elves have taken pity on this hard-working
couple and made shoes for them to sell.
Once prosperous, they pay back the elves by making tiny shoes for them.
And thus is the old saying that, him that makes shoes goes barefoot himself, made false,
by the intervention of benevolent visitors from the world of fantasy.
These days, the fantasy of such a story stretches in every direction.
There are no more cobblers who make shoes – well, there are some who cater to highly
specialized foot issues.
There are people who repair shoes, and we call them cobblers for nostalgic reasons.
If we go back far enough in time, we can see that, in the greatest portion of known history,
shoes consisted of nothing but wrapped animal skin, bark or leaves.
The stage of economic development that permitted people to specialize in making shoes was itself
a great step forward.
And yet today, the specialisation of shoemaking itself has been displaced, but for eccentrics
who choose to re-enact their making and even pay for them, just as some people like vinyl
records.
We've all had the experience of reading old works of literature and finding that various
shoe miseries and dramas play a huge factor in daily life.
We read long details of the way in which shoes are falling apart and bringing about terrible
People, pains, and how difficult it was to find a new pair.
They were expensive and the wait was long.
Shoes are the subject of great longing.
Cinderella.
Sin.
Anderson's red shoes.
Magic.
Dorothy.
And suffering.
Valley Forge.
They are made and presented at major turning points in life, communion, confirmation,
weddings.
State ceremony was attached to their acquisition.
They were the defining mark of class, nor no more shoes than feet, Shakespeare on poverty.
They were the subject of comment, regulation, sumptuary laws, envy and crime.
Today, because we take the availability of shoes for granted, we can only wonder what
all the fuss was about.
From Data, FYI Americans bought two billion pairs of shoes
last year, mostly women's shoes and sports shoes, made in China.
On this, we spent about 0.65% of our budgets, a figure that has been falling precipitously
for decades.
This is a period when domestic production of shoes has fallen by 75% in 10 years.
Concerning China accounting for 80% of imports, how interesting a turn of events is this?
When capitalists of old used to speak of China, they imagined all the shoes that could be
sold to a country so populous.
Who would have imagined that it would be China that would turn out to be the maker and seller
of shoes to the world?
This represents a reversal of the open-door policy that led to the Marxist rebellion,
The History of Shoes online assumes that in the Middle Ages there were women's shoes
and men's shoes, both dreadfully uncomfortable, and that there were either low-quality or
high-quality shoes available for peasants and elites, respectively.
Those were a coveted mark of social advancement.
That was true for most of history until very recently.
If you enter a shoe store today – and actually even my local grocery store sells shoes – you
find a seemingly infinite variety produced not by elves, but a coordinated international
marketplace of corporations and suppliers and factories that make shoes for all the
feet of the world.
For men, there are what are called work shoes – which today, strangely, means shoes for
manual labour – which are made of hard rubber soles, dress shoes, meaning leather soles
or the faux version with leather uppers with rubber soles, office shoes of hundreds of
varieties of styles that most men wear, and sports shoes designed specifically for leaping
or running or playing tennis or basketball or baseball or anything else.
All chain stores are devoted to selling the hundreds and thousands of styles of sports
shoes alone.
And lest we are tempted to think that this is an example of capitalist redundancy and
repackaging, try running a few miles in a racquetball shoe, as compared with the brilliance
of a running shoe proper, and you discover that there really is a point.
And prices!
You can go to the military surplus store and get excellent dress black for a dollar or
two.
You can pay between $6 and $600 for a pair of sports shoes.
You can do the same for men's dress shoes.
It seems, too, that the prices are always falling for shoes, but it is more likely that,
as always in a market economy, yesterday's luxury good becomes tomorrow's sale item
at Big Lots.
If wearing status shoes is what you seek, you have to act fast, since the poor will be wearing
next week what only the rich wore last week.
As for women's shoes, I would guess that the average consumer has more in her closet
than Marie Antoinette ever dreamed of owning.
And this is true all over the world.
Even in the poorest countries, shoes are available everywhere and at rock-bottom prices.
One of the great miseries of living in the Third World used to be the aches and pains
associated with poor-quality footwear, if you could find it at all.
But no more.
American capitalist excess, which led entrepreneurs to pay workers in China and Indonesia to make
shoes for American consumers, has yielded surpluses that spread affordable shoes to
all corners of the globe.
Today, a peasant in the fields of a Guatemalan village wears shoes that medieval lords would
have traded for their own models made of wood and leather.
Even bums who beg for a living in big cities and want to do their best to look the part
have a hard time finding shoes that look appropriately worn and ragged.
The trash bins are filled not with leather shoes taped and tied together, but only mildly
Shoes all over the world are all of extremely high quality as compared with previous times.
Even in my youth, I can recall that track shoes were black with white stripes and had
a thin little layer of rubber on the bottom that would allow you to feel every pebble beneath
your feet.
Today, a running shoe is a spectacular thing.
With the proper fit, it goes on with a suction sound, hugs and holds your foot, seems to
put jet propulsion at your back, and creates the illusion that you can run up a wall and
across a ceiling, all this without creating a blister even on the first wearing and for
less than forty dollars.
Now, quality might not be the same as long-lasting, of course, which is a feature that is dictated
by consumer preference.
A handmade shoe of the 19th century might have lasted two generations, but we no longer
need or want shoes to last that long, any more than we want our houses to have the enduring
power of medieval churches.
Mostly people would rather buy new, rather than apply new soles.
Of course, for those who do prefer shoes that live generations, those are available too.
And yet this is all rather new to our time, and crucially important for health and wellbeing.
Podiatrists tell us that the bones and tendons in the feet begin to weaken severely with
age, especially past 40.
Now consider that the average life expectancy didn't pass the age of 40 until 1850 in
the US.
Throughout the whole of world history, when shoes were so shabby and miserable, most people
didn't have to worry about weakened foot bones and tendons because they were dead long
before this became a problem.
But now that we are living twice as long as our great-great-grandparents, it becomes crucially
important that we have shoes that treat our feet with loving attention.
How interesting, how marvelous, that the coordinating powers of the free market grant us comfortable
healthy pain-reducing shoes in the very time when we are living longer and longer, and thereby
requiring even more sophisticated ways of forestalling or otherwise dealing with bodily decay.
It is conventional to credit medicines and hospitals for long lives, but we should also
give due regard to such conventional consumer products as shoes that make life past the age
The Great Irony of Living in the Age of Entrepreneurship is that we no longer have to put thought into
life's necessities such as the production and acquisition of shoes.
It has made a problem that has vexed all people in all times obsolete, and so much so that
But to even write about the topic is considered frivolous and obsessive.
There are even whole interest groups calling for shoes to be less plentiful and more expensive.
In a world without markets such as these people seek, many things would be missed, but I'm
Assessing that footwear would be at the top of the list.