<story><title>The Knife Maker</title><url>http://thisismadebyhand.com/film/the_knife_maker</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mapleoin</author><text>So you&apos;re saying that fair trade coffee benefits &quot;the white man&quot; rather than the producers in the third-world country? That&apos;s exactly the opposite of what fair trade means.&lt;p&gt;Also, hand-made isn&apos;t fighting against capitalism, it&apos;s fighting against mass-production, sweat-shops and machine-people jobs like the ones portrayed on Chaplin&apos;s &lt;i&gt;City Lights&lt;/i&gt; or even Discovery Channel&apos;s &lt;i&gt;How It&apos;s Made&lt;/i&gt;.</text></item><item><author>patio11</author><text>I&apos;m torn between &quot;This guy clearly enjoys his work, bully for him.&quot; and &quot;The handmade movement is an extravagantly wasteful alternative to a factory in China to give rich white people an opportunity to demonstrate their social superiority over people who use functionally equivalent objects produced in an efficient fashion.&quot;  (c.f. organic food, fair trade coffee, etc etc.  This topic makes me positively Marxist.  There was a time when only wealthy folks could afford goods.  Capitalism happened and now everyone can afford goods.  This &lt;i&gt;really discomfits some people&lt;/i&gt;, so they get very creative at inventing reasons why the goods they are using today are the right goods and the goods they were using ten years ago are now the wrong goods since poor people now have access to them.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dangrover</author><text>No, but the price difference between buying normal and fair trade (as a consumer) is much larger than the price difference between the underlying coffee crop used in each.&lt;p&gt;Tim Harford wrote about this: &lt;a href=&quot;http://timharford.com/2008/04/business-life-fair-trade-or-foul/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://timharford.com/2008/04/business-life-fair-trade-or-fo...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, he says, fair trade is 10X the margin!&lt;p&gt;Fair trade exists to segment the market and collect more consumer surplus (more than it exists to improve conditions).</text></comment>
<story><title>The Knife Maker</title><url>http://thisismadebyhand.com/film/the_knife_maker</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mapleoin</author><text>So you&apos;re saying that fair trade coffee benefits &quot;the white man&quot; rather than the producers in the third-world country? That&apos;s exactly the opposite of what fair trade means.&lt;p&gt;Also, hand-made isn&apos;t fighting against capitalism, it&apos;s fighting against mass-production, sweat-shops and machine-people jobs like the ones portrayed on Chaplin&apos;s &lt;i&gt;City Lights&lt;/i&gt; or even Discovery Channel&apos;s &lt;i&gt;How It&apos;s Made&lt;/i&gt;.</text></item><item><author>patio11</author><text>I&apos;m torn between &quot;This guy clearly enjoys his work, bully for him.&quot; and &quot;The handmade movement is an extravagantly wasteful alternative to a factory in China to give rich white people an opportunity to demonstrate their social superiority over people who use functionally equivalent objects produced in an efficient fashion.&quot;  (c.f. organic food, fair trade coffee, etc etc.  This topic makes me positively Marxist.  There was a time when only wealthy folks could afford goods.  Capitalism happened and now everyone can afford goods.  This &lt;i&gt;really discomfits some people&lt;/i&gt;, so they get very creative at inventing reasons why the goods they are using today are the right goods and the goods they were using ten years ago are now the wrong goods since poor people now have access to them.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cschmidt</author><text>He&apos;s saying that the main benefit of fair trade &lt;i&gt;to the consumer&lt;/i&gt; is a sense of superiority or reduced guilt over those who drink &quot;regular&quot; coffee. That sort of benefit always strikes me as a bit of a &quot;luxury good&quot; as well, in the sense that the benefit isn&apos;t about the functionality or quality of the coffee itself.&lt;p&gt;There is of course a benefit to &lt;i&gt;the producer&lt;/i&gt; as well, in the form of a fair price.&lt;p&gt;I imagine most of the factory workers on &quot;How It&apos;s Made&quot; rather like their jobs. They all seem to take pride in what they produce.</text></comment>