Benjamin Powell - Out of Poverty: Sweatshops in the Global Economy

My first debt for this book is owed to David Skarbek. Now a lecturer at Kings College London, he was an undergraduate student in an international economics class I taught at San Jose State University in 2004. He approached me with a desire to write a term paper that we might jointly turn into a scholarly journal article. I suggested working on an empirical investigation of sweatshop wages. We eventually published the paper that evolved out of that project in the Journal of Labor Research . It was my first sweatshop-related research.

That initial research led to many invitations to give public lectures about sweatshops. I have given lectures to, or participated in debates in front of, civic groups, professional associations, and, mostly, college and university student groups. I resist the urge to try to name each audience I have lectured to about sweatshops because I will surely leave some out. It now numbers at least scores and probably somewhere in the hundreds. This book is a direct result of the public lectures and the feedback I received at them. In the course of my lectures I found myself addressing more and more aspects of sweatshops that went beyond topics I had been able to address in scholarly journal articles. Ultimately, I decided that it was time to write a book on the topic that could more fully elaborate the points I was making in my lectures. I am indebted to the students and faculty members who helped to arrange these many lectures and the participants, both hostile (and there were many of them) and sympathetic, who provided feedback over the last decade.

Although most of this book is new work, it does draw on my prior research. Im indebted to coauthors Matt Zwolinski, J. R. Clark, and David Skarbek for their contributions to that research.. Im also grateful that the editors of the Journal of Business Ethics , Comparative Economic Studies , the Journal of Labor Research , and Human Rights Quarterly all saw fit to publish my research on sweatshops.

Im grateful to the Earhart Foundation for financial support that allowed me to write much of this book over the course of two summers. I thank Nicolas Cachanosky, Rick Weber, Tylor Orme, Rosolino Candela, and Audrey Redford, who provided valuable research and manuscript preparation assistance over the course of this project while they were working as my graduate assistants at Suffolk University. And I thank Linley Hall who provided valuable editorial assistance.

Im grateful that Cambridge University Press senior editor Scott Parris and series editors Timur Kuran and Peter J. Boettke believed in this project from the beginning and encouraged me to pursue it. I also thank Kristen Purdy, who replaced Scott, and her staff for seeing the project through to completion, and I thank David Theroux and Roy Carlisle who were able to involve the Independent Institute in the publication of this book. I also thank two of the three anonymous Cambridge University Press reviewers for valuable feedback on the first half of the manuscript. Im indebted to Jeffery Rogers Hummel for providing valuable feedback on the historical chapter in this book and to Matt Zwolinski and Mark LeBar for helping me avoid saying anything (hopefully) that philosophers would consider stupid in the chapter on ethics. The greatest thanks go to David Skarbek and Josh McCabe, who read the entire manuscript and provided valuable feedback that often substantially altered my presentation of the material.