The Pittsburgh Steelers played in this year’s Super Bowl, but did not win it. Which means that, sitting in a warehouse somewhere, are lots of preprinted “Pittsburgh Steelers 2011 Super Bowl Champion” t-shirts. Ever wonder what happens to them? Dean Karlan, a development economist at Yale, is here to explain in a guest post.
Karlan is president and founder of Innovations for Poverty Action, a research affiliate at the M.I.T. Jameel Poverty Action Lab,?and co-Founder of stickK.com. And he and Jacob Appel are co-authors of a forthcoming book called More Than Good Intentions: How a New Economics Is Helping to Solve Global Poverty.
What Happens to All Those Super Bowl T-Shirts?
By Dean Karlan
The Super Bowl stirred up an old controversy in the international aid community.? What happens to all those preprinted “Pittsburgh Steelers 2011 Super Bowl Champion” t-shirts?? Apparently, each year the NFL gives them to the international relief and development organization World Vision, who then ships them to Africa.
Is this good or bad? And why should anyone care?
This is not the first time these questions have been asked. Less than a year ago, Jason Sadler planned to send a million t-shirts to Africa, only to be bombarded by scathing criticism from the aid blogosphere. Read here for the story, and here for his version of why he ultimately didn’t send the shirts.
Opponents argue that sending shirts destroys local textile economies by flooding the market with free goods and undercutting local t-shirt producers. World Vision responds by saying something to the tune of, “but we spread it out.” That is kind of like arguing that something bad is okay if you do it in small enough doses to lots of people (rather than a large dose to a few people). Of course, such arguments don’t hold water: bad is bad, even if marginally so.
I think World Vision might have a better defense. They could argue that critics of the annual t-shirt migration (or at least all the critics I’ve heard) are thinking about the wrong counterfactual. The choice is not between (a) doing nothing — which, critics infer, would leave Africans to produce and sell 100,000 new t-shirts — and (b) shipping 100,000 t-shirts to Africa. Rather, the choice is between (a) selling the t-shirts in the U.S. as rags (or novelty souvenirs for delusional Steelers fans) and then sending to Africa the proceeds plus the money that would have been spent on shipping, or (b) shipping 100,000 t-shirts to Africa.
In other words, the NFL surely isn’t going to pay local producers to make 100,000 t-shirts after the Super Bowl. That option is not on the table. So in the end, the t-shirt migration has one pro and two cons, and we have no real data to tell us what to do. The pro: some people in Africa get some t-shirts, and hopefully those people extract some value from the t-shirts (either by wearing them or by selling them). The first con: market prices for t-shirts may go lower in Africa, and this adversely affects some. The second con: there may simply be a better way, such as selling the t-shirts in the US and sending the profits, as in (a) above.
Typically, when we see arguments for in-kind goods, they have some sort of positive externalities (bednets to fight malaria, deworming pills) or we think they’re underconsumed because of poor information (education: gated copy here, earlier working paper here). T-shirts? Tough to make that case.
The more I read, the more I was struck: lots of rhetoric, but I could not find a simple evaluation that compared the above tradeoff: hand out t-shirts in Africa, or sell them in the U.S. and hand out the cash equivalent in Africa. Perhaps the outcomes are too diffuse (these shirts are not worth too much, after all, so what would we actually measure? And measuring impact on local prices is a tough nut to crack).
Perhaps the “gift” is simply too small to detect an impact. But, with as little as $0.50, we do know ways to make a noticeable impact: e.g., give deworming pills to schoolchildren in areas with worms, and their health and then school attendance improve.
What do you think?? Better than no aid, but not the optimal aid?? Or actually doing harm, as some argue?
(HT: A View from the Cave)
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Here’s an even better idea: don’t make the t-shirts in advance. The money that would have been used to produce the t-shirts can then be donated to any number of organizations working in Africa that don’t dilute local economies. Of course, here in the US, real hardship means having to wait an extra day to purchase our team’s victory t-shirt.
i would think that selling the shirts in the US as an Africa fundraiser could be very successful if you marketed it to the right demographic. “look at me wearing my ironic sports tshirt that also shows everyone that I donated money to africa!”
The choice is different: it is between selling the t-shirts at their real value (probably USD 1 per piece), and getting a tax exemption as a gift on the original value of USD 20, meaning a lot more than the USD 1 they would otherwise get.
In essence, it is just a tax scam, facilitated by a tax exempted organisation.
Who exactly is making t-shirts in Africa? From my experience in W. Africa the vast majority of clothes are bought at second-hand booths where these Superbowl tees would likely end up. Other clothes are made from traditional fabric (often produced abroad). Still some non second-hand clothes are imported from China.
This textbook idea that “foreign t-shirts flood market and hurt local t-shirt makers” is much more nuanced in practice. More t-shirts give lost cost alternatives to consumers and does very little to hurt ‘local textile economies.’
Plus it’s fun for ex-pat workers to look for funny t-shirts at the market.
It seems to be assumed that crappy t-shirts somehow benefit poor people in Africa. How?
As many (including me) bloggers interested in aid and development have argued, an important question from World Vision’s perspective should be “what else could we be doing with the same money?” World Vision spends a lot of money coordinating with donors for these Gifts-in-Kind, sorting things, shipping the t-shirts, and distributing them, especially if they’re doing the sort of advanced work they say is necessary to spread out the harm (OK, not their wording, but effectively what they’re saying). The opportunity cost is huge. They’re spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars — and much more over the years — to distribute t-shirts when they could be spending it on any number of things: medicine, vaccine programs, health education, microfinance, etc. They can and should do much better!
There’s another con to sending the shirts over there. As someone else pointed out, somewhere in Africa there’s a kid who thinks the Bills won four straight.
How about we all stop a minute and question the existence of the t-shirts in the first place. They’re a result of our “me want now” society – can’t people wait a few days to get their superbowl t-shirt in order to avoid the waste? The meaningless virtual glory that goes with sports fans stuff should also give pause – do we really need this? If Africans can be harmed by a bunch of free t-shirts, think what this is all doing to us at home? Plus, where were those t-shirts made? – I’ll bet not in the defunct southern U.S. clothing mills but in SE Asia. Oh the inhumanity of it all!!