Written by John Lounsbury
Econintersect: Benjamin Powell is Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, Director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University, and former President of the Association of Private Enterprise Education. He is a professor of economics in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech. This is a lecture on sweatshops presented in the summer of 2016 at the Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama.
Prof. Powell is an expert on sweatshops, with the topic being one of his career research interests. From Wikipedia:
Powell’s academic interest in sweatshops dates back to at least 2004, when he wrote a working paper along with David Skarbek for the Independent Institute looking at how sweatshop jobs compared with the other jobs available to people who took them.[3] The working paper was later published as an article for the Journal of Labor Research.[4] Powell also wrote an article for Human Rights Quarterly, responding to the argument by Arnold and Hartman (2006) that activists should encourage sweatshop employers to voluntarily work toward improving the conditions of sweatshop workers.[5] Powell has since written journal articles on sweatshops for the Journal of Business Ethics[6] and Comparative Economic Studies[7] and has also written about sweatshops based on his research in other venues, such as EconLib,[8] Forbes,[9]Christian Science Monitor,[10] and Dallas Morning News.[11] He has also summarized his arguments in a 3-minute video for LearnLiberty.[12] Powell’s forthcoming book Out of Poverty builds on his deacde of research on the subject.[13]
Powell has been interviewed about the subject by The Freeman, the magazine of the Foundation for Economic Education.[14] Powell’s work on sweatshops has been reviewed by Elise Amyx at the Values & Capitalism blog,[15] John Miller at TripleCrisis,[16] and Kevin Carson at the Center for a Stateless Society.[17]
Note: This video was recommended by John O’Donnell, Online Trading Academy.
Source: YouTube
