Ha. I still own and wear clothes bought in 1997.
Today, we only hang on to about 21 percent of the clothing we buy every year.
How would one come up with a figure like this? I mean, did they do a survey of how much clothing the average household gets rid of per year (no, I didn't read the article, why do you ask?) And even if there is such a survey, does it specify that the clothing gotten rid of in a given year was also acquired within the last 12 months?
Possibly it would be helpful to read the article.
It will not be helpful to read the article.
And what does "hang on to" mean? Hang on to for how long? A year? 10 years? That sentence is just terribly written!
Ha. I still own and wear clothes bought in 1997.
Me too, and from earlier!, but I feel like this is the new I-don't-even-own-a-TV.
I think I have a few things even older, but from memory I can only verify 1997. Clothing is very cheap when you stay a consistent size since high school and have no fashion sense at all.
The first link in the post is interesting, but I'm pretty sure it's not what heebie meant to link to.
My wife still owns and wear clothes bought in 1987. I think this is because I asked her to throw them away.
7 made me think it was porn, but it wasn't.
Oh, ha, that was leftover from a different post that I was trying to construct, that I abandoned because I sounded so dumb.
Here's the source for the dumb "we hang on to 21%" line.
All my clothes fit in an ordinary chest o' drawers and 1/3 of one of one closet. Because I care about Africa.
The article in 11 is actually more interesting than heebie implies, although it is admittedly a bit thin and lacking in sourcing.
That $150 would see me through a year, easy. I still occasionally wear a t-shirt I bought at a Nirvana show.
I don't think I have any clothing from 1997. In the past, I've tended to own only a week or so's worth of clothing and stuff would wear out fairly quickly. More recently, I've owned a bit more and replaced stuff less often.
I don't think I have any clothing from 1997.
You could visit a museum that specializes in the past millennium or visit Sears.
(heebie, are you going to fix the original link in the OP?)
The article in 11 is interesting: we've talked here before about the importance of the grey market in our economies. The recycling/reuse business is pretty robust, and tends to fly under the radar of most people, who view it as vaguely illegitimate, but it's essential to the way we operate.
14: But I assume the average household is more than one person.
Original link is fixed. Here's the faulty link, for posterity, since someone will wonder what Teo found so interesting.
17: Who are these people who think clothing resale is illegitimate?
1: I have some shoes from 1999 or earlier, though they've been repeatedly reheeled and resoled. There's no Ship of Theseus problem, though, since the uppers are original.
I also have lots of suits I inherited from my grandfather, some of them I'm sure are from the '80s or earlier (maybe even a few from the '70s).
20.1: Underwear sellers, according to the return desk people at Sears.
On "the average household spent $1760 on clothes in 2007" -- that's an average, not a mean. It's hard to know how the mean might differ, but it would be helpful to know. Flippanter probably skews the average in one direction, after all, while households of one who spend $75/year skew it in another.
I bought my one suit in January 1998. Possibly December 1997, I guess.
My suits are that old also. We're probably luck that the last fifteen years have had fashion change more slowly than it has in the past.
20.1: I'm referring to this bit from the OP's now-fixed first link:
Before it heads abroad, so-called "processors" buy charity overages in bulk. These processors used to be in the business of recycling garments for their fibers. But with the decline in quality of the fabrics we wear, this kind of recycling has grown comparatively expensive, and is no longer lucrative. Instead, thousands of pounds of clothing are taken from charities and sorted by category in various facilities across the U.S.
Along with the following paragraph.
I mean that recyclers are, as the article says, big business: there are metal recyclers, and paper recyclers, and clothing, and so on. Recycling plants all over the place! Which most people don't really know about, but that's where most of those books you donate to the library go: to be pulped and sold for pennies per pound, as pulp. A lot of people watch the prices for these things, and redirect things accordingly; it's above-board for the most part.
By the way, Benquo, I saw your offer of help re: the septic tank thing, but not until the next day when the thread was long dead. Much appreciated, and I may issue a call for help if need be; so far things are muddling through.
You're mashing the poop through your toilet with a stick?
Nobody is residing at the house at the moment, Moby. Trying to figure out permitting issues now, without paying an arm and a leg for a 'design' consultant.
27: Glad to hear you're doing OK so far.
There was probably only a 5% chance or so I could have been helpful anyway, so don't give me too much credit for the offer.
Speaking of people who think things are illegitimate -- good heavens, there was some guy interviewed at length on the radio about his proposal to do away with physical representations of money. We should all operate with debit cards, credit cards, and electronically.
Why, you ask? Well, first, he said, the manufacture of paper money and coinage is expensive, and the labor costs in handling all that cash are simply wasteful and inefficient. Second, he said, we are losing boatloads of tax revenue from the cash economy: it allows people to deal directly with one another outside sanctioned channels.
Heh.
32: The link attached to your name goes to a bunch of pictures of stuffed animals. You realize that, right?
My oldest functional garment is a pair of leggings purchased when I was 12. They are blindingly hideous, but might be in style again.
The only clothes I have from before 1997 are things I don't wear or only rarely - formal stuff or specialized sports things, e.g. my ski suit is about twenty years old. Other than that clothes wear out, get thrown out or stuck in a closet or a dusty corner of my bedroom.
Oh, were you trying to email me? I just sent you an email.
If my records are to be believed I spent $81.87 on clothes in 2011, $97.91 in 2010. This is a bit misleading as I also get gifts of clothing.
||Apparently, back in fifties the Catholic Church in Holland occasionally had teenaged boys castrated as a form of 'therapy' for gayness. Extra bonus fun fact, they seem to have been ones who filed charges of rape against priests>|
No link since the article is po polsku.
41 is kind of hilariously in character.
I regularly wear boots I bought in high school and the boots my mother was issued in Basic eighteen years before that. The uppers, anyway, as above. Also a coat of my grandfather's, although the stitching and lining are failing and I need to re-assemble it. Also some less utilitarian things from a generation or so further back; lace collars, a muff, a very few hats. Also some things even less in the spirit of the question.
Isn't the problem with exporting our cheap clothes that it destroys value-adding industry in the buying countries?
Isn't the problem with exporting our cheap clothes that it destroys value-adding industry in the buying countries?
That's the argument, yeah, but figuring out if it's true is a complicated empirical question and I'm not aware that anyone's really looked at it in detail (which is of course not to say that no one has, necessarily). Even if it is a problem, I find it hard to believe that it's as big a problem as, say, our system of subsidies to US cotton growers.
46: It shouldn't be possible for us to have a comparative advantage in everything relative to poor countries. But, as teofilo says, it's an empirical issue; it could well have the effect of shifting people into industries with worse prospects.
I'd expect the harms to be more visible than the benefits, because it's easy to find (at least counterfactually) the would-be clothesmakers who instead do something less remunerative or dignified, and harder to measure the impact on the quality of life of the much larger number of people who don't have to spend quite as much of their income on clothing themselves.
If you want to help Africa, you're probably better off transferring money to random people (there's now at least one charity that does pretty much this, though it may be in India) than fretting about "dumping" surplus clothing.
If you want to help Africa, you're probably better off transferring money to random people
Benquo is Nigerian!
49: If you picked an African at random and got me, there's something wrong with your selection process.
Er, I mean,
Dear Mr. G. Swift,
My name is Benquo Cholmondeley, Esq. and I am the sole executor of the estate of Mr. Jonathan Connor, who has recently passed away.
Mr Conor has no surviving heirs and has desired to share his final net worth of $25,000,000 with 25,000 Africans selected at random. He did not trust his family or business associates to fulfill his wishes, as they are prodigals and cheaters, so the responsibility is mine.
Unfortunately I am at present unable to obtain a reliable and comprehensive list of Africans. In addition, to my deep regret, I am no longer in sufficient health to travel.
Since you are a TRUSTWORTHY and HONOURABLE man, I would like you to be my partner in fulfilling the last wishes of Mr. Connor. You will of course reimburse yourself for expenses not to exceed five (5) percent of the total amount.
If you are willing to serve as an intermediary in this charitable task, please contact me with your bank account numbers and personal tax identification so that I can transfer the monies forthwith.
May the Lord who sits in merciful judgement, almighty and good, bless you and yours.
Best Regards,
Mr Benquo Cholmondeley, Esq.
41 is kind of hilariously in character.
James B. Shearer is actually a performance piece that will be elaborately revealed for the next Whitney Biennial.
Also, here's a link for 41.
Here's another with added political corruption. Seat belts, bumpy night, etc.
I don't know why this can't possibly be true. I would think most people are at a fixed quantity of clothing, either because they've got limited space or because that's all they need. So they are buying replacements as and when things wear out or become catastrophically unfashionable or wrongsized, and then getting rid of the old stuff.
There must surely, though, be some error in the definition of "hang on to". I am pretty sure that I have owned most of my clothes for more than a year. Certainly I've owned more than 21% of them for more than a year.
I wonder if this is doing something odd like including, say, tights.
I have very little clothing and almost never get rid of it. Once it's too threadbear to wear out of doors I relegate stuff to slobbing round the house and gardening; eventually it goes to painnt rags or Mrs y uses it to make patchwork. About the only thing that doesn't get this treatment is grey slacks.
Also, I'm on side with the anti-fashionistas. Most fashions I simply don't like, and I resent being made to wear shit just because capitalism decides it wants me to. Since I was about 15, I've liked to wear long sleeved open shirts in block dark colours. These become available/fashionable about every eight or ten years, so when they appear in the shops I get a decade's supply and then never buy a shirt again till next time except in emergencies.
I wonder if this is doing something odd like including, say, tights.
So, how old are your tights, ajay?
I haven't bought any since I gave up blagging ten years ago, guv.
I would think most people are at a fixed quantity of clothing, either because they've got limited space or because that's all they need. So they are buying replacements as and when things wear out or become catastrophically unfashionable or wrongsized, and then getting rid of the old stuff.
Meet
It must mean that the typical person gets rid of four items for every five items that they purchase. In other words, that most of us are at closet capacity and trying to keep at a fixed amount of clothing. In any case, this doesn't say anything about the quantity of turnover.
from the OP.
Lack of coffee, sorry...
I would like to know what 'hang on to' means though. I can't believe that most people chuck most of the clothes they buy within a year.
1 and 5: I had a dress from 1995, which fit well 5 years ago, but now it's a bit tight, and the fabric is starting to wear. I've never owned enough clothes for my clothes not to wear out.
I've never wanted to give mine to Goodwill, because I didn't think that they were in salable condition.
I did see an African guy who was visiting England shopping in a Charity shop, because he wanted to bring things back as gifts. Stuff was cheaper in Oxford than it was in Africa.
Chrst, we have to read the OP now?
I still occasionally wear a t-shirt I bought at a Nirvana show.
About 2005, I stopped wearing the t-shirt I bought at a Nirvana show, because it was about to completely disintegrate, and I wanted to hang on to it for sentimental reasons.
It is one of the ones that says "Flower sniffing, kitty betting corporate rock whores." Nirvana had just signed, but Nevermind was not out yet. They were opening for Dinosaur Jr.
I probably don't have much of anything over 5 years old with the exception of things like winter jackets. I pretty much only wear jeans and/or shorts with either t-shirts or polos. I do go through a fair number of black cotton t-shirts every year. Kevlar under navy blue uniform in the summer makes for constant sweatiness.
I've got a shirt or two from middle school, which would be 1990-1991. Tie-dyed shirts. A few more sweaters and shirts from high school and college.
On the other hand, I really like clothes and have way too many and donate lots to Goodwill. I call it "checking out clothes from the clothes library".
I'd be pretty much in line with JBS' clothing expenditures most years except that I bought a suit for my grandfather's funeral in January, so that added an extra $300 or so to this year's total.
I quite(ish) like clothes, but I'm too stingy to spend as much on them as I probably would if I had lots of spare cash. I probably go out and buy half a dozen things* a couple of times a year [couple of pairs of jeans or trousers, a jumper, shirt, or a jacket, etc] and the rest of the time it's just replacement black t-shirts and underwear. I don't know how much that works out as a cash spend each year, but I'd guess well under £1000 except when flush. Last year, maybe closer to half that, I think. Plus shoes on top.
* much of which is just to replace stuff I've worn out.
I've seen this criticism about clothes reselling in Africa before, and it's always rung a bit false. I mean, of course I don't want people in Ghana to pay more than people in England for the same used clothing, but surely this is a question of getting more people into the clothes-reselling business? Should we enthusiastically support the use of more resources solely as a prop for Third World clothing manufacturers? That seems like an idea that's chock full of perverse incentives.
Once you start thinking about this stuff, it gets kinda weird. How about those heavy-weight white t-shirts that young folx in working class neighborhoods buy for $5 or so, cheap enough so that even poor people can wear them a few times and then dispose of them when they're not perfectly white? It's kinda bizarre that the global economy is flexible enough to support this practice.
It seems to me, rather than focusing on the 15% of donated clothes that go to Africa, it might make more sense to encourage people to buy fewer, high-quality natural fiber clothes. But maybe not. I don't know.
Well, manufacturers should bear a cost of the environmental toll of their clothes, which would price everything a lot higher.
I have a tshirt that my brother gave me when I was 7 or 8. It was way too big then and I can still wear it. It has a bunch of farm animals playing together in a bluegrass band and says, "Aunt Nellie's Bluegrass Farm -- Our Grass Will Get You Off." My mother must have loved that.
Yeah, also, I spend maybe $500/year on clothes, averaged out over 5 or 10 years. Inclusive of shoes. Still have several articles of clothing from the mid-1990s that I wear, although now that I've been losing weight, I hardly have any pants that fit. Just ordered $70 worth of new pants to hold me through the summer. Might get one more pair each of slacks and shorts. We'll see.
I've got a shirt or two from middle school, which would be 1990-1991.
You just made me feel very very old.
71: You are almost an entire year older than me, gramps. By the Unfogged 10-year reunion, we'll both be wearing white belts buckled just below our nipples.
71: Yeah, 90-91 would be our senior year of college. Even if, ahem, I skipped a year, etc and am not quite *that* old. [deprecated smiley to be inferred]
71ans73: It makes me feel old even though I was in high school.
71ans73: It makes me feel old even though I was in high school.
Today I am wearing a jumper (you know, a knitted top) that is one of 2 I stole from my mum in September 1987. I think they were pretty old then, because I felt justified in taking them from her drawer as I couldn't remember her wearing them. I still have and wear them both - they are some kind of acrylic and may never die. I also have a cardigan that my mum knitted for my dad before they were married, so it's older than me.
I think I may chuck out more clothes than I buy, which is a bit of a problem, and I rather desperately need to go shopping.
Isn't the problem with exporting our cheap clothes that it destroys value-adding industry in the buying countries
There are value adding industries around used clothing as well. In addition to the work of sorting and resale for more specialized sellers, there are tailors who specialize in repairing used clothing and West Africa is the only place I've been where you can get sneakers resoled. Clothes made directly from bolts of cloth, locally produced or imported, bright prints, but also linens, wool blends and damask, are still more prestigious and sought after, especially for women and continue to exist alongside used clothing (oboroni wawu, or dead foreigners' things) in Ghana. The greater threat there is cheap Chinese cotton fabrics that can undercut locally printed cloth and thus threaten those idustries.
I have a couple t-shirts from shortly after college, but the last of my high school/college vintage shirts disintegrated at the collar in the past couple years and now are relegated to in-the-house-when-no-one's-coming-over wear.
My wife has a "Nordic" sweater that she wears at least semi-regularly (not much this winter, however) which her father had bought in the late 50s/early 60s.
My t-shirts all disintegrate with alarming rapidity these days. The modern style of thinner, more delicate knits meets the waistband of my jeans and instant riddling with tiny holes ensues.
80: They're relatively expensive for t-shirts plus "boring", but I have been happy with the relative durability of Sahalie t-shirts (and there is one other brand that has more heavyweight material that I like but am forgetting now).
Quicken tells me we spent $1530 on clothes over the last twelve months. So I'm a confirming instance for the average.
I have lots of pre-1997 clothes: all my suits, the shirt that goes with my dinner jacket, all my ties. I don't wear them much these days, of course.
I have at least one surviving t-shirt that I got free from a booth in a trade show in the dot-com days.
So your average American spends c. $700 annually on clothes? If that includes footwear, it doesn't seem crazy to me even though I spend about half that. Can't quite imagine doing the Shearer thing, or I could for a couple years, but then I'd need to rebuild my clothing stock.
I would guess that $1760 is for a family of four. But maybe not.
We are downstream, hand-me-down-wise, of two mothers who buy a holy boatload of clothes for their girls. It is mind-boggling. Then we're always scrapping for clothes for Hokey Pokey.
Looking in my closet this morning, I don't have much of anything in the daily section that dates before about 2004. Just a couple of shirts that aren't worn out. I have a suit I bought in 1988 -- I really like it, but need to lose a little weight. (I suppose I could go see about it getting taken out. It's probably a better idea to lose the weight.)
85: It's a boy-girl issue. People seem to buy more clothes for girls, so they're more lightly worn and there are more of them. Handmedown or secondhand boy clothes are few and far between, IME. My mother is a yard-sale fiend, and she'd bring home giant sacks of basically new clothes for Sally, and complained constantly that she couldn't find hardly anything for Newt.
My favorite suit is from summer 1999. The lining's shot, but it still looks fine if I keep the jacket on. I've got some other suits getting up to ten years old -- I only wear them a couple of days a month, so they don't take a lot of damage. Other stuff, I couldn't tell you how old most of it is.
The disposition of used clothes seems like a small symptom of the larger issue, that our free-trade regime has hardly any international redistribution of gains from trade, and we tacitly accept a system in which so many regions have no leg up at all toward economic development. (It may be slowly happening, but no thanks to the first world, I think.)
Apart from the issue of African economic impact, might it not indict the charity mission of Goodwill, etc., that they, as the country's primary receivers of used clothing, put so much of it back into the for-profit market? It seems like a "charity stops at the water's edge" policy; surely they could, if they wanted, earmark at least a fraction of the wearable-in-Africa stuff for the needy there. (I have no issue with them selling the stuff that gets shredded or recycled.)
James B. Shearer is actually a performance piece that will be elaborately revealed for the next Whitney Biennial.
Read this as Whitey Biennial.
Much like CC I don't have that many clothes older than about 2004/2005. I think I got my suit around then, and I have a couple of good quality heavy cotton shirts that are about the same; possibly some summer stuff like shorts is about the same age. Everything else gets worn regularly and wears out. I have a nice* Crombie wool coat which is 'vintage' but that doesn't really count.
I'm significantly heavier now than I was 10 years ago, so I'd be shit out of luck wearing old stuff, even if I'd kept it. I look at old photos, especially late 90s, and think I dressed really shittily at the time, too.
* I like it, my wife, who would prefer me to dress marginally more spivvy, does not.
I am probably the only person on this thread who literally had the bar in their closet fall down over the weekend due to a literal excess of clothes (hanging on the bar, anyway). The bar stretches across a full room-width closet and apparently the two intermediate support pieces pulled away from the wall and it bowed and slipped out at one end (my wife's end, as I subtly pointed out to her...we have an ongoing thing where she decries my aspirational retention of clothes which no longer fit). We had been rooting around some of the nether reaches last week, but I'm a bit puzzled as to the proximate cause as no one was in the room at the time. The cat? One too many stinkbugs?
91: Hey! This happened to me twice! And the second time maintenance put in a special extra set of brackets to make sure it didn't happen a third time.
Some of my suit jackets are older than five years (and none would be younger if there hadn't been an incident when my arboreally inclined cat got into the closet), but, like fake accent, I tend not to own too many clothes at once, so they where quickly.
About a month ago I discovered that about four pairs of jeans had large holes in the crotch, leaving me to wonder if they had all simultaneously gone, or I had been walking around with extra ventilation for months until I noticed one. Several weeks later, another one went, but I'm not sure which theory that supports.
So call maintenance, JP. I'm sure they'll get right on it.
For the record, I don't appreciate the scare quotes in 30.
Also: still have (an wear) a Beatles tshirt bought from a Spencer's in Rockaway, NJ in 1988. Last fall I got rid of some clothes, including a dress shirt I bought in the spring of '95. And I asked AB to store a couple shirts that used to be my favorites, that I simply don't wear anymore, but that I can't bear to part with. I still have most of the clothes I purchased in 2000 and 2001 when AB was encouraging me to update my wardrobe, but I actually don't wear most of them anymore.
90% of "new" clothes in my wardrobe are acquired through AB's thrift store shopping; that's actually the main reason I get rid of clothes. I can't bear to spend full price for decently made clothes, and I also can't bear to buy cheap, crappy clothes (with occasional exceptions, mostly socks & underwear). There was a point about 2 years ago, after several years of low income, when I probably didn't own a single garment less than 3 years old, except for a couple gifted shirts.
87: 85: It's a boy-girl issue.
Not entirely. AB just got the extras from a clothing dump of a friend's cousin (that is: friend's cousin has boy, hands down clothes to friend, friend culls then passes on to AB). An absolute shit-ton of never-worn, super-pricey, mostly not our style stuff. 2 different Mickey Mouse-themed swim trunks, lightly if ever worn.
I don't doubt that LB's pattern holds overall - I think people are more likely to buy pretty but unwearable clothes for little girls - but I think that, when you combine money and only children, you get an excess of lightly worn clothes regardless.
We were very fortunate with Kai to have friends with boys a couple years older. Not exactly our taste, but AB basically has never had to buy pants for Kai, who's in 4T now. She'll buy shirts for him because she hates polo shirts, but jeans, cargos, cords overfill his dresser drawers.
Oh yeah, my office sweater is an old, cable-knit cardigan that my mom bought for me when I was in HS (1989, I think). Shawl collar. Hilariously age-inappropriate, but it will apparently last long enough for me to age into it.
One year in college I wore it with a black turtleneck and went as Carl Sagan for Halloween. I should probably mention that I got the idea from when I'd wear it with a black turtleneck and my so-called friends would make fun of me for looking like Carl Sagan.
Billions.
I have started shopping at goodwill again since I found out that the sf goodwill at Van Ness, while devoid of hipster wear, has boatloads of good work clothes.
92: extra set of brackets
'Brackets'! I could not find that word when writing my comment (or even 'braces'). 'Flange' came to mind, but I knew that was wrong, so I punted and went with 'support pieces'. The shrinking specificity of my vocabulary, let me show it to you (in a low-level, barely-repressed panic kind of way).
95: For the record, I don't appreciate the scare quotes in 30.
Apologies, JRoth. Allow me to explain: all I need to know is whether I need a permit if we are only replacing the septic tank -- one part of the system. The state's .gov PDF says no, but I keep hearing from people that things are tricky on the lake (the house is on a lake). Anyway, I don't need help with design, but the reference I got from a neighbor in the area who recently had similar work done is to a Design Consultancy.
Anyway, that's all I meant.
I was mostly joking, parsi, but I appreciate the explanation.
I am a bit sensitive to the issue, as my profession suffers from a reputation as being in service to the wealthy and out of reach and/or unnecessary for hoi polloi.
I love to work for hoi polloi, and actually make a point of doing so (keeping fees reasonable, taking on small jobs without concern for future, additional work). I just want people to get the help they need.
Of course I reserve the right to dynamite it if they build something of which I disapprove.
94: So call maintenance, JP. I'm sure they'll get right on it.
Yeah, right. You know the maintenance is just going to cock it. BUT ITS MOLE!
101: my profession suffers from a reputation as being in service to the wealthy and out of reach and/or unnecessary for hoi polloi.
Sadly, I admit I'm shying away from the design consultant who's been recommended because between him and their contractor, it apparently cost our neighbor 20k to replace their septic tank. Which, you know, not doable. (Admittedly, they had additional issues which we don't have: they needed to be able to park on top of their septic tank. But they think that complication only cost them an additional 5k. So, again, 15k, not doable.)
A network of affordable experts who don't mind working with hoi polloi would be great. As it stands, we have access to some of them, but they weirdly don't have internet access or something. Hrm. In any event, I'm trying to decide whether I can call the design consultant and ask him my very simple question without entering into a contract with him that will cost me $1,000 for him to answer a simple question. It is annoying to not know where to find answers.
Let's all give JRoth a round of applause for not saying "the hoi polloi".
clapclapclapBUT-ITS-MOLE!clapclapclap
I did think of you, Neb. But I knew better before I even got here.
A network of affordable experts who don't mind working with hoi polloi would be great. As it stands, we have access to some of them, but they weirdly don't have internet access or something.
Hoi polloi don't pay enough to make internet access affordable.
I suppose that statement is self-refuting.
102: Well I certainly wasn't expecting to get future work out of you.
That is probably a safe bet. But maybe one day an Unfogged commenter will dig through the archives and heed my promotion sequence.
107: I vaguely enjoy working with the underground economy. I mean, everybody else is so overpriced.
109: Actually, when we were navel-gazing last week and I searched for my name and this site, your promotional posts were up top.
Which doesn't help my larger promotional needs, I suppose, but was nice to see.
hoi polloi
Time for crowd-sourced architecture. Here come's everybody! But don't stand under their building.
I'm sure it's professional licensing that's impeding this important institutional innovation.
Seriously, I can't wait for the superduo of Shirky plus Yglesias to take this on. In spandex.