Trust Me

"Bob said that in the old days, a handshake was good enough to seal a deal," said a relative over dinner, talking about Bob's experience growing up in textile country, back when Americans still made clothes in North Carolina. "They didn't need any lawyers."

I remembered old home ec books, with instructions for turning old dresses into jumpers, and making dad's old shirts into pinafores for little girls.

"Clothes were expensive in those days," I said. "Things were cozy. Manufacturers all knew one another. They could agree on a handshake."

"It's only when outsiders got into the industry that not everybody knew one another. Then they needed contracts to spell out their expectations. Those outsiders shook things up, and they drove prices down."

The relative did not appreciate my opinion, but her husband, an attorney, did.

I've been thinking about trust lately. As I said, I have a great idea. To submit a patent application, I need an engineer to think it through. But how do you find the right engineer, somebody you can trust not to steal your idea? You don't look them up in the Yellow Pages. You ask around. And when you find what you hope is the right person, you draw up a paper agreement, just in case.

Which is Poorly Made in China, a new book by Paul Midler, fascinated me. Midler lives in southern China. He negotiates and performs quality control on behalf of US importers of Chinese manufactured goods.

He describes how, after a couple of shipments, Chinese producers begin a process Midler calls "quality fade," subtly and gradually substituting less expensive materials or processes. Or when the importer gets a big order from an American customer, the producer announces a price hike. Or increases production runs and exports to another country.

Is it that the Chinese producers have no respect for the paper contracts they sign? Or is it that they view Americans as capitalist running dogs who deserve to be swindled?

Minutes after I closed Poorly Made in China, I picked up the Star Ledger and read Kelly Heyboer's article about Centenary College's closing its Chinese and Taiwanese satellite campuses. Cheating there was so widespread that administrators declared that they could not confer the MBAs the students had enrolled for.

Until it's violated, we don't realize how much we rely on trust, nor how expensive it would be to have to police every transaction.

Midler says that the Chinese are only able to copy Western products, but Heyboer describes wristwatches that allow people taking competitive entrance exams to share answers. I doubt Americans are making or using those. Not yet.

How do you guard against Dick Tracy watches in exams? Make everybody test naked?

Anyway, you can be sure I won't outsource my patent application to China. Keep your fingers crossed for me, ok?