Many comments here are arguing that quality has actually gone up over the past decades. However, a common experience for me is that I own something of good quality from 5/10/15 years ago and now buy the successor model from the same brand, but the product has gotten worse, being cheaper made. And I have a hard time finding a replacement that matches the quality of the old version. It’s a regularly reoccurring frustration.
My suspicion is that when products are successful and mature but reach market saturation, profit growth pressure leads to cutting some corners on every iteration, and hence to a slow decline in quality over the years.
Here's how I see it: in the absence of growth in market share or cost-reducing innovation, the only remaining strategy for profit maximization is the delivering of progressively lower quality products for progressively higher prices. This obviously destroys the brand over time, but brands can be recycled/reinvented.
A purely rational and self-interested (i.e. unencumbered by moral sentiment or empathy) economic agent would, in this case, calculate the longest time period a brand could be sustained at the highest price and the lowest production cost, before the brand is lost. If the ROI during that period justifies the investment, such an agent would execute the strategy.
That's pretty much the game plan for every private equity acquisition: exchange brand goodwill (and all other sources of value) for profits, pocket the profits, leave the empty husk behind.
This is mostly how I see it too.
I've wondered recently if it was possible to plot that curve and use it to show which companies are still on the quality portion of the arc and which are on the downturn.
When people tear down new models of gaming systems they find fewer chips on the boards because they’ve found some chip that does two things for less than the price of both - below a certain point it’s financially infeasible to make simple parts because the capacity they consume makes a chip that does half as much only 15% cheaper. See also when people started putting Linux rescue disks into the EEPROM, because appropriately sized ROMs no longer existed.
You can find better equipment and processes that get you more product per hour out the door without necessarily making the product shittier.
Parent comment explicitly says this happens when a sector runs out of things to innovate on. Chips are still innovating like crazy which is why we're seeing some amazing processing/CPU/GPU/DSP chips/etc. If we ever hit on the limits of moores law, watch those CPUs become shittier and shittier over a 10 year period.
I think this point is the key and kind of subtle point - "growth at any cost" does actually rise the tide and bring up all boats when there is a lot of room for innovation. It just starts harming when a sector has diminishing returns on innovation. So you'll be able to come up with plenty of counter examples where growth mindset is really beneficial because it's very context sensitive.
I suspect you know better than this. Failure of imagination does not mean lack of options. People in our industry reach for next steps that cut off other options in the process, all the time. To assume manufacturing doesn’t have the same problem is questionable.
Sure, but it's a hacker news comment, not a book. To be more clear I mean functionally run out of things. To be even more clear, when ROI on innovation becomes less than ROI on simply making product cheaper. There's always innovations, and some may even be missed, but when the perception of the industry is that future innovations cost more than the loss of good will of making worse product then it's obvious what will be picked.
I think the solution is to make "loss of good will" valued higher, right now it's valued very low by investors since people want to hold investments a short time and exit quickly. CEOs elected by boards controlled by shareholders are the same way. Short term growth is incentivized and that undervalues long term retention of customers, which makes it more likely "manufacture a worse product" a better option than "innovate and make a better product that more people will want".
Yup, the thing is the price difference between the humongous flash (do they even do EEPROM anymore?) and the "appropriate" one is less than the overhead of designing/making/handling different sizes. And the bigger the chip the more sectors for wear leveling and you can tolerate lower total write counts on the chip.
Thus we end up with circuits designed to feed the reinforced concrete outhouse in the center. And they're unrepairable because the troubleshooting cost is more than the replacement cost.
What's really annoying is when you do find a company that produces quality product and then it get's bought by one of the big brands and then the process you outline starts to happen - the brand is exploited through a combination of marketing and cost cutting.
What makes these quality brands sell out? I suspect when they become a target of the bigger company, there is a combination of carrot and stick - with the stick having a significant component of the larger company using it's channel dominance to exert pressure.
This is exactly what I came to say - growth as the primary goal DOES create innovation, until innovation in that field yields diminishing returns or bottoms out completely, then it creates shittier and shittier product.
The entire American version of capitalism is built around growth as the primary goal, which did great things, but now (unequally, some sectors are still innovating) is creating more and more shitty things.
It's so hard for anyone to acknowledge this because everyone wants to take a "side", pro- or anti-capitalism, without being realistic that there are different implementations of capitalism and there is no system that universally works, it really depends on the situation. Right now we need to make "lifestyle company" not a bad word in investment circles, focus on dividends/revenue sharing over stock growth, create incentives around steady, well run companies, and not companies that outspend and destroy competition and then make their product shittier and/or more expensive.
I agree with a lot of what you are bringing up, but I don’t think of these things as synonymous with American capitalism as a whole. I think of them more as a failure mode.
I think it’s very human to keep doing what once helped us when even when it starts harming us. Like an alcoholic who started to help get over social anxiety and saw positive results early on but then starts seeing drink as what makes them happy rather than the social connection it helped facilitate. Yes I’m saying America is addicted to growth.
(I agree it’s more nuanced than that and it’s both succeeded and failed in other ways, and US isn’t the only one - but this a major feature of American capitalism)
It’s hard to compare. Almost everything at a mass market price point is made in China. From luxury iPhones to cheap commodity crap. With the exception of maybe cars, made in USA, Europe or Japan tends to be niche or specialty.
Yes, but that's creating products primarily for capitalist markets. So the same demand drivers exist, even if it's being produced in a semi-socialist country.
No, and that’s not what I said. In fact I said being blindly pro or anti capitalism blinds people to things that could be fixed. Growth helps innovate and create great products up to point of innovation creating diminishing returns.
There’s a huge difference between capitalism and a specific implementation of capitalism.
The product people really want often isn't on the market at all. I speak of a product that is:
- Mass produced at scale
- High quality and will "last a lifetime" (a long time)
- Repairable when it breaks down
I believe that many people would happily pay a 20%, 50% or even 100% markup for such a product, but often often all of the available mass produced options are shitty quality (and the choice is between a bargain option or a "premium" option that is just as crappy quality but costs more because of the brand name). There might be a "boutique" hand-crafted alternative, but it will cost 5-10x more.
The other problem is imperfect access to information. Even where there is superior alternative on the market, it is often very difficult for consumers to determine which one it is. Which means they can't choose it. Which further means, there is no incentive for manufacturers to produce it.
I don't know that this is realistic. Like you recognize, there ARE usually boutique higher quality products - at significantly higher prices. There are also nearly always product management-based, "higher end" product lines. And the quality of these is only sometimes better. And they are not often repairable probably.
I think there is a significant issue with achieving "Mass produced at scale" together with "lifetime and repairable (ie, parts available and easy to replace)". Without people going out of their way to be evil, see lightbulb lifetime mgt, it's easy to be too expensive to miss the "mass produced" window, and your price might be much higher. Not just 20% higher.
Chinese companies built massive factories to corner the market on specific products. Years ago, see the halogen torchiere market. Suddenly the world was flooded with torchiere halogen lamps for an insanely low price. ... a price so low that nobody could really complain that spare parts were not available. These stunts must have been very expensive. An all or nothing bet on a market.
Nowadays, you get factories that make ALL the models of, say, steam irons for basically ALL the brands. These factories take care of some of the issue of quantity-related low price, by sharing parts and processes between all these brands. But could they be competitive in price on smaller runs of steam irons with replaceable parts? Plus the cost of stocking and distributing these parts? I don't know.
You've forgotten your Pratchett. Quoth Men at Arms:
> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
> But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
> This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness.
1. "People here" are a very small fraction of the economy. They may in fact buy superior products over cheap ones, but their numbers are too small to matter much.
2. People don't always do what they say. They want superior quality, but they also want it at the same price as the inferior alternative. When push comes to shove, which will they choose? Not all will choose quality over cheapness. That doesn't mean they didn't want quality. It just means they didn't want it as much as they say they did.
Also "market for lemons"- a friend told me she used to go to Macys/Dillards to buy $50 bath towels b/c they were better, nicer, more durable than the $20 ones from Walmart.
Now she goes and still pays $50 for them, but they have been stealthily replaced by the equivalent of the inferior $20 ones.
It becomes a market for lemons: you can't trust that paying more for a product gets you a better product so game theory says you have to pursue price minimization at all costs.
Because capital doesn't like to fund them. Being worker-owned limits the potential upside for investors so a collective or co-op needs to be able to bootstrap itself to success, at which point capital will just fund a competitor that allows them to extract their desired rents.
Nobody cares if they're buying from a collective or a conventional business.
> no policy incentives
Are you saying they should get special government incentives not available to businesses?
> lack of funding platforms
Nobody is stopping anyone from funding a collective. The reason they don't is they won't get ownership shares in return. That's one of the problems with a collective.
If they got the same incentives offered to businesses, that would be interesting.
Coops are fairly common in Europe, mostly in agro-food and related areas.
They're actually better at innovation for their market segments, because they can make long-term plans for expansion instead of being hamstrung by the demands of ridiculous short-term marketing-driven hype bubbles.
But if you want to profit from frothy get-rich-quick hype and don't care if this year's unicorn is next year's "Our incredible adventure comes to an end", they're definitely not for you.
> Nobody cares if they're buying from a collective or a conventional business.
Before buying, you need to startup and produce.
> Are you saying they should get special government incentives not available to businesses?
Its the other way around. They are not eligible for incentives that are available to traditional corporations. They cannot issue traditional equity. There are also no equivalent cooperative-friendly structure like a Delaware C corporation which allows for friendly taxation and non-liability for the debts and legal obligations of the corporation. Difficult to apply R&D Tax Credit like corporations since it cannot carry forward credits due to legal constraints. Cannot claim Payroll Offset like startups do, etc.
The system in the US simply does not give incentives to cooperatives to the same extent that it facilitates corporations.
Publix has a model similar to this and it seems to work well for them both as a former employee and a customer. Their stores and products are always nice and they pay above average for their sector. They are on the expensive side but also they have good deals when you look for them especially the BOGOs. I definitely had a better time working for them than I did when I worked for Sprouts which is publicly traded and aiming at a similar market segment. I think if we are going to stick with some capitalism we need to switch to models like Publix and away from models like Sprouts and Walmart.
People on both sides of the capitalism/socialism divide also always conflate "Current Way Stock Markets Work" with capitalism. We do alot of extra damage to the average person's health and well being with the WAY we do capitalism. The plutocrats use the heavily propagandized stick of "SCARY SOCIALISM" to give you a more shriveled carrot year after year and tell you you should be thankful you dont get beat with the "SCARY SOCIALISM" stick while they still hit you with the "NO HOUSE, NO FOOD, NO HEALTHCARE" stick if you can't sell your bodily capital for enough value to please them.
The extra damage is all this profit over anything else no matter the circumstance. Look at United Healthcare getting sued because the new CEO, even if it was purely out of self preservation, decides they are going to actually give people some of the coverage they paid for and not do quite as many dirty tricks to skim as many denials off the top as they possibly can. MANY SUCH CASES
because they are a fantasy of people who have never once in their life seen what happens to a company with a strong union or excessive worker power, they become repressive towards newer employees among other things
I'll half-disagree. There are situations where "workers" having a seat at the table can produce favourable outcomes. Some German companies have union representation on the board and it results in workers sometimes willing to make sacrifices for the greater good, so long as they also then benefit if an upside materializes. It can also benefit the company as the top-down decisions can also receive comments and concerns from a different viewpoint within the company.
But it's also very much a cultural thing. The anglosphere tends to treat CEOs and corporate leaders as the smart drivers of corporate success, where as Germany and other European companies are more comfortable with some collective ways of working.
There's benefits to both models, but there's no arguing against the fact that the "anglo" way does seem much more successful at the entrepreneurial stages, especially with new ideas and industries.
I myself prefer the anglo-model, but I try my best to find places that appreciate and trust their workers. I also find myself appreciating goods that last a lifetime from "boring, but stable" companies. People like Jack Welch and his acolytes ruin companies.
There's plenty of arguing about whether the entrepreneurial stages are more successful.
Financially? Of course, in the narrow stonks-go-up sense. But not so much in the kind of wealth distribution that accelerates inventiveness and creativity of all kinds at all wealth levels.
The kinds of products that are developed tend to be packaged digital (re)intermediations, fintech, and ad tech, all of which are more likely to be hype-boosted corporate slop with toxic consequences than a genuine boon to the culture around them.
It's a model that's more likely to create the next Theranos than the next Jonas Salk.
It boils down to what people are willing to pay for. How many of us go to buy something on Amazon, and buy the cheapest one? And if your product isn't the cheapest one, what are you going to do about it?
> How many of us go to buy something on Amazon, and buy the cheapest one?
An outfit like Amazon is in a position to make reviews work better. And when I buy on Amazon, I do pay attention to reviews. Of all kinds, text, photos, videos, plus other cues such as quantity sold and what other things do the sellers sell, quality of the description. Amazon could do better. Will Amazon improve the review mechanisms to fight abuse and garbage? I don't know. It seems to me that they have won the race, as it is, and they are now in a position where it's their choice to lose it again to the up and comers or to let us better figure out the tradeoff price-quality and keep their lead.
Prices are so gamed though, they are basically drawn by salesmen, marketers, VCs, 200% profit CEOs and what not. Recent fad is to provide no description of the product, even on the vendor site, to reduce your ability to choose based on features, so you choose completely at random or based on price alone. You can buy anything and have no idea what it's made of.
Buy the Dyson version at 4x the price, avoid thinking about the money and concentrate on the fact that it's not crap (yet). We can expect the Dyson brand to go through the same quality arc in twenty years, but for now, I'm happy with the times I have splurged for their products.
The problem is naked capitalism doesn't have a meaningful reward function for quality products. If I buy a product and am happy with it in three years, or I buy a product and it's trash and unsuitable for its purpose, the company still already has my money. I have to care enough about the purchase to spend time and effort into writing a review online about the product, and the brand, which will go into the circular filing cabinet. For a $20 thermometer, I'm not even going to bother.
Dyson only has the appearance of quality. Both Dysons that we had had broken accessories (though they happily replaced them). The first Dyson broke down in three years or so.
We also have a Miele vacuum cleaner. It's less glamorous, but it is, as Germans say, unkaputtbar (and also a very pleasant device to work with).
Miele is one brand that seems to show that it's still possible (to build lasting and repairable). But it's expensive, very expensive, and repairs themselves are not cheap. I would say, too expensive overall to become a default choice.
Parts are another story.
I have miele Washing Machine. It has brushed motor so after ~8 years I need to replace brushes. Miele ones cost 60$. That's 20% price of cheapest washing machine I found on market. Im' sure 40$ of that is handling those spare parts across many years.
Other, more complicated components cost more than cheap, other vendor washing machine.
Do not get any of their fans. They are designed to fail.
They use a wimpy brushless motor mounted vertically and then shove a impeller on the top of it to move air. The problem is, they don't balance the impeller. And when I saw the motor is wimpy, I mean it's shaft is barely a 1/4". The motor shaft ends up destroying the bearings within a year or two due to the unbalanced impeller load. You will be annoyed to fuck by the high pitched noises it starts making from shot bearings.the bearings are integrated into the motor assembly so you can't just replace them. You have to replace the entire motor and do this basically every year or two because it's not a motor defect, it's a design defect.
Dyson is shit now though. Maybe it used to be good but like many other established names they are squandering their good name for more profits by cutting quality.
I think GP is right. We buy stuff online now. You can't see, touch, or evaluate anything. Reviews are all fake. Brand names are comingled with counterfeits. The only signal left is price. So knowing it's likely going to be crap, why pay more than you have to.
Thankfully, the citizenry is irrational and self-interested, which enables an entire cottage industry of sheisters, marketers and psychologists, which then engineer our attention spans and purchasing decisions.
The era of the "brand" is over. Consumers have gotten wise to companies cutting corners while raising prices, burning up the goodwill earned on their past reputation for quality.
Apple had a top brand, yet most consumers are aware that now Apple Stores are overcrowded messes and the iPhone 16 doesn't offer anything meaningfully different than iPhone 13.
Netflix replaced AAA TV series licensed from other networks with in-house material, the overwhelming majority most of which is cheaply produced shovelware that doesn't make it to Season 2.
That's just not true. Look around you right now. If you're American, almost everything you own is branded. Your phone, your laptop, TV, clothes you're wearing, shoes, books, food in your pantry, transportation.
There is almost always a cheaper non-branded choice. If you are like 99.99% of Americans, you didn't make that choice in almost every case.
Tellingly, you gave the example of Apple. Whether it's an iPhone 16 or an iPhone 13, more people than ever buy the Apple brand. I know I do.
You need to factor in planned obsolescence. The fundamentals of the market simply does not make sense when your product is cheap and lifecycle is long.
Think of the LED bulb. It would make more sense for the government to manage the few resources needed and for them to maximize the lifecycle of a lightbulb.
A lightbulb is a fascinating example, because there’s an argument to be made that a “minimum government specification” lightbulb would be superior to what the market provides (read: under-spec’d cheap caps that die due to heat https://www.edn.com/ensure-long-lifetimes-from-electrolytic-... ).
I’m tired of having to replace whole LED light fixtures instead of being able to replace a bulb. I am currently waiting on a special order to arrive with 2 fluorescent light fixtures. I refuse to put up more LED fixtures that will go bad in another 2 years.
It seems to me that for products that in general are cheap to buy as well as produce, companies would want to make these products somewhat longer-lasting to gain a better reputation and then make more sales and larger profits on more expensive items.
I think the fundamental problem here is that nobody trusts brands anymore because we have been trained by strategies like market segmentation and private equity cost cutting that the vast majority of brands don't consistently indicate quality. That product A could be fine and a very similar-looking product B could be horrible, and any company or even product could become shit at any moment. Breyers in the US is a great example - they sell real (though still watery) ice cream in the cartons that say "naturals," and all the other very similar looking cartons are full of crap artificial frozen dairy dessert. They had a very strong brand, and they decided it was time to cash out that brand goodwill by cheaping out, but deceptively so they could ride it out for a few decades, at which point who cares?
This has led to a situation where companies don't make any attempt anymore to gain a reputation for the quality of their products, because it's futile to convince the public that they can trust you. And also, they have to compete much more equally with alphabet soup brands on Amazon making the absolute cheapest version of products at the lowest margins (and labor costs). So why would anyone make a better lightbulb that no one will buy because it's $2 more expensive?
Uhh, you are aware that planned obsolescence is only incentivized in fiat markets based in money-printing which aren't real markets.
Absent boom-bust, and the related fraud/true-up that happens cyclically, you have sustained growth mirroring population growth, without the chaotic whipsaw, as well as other factors of general wear and tear that make sustain demand.
Less cost, and cost that follows real stable value without distortion, leads to more production over time, not less. Boom bust dynamics cause a slight move forward, followed my two steps back; repeatedly, until your out of steps.
In such older economies, you don't lose out such monumental opportunity cost and related resources to fraud or people who sit on their hands. Opportunity cost is immeasurable without a reference, so you don't know what you lose, or what could have been.
> Think of the LED bulb. It would make more sense for the government to manage the few resources needed...
Honestly, seeing this rhetoric makes you sound like a shill peddling propaganda towards centralization as a solution, which includes both fascism and communism (statism for both), while ignoring the established failures of such systems.
I don't mean to be critical of what you have to say, but you come off as really ignorant, or deliberately misleading.
If you can only run on the same path on a circle, do you really think you'll eventually get to where you want to go when that point is not on the circle?
> Uhh, you are aware that planned obsolescence is only incentivized in fiat markets based in money-printing which aren't real markets.
I have no idea why you're claiming that. What should I read?
But you're not going to get rid of business cycles by not having 2% inflation or whatever, and those cycles don't seem strong enough to impact product lifetimes all that much. "chaotic whipsaw" is a big exaggeration.
To start, you need to have a correct grasp of economics.
Hazlitt (Economics in 1 lesson), Mises (Human Action/Money and the Theory of Credit), Austrian Business Cycle Theory, Thomas Jefferson's letters to Thomas Cooper, Carl Menger (SVT) to start.
Adam Smith provides the requirements for factors and producers to operate in a market, also describing markets pre-fiat in a five volume set. The observations made are invaluable when comparing against the non-reserve modern monetary mechanics where they departed from fractional reserve in 2020 under Basel3.
In terms of actual monetary debasement/inflation, going back to the unobscured calculations before manipulations began occuring, its been much higher than 2% YOY, and the interest rates have been manipulated to a point where the delayed dynamics are in full swing and can't be prevented. Big Debt Crises by Ray Dalio/Bridgewater Associates provides useful data, but his conclusions are rose-tinted.
The objective point of failure to non-market socialism from money-printing is where national outflows exceed inflows in debt growth to gdp, and in the private debt market that's likely already occurred we have a few years yet before another true-up. It gets to that point through concentration of business which concentrates bad decisions, and legitimate entities can't compete with slave labor, eventually leading to hyper-inflation then to deflation, or directly to deflation. Damned on both sides, with the safe shifting path dependent on lagging indicators amid chaos.
Each boom bust cycle started small on adoption to fiat, but has increased exponentially every 10 years where the banks are forced to crisis from bad investments, and seeking bailout during a true-up. Penn Station Bailout (1970s), Savings & Loan Crisis (1980s), Dotcom Bust (2000), Lehman CDOs 2008, the next will be the CDO equivalent for business (but that bubble hasn't burst yet) QE 2010-2022? (pure money printing to those banks), etc.
There is a third-party in the economic process, the money-lenders friend who receives preferential rates, allowing them to lower prices below cost to drive businesses out of business where leveraged buyouts aren't an option.
You are right 2% isn't sufficient by itself to cause whipsaws.
Its not just business in isolation, its the entire monetary cycle in aggregate.
What about the petrodollar abandonment, and the loss of foreign demand for a pool of money we printed up to meet that demand over 50 years. Where's it go? What about paper warrants of commodities, where the ratio is now greater than 300 non-existent paper: 1 physical, where everyone starts requiring physical delivery (taking it out of the vault). Synthetic shares through options contracts.
The deficit spending of the government, or unfunded liabilities (social security), where the debt on that to pass the budget must be almost completely borrowed (and the associated interest rate risk).
Lets not forget the swap lines between other central banks and ours, and the carry trades happening, or the preferential swaps of existing already purchased treasuries for existing current rate treasuries 1:1 (no discount); blackrock and others.
One thing, would slow it down, but the magnitude of each of these things fuels it moving forward chaotically as it unwinds; and people don't have the capital to draw from anymore because its been systematically debased for decades.
Keynes has historically failed to properly account for the business cycle under fiat; a notable recent example being the housing crisis.
Real markets require money meeting 3 properties (stable store of value...), adversarial independent decision-making based on a cost constraint, and working visible price discovery to function (aka economic calculation), with little regulation/interference.
When these can't happen with money-printing, distortions naturally occur chaotically starting with the first rung of spending from that bank as a small blip, and growing to tsunami heights. Lets not forget what that AI may zero out most white-collar jobs, already having profound disruption in the factor markets, which whipsaw to the producer markets in a spiral.
You may want to also read about the economic history of Argentina and how Milei turned everything around with almost 100 years of poverty caused by the same policies we have been doing, and how he made such giant strides to fixing it within 1 year; by firing the parasites, removing the regulations, and letting the market do its thing.
State-controlled entities cooperate because they depend on the debt for continued existence, however indirect/laundered it came to them it originated in money-printing, and its not given to them for free; coercion and malign influence is well documented in many areas related to this. (i.e. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, which may or may not be fictional; but the details match up, some of which weren't validated until recent releases.
I'd say you have quite a bit of reading ahead of you.
I'll go look at those but a few things first. Business cycles existed before those monetary changes. I cannot figure out what you're accusing of being socialism. Deficit spending causes problems but you can borrow to spend without any fiat and printing and inflation improve the situation of governmental debt. Crooked handouts don't need fiat printing.
Business cycles as a phrase have existed, but that definition has changed over time, and people conflate the modern meaning neglecting the older specific meaning which was limited to seasonal variability.
The modern understanding of the boom bust bailout cycle is included in modern definitions, but this only occurred once non-reserve fiat was adopted; even back in Thomas Jefferson's day; the failures occurred when more was printed than was actually there and distortions aggregated until crisis. We're specifically talking about the over-subscription, mania, and bust that follows all money printing.
Its impossible to rationally differentiate without having a good detailed reference which is why Adam Smith's 5 volume set (most sets ignore volume 5 but they shouldn't), and Thomas Jefferson's/Coopers related letters are also useful.
Non-reserve fiat leads to collapse from a market economy to non-market socialism, through the assymetric feed from the money-printer driving state-apparatus (unconstrained) to run legitimate producers out of business (profit constrained), sieving resources into few hands. This has been happening since the 1970s, with additional bites at the apple taken during crisis when the banks hold everyone hostage facing systemic contagion from failures they created (perverse incentives).
The connection to socialism/communism is that the plan of concentrating resources has been written about by such groups quite publicly, as the first step prior to crisis engineering and seizing the means of production. While some of these words I use are more modern terms, the meaning remained the same, back then.
The first surviving reference I've found is the paper magazine published ~1895 by the Fabian's under the name "The American Fabian", in one of the first five publications they promote this plan with regards to the NYC real estate market coupled with rent-seeking behavior to create self-sustaining income until all real-estate over time would become under their control and 'could be passed into the common good', so it says,and their membership was tailored towards influential bankers and politicians at that time.
Within a few years (at that time, 1900s) several things occurred, the adoption of the prussian model of centralized schooling, the backroom deals following Jekyl Island leading to the creation of the Fed, and the landmark decision to treat Federal Law as separate to common/state laws with regards to predence (Erie Railroad, 1930s-1940s). One of the historic copies of this magazine I had a chance to examine had writing mentioning the same group influencing the decision towards centralizing authority via the UCC (which first came out around 1870s-1880s iirc. It seemed to be written about the time of publication, but providence is unknown. A good knowledge of detailed history really comes in handy.
The group itself ceased public publication in 1907, with splintering special interest groups forming under varying names since, continually change such names obscuring their origins like what we understand today as cells. 1917 (iirc) also had Lenin proclaiming the best way to destroy the West was through debasement of the currency.
With regards to debasement, it doesn't matter how many entities it passes through, the debasement hits a point where oversubscription of the resources cause the bust cycle failures (which lag), opportunity costs become untethered, and personal property of the individual is stolen through such mechanisms. Demoralizing, Destabilizing, and Crisis, where a new normalization must be found regardless of the cost ("Its the end of the world" - Big Short).
> Crooked handouts don't need fiat printing.
A Crooked handout is fundamentally limited by the reserve of the stable store of value it has access to, when fiat printing is not available it has no rope in the economy to distort it beyond the initial value. You can't take what's not there, and you don't build things in places that will regularly be destroyed.
The government does the money-printing, the crooked handouts induce growing amounts of money-printing, inflation rises. The lagging indicator of disruption leads to chaotic hysteresis requiring perfect-futuresight to plot a safe path forward as you end up being on a cliff where you can only step forward, and on each side you have cascading failure (hyper-inflation->deflation, or direct deflation). The bill always comes due.
This issue is called the Economic Calculation Problem. Mathematical chaos is special, because it can't be predicted ahead of time, small changes dramatically affect the outcomes, and thus no wayfinding a safe path forward can occur since these aren't based on directly measurable indicators in realtime; the survival of those on your boat (which is everyone in the sphere of influence of said currency), depends on random chance heavily skewed against survival as the number of factors involved increase asymmetrically toward failure, similar to falsehoods vs. truth if one were to graph that.
Corruption of those administrating inflationary monetary policy which grows with time, leads to collapse, always, and the scale of that collapse is determined by the underlying amount of resources involved, and the distortions created.
Positive feedback systems are prone to run away with no warning about when that point of no return is. You have exponentially less control to resolve issues the longer you let it run. The baby boomers started this runaway experiment in the 70s.
You can't borrow to spend dollars without any fiat and printing, non-fiat currency has implicit value unlike fiat and you don't see people borrowing gold/silver these days. You'll find proper definitions of the types of money in Mises Theory of Money and Credit (money/money-substitutes). At its core any ambiguous indirection must be followed back to its underlying base or identity that is one or the other; which some people are bad at.
Inflation doesn't improve governmental debt, it creates slow moving distortions that accumulate over time culminating in a tsunami/crisis. Debt is borrowing against the future, or stealing from the future if you go the route of financial dominance. Eventually people will have no purchasing power to feed themselves, and stop having children.
"Socialism", is formally defined by structure in Mises book on Socialism. That book is a worthwhile read, its a professional failure domain map for every way mainstream forms, and variants inevitably fail, even with employ owned/run companies (syndicalism). The mismatch that one often has to come to grips with is the word ownership has been misused in contradictory ways, so much that its lost meaning.
If you've done an in-depth critical study of Communism and its history you'd recognize a number of common tactics used as well, such as the purposeful misuse of language corruption (orwellian doublespeak) which weaponize rhetoric and leverages psychological blindspots but ultimately fail rational/objective comparisons. In other words, the convincing lie.
"If one cannot speak the word, one cannot convey the idea, and thus the idea based in harmful behavior doesn't exist. It is through making people better and more virtuous that the common good can be attained." - Who decides harmful behavior, and to whom, no one can do this objectively and thus *cough bullshit*.
Needless to say, when talking of such things one does need to have a well rounded/working knowledge of the type of people involved to be able to come to sound conclusions.
A lot of the articles are a quagmire of propaganda. If your looking for a good starting point historically on the Communist perspective, reading about the Stasi and then moving backwards from there might be beneficial. Markus Wolfe from the Communist Side (Man without a Face), and John O. Koehler on the American Side as a useful comparison.
When I worked at a big tech company, the life quality of software engineers was undergoing what old timers perceived as a significant decline.
The official response of the CFO was that the quality can't be declining that much because people aren't quitting an an accelerating rate.
This is the same phenomenon as your suspicion. There's some metric (e.g. people keep buying our widgets) and you stress test demand for it by making it cheaper to produce. If demand holds up there's no problem from the company's perspective.
From the consumer's perspective, every project is doing this and the entire world is declining in quality but prices aren't going down.
You are pointing directly at the philosophical bedrock of western civilization, something which most white collar elites implicitly believe but don't state outright. It shows up right away in the article:
> ... quality is an inherently subjective concept, as it depends on the preferences of each consumer.
For most of history, people believed the opposite. For thousands of years, people in every major civilization believed that there WAS an objective notion of quality (i.e. value). The idea that these things are purely subjective is a very recent concept in human history.
In the west, and places influenced by it - most elites come to believe that value is purely subjective. We talk, instead, about people's _preferences_ - but we can't measure feelings, just actions. "Some things are more valuable than others" is a very different belief from "people prefer some things over others". In a world that only recognizes what it can measure, the idea that value is subjective reduces to "people do some things and not other things", and _any_ action which can reliably be motivated - whether that's having babies or getting divorced, losing weight or watching porn, eating healthy or eating junk food - _all_ that our economy cares about is, "can you reliably produce that outcome at scale." This is all a natural consequence of the idea that value isn't real. People can't be wrong in what they want, and what they want is revealed in what they do. Therefore, literally all that matters is, can you motivate some kind of action - whatever that action is? If you can, you're 'adding value.' Motivating people to go out and commit crimes could itself, be valuable - if you were, say, the operator of a private prison. As long as your motivational technique isn't too direct and obvious, it's profitable for you. You're creating demand for business!
What would the world look like if value were _real_, we could sense it intuitively, but we could not measure it, and had persuaded ourselves it were entirely subjective? I think it would look exactly as it does now: a prevailing sense that quality is declining. We would observe drops in numerous large-scale metrics like "does humanity value life enough to create more humanity", while metrics like "time people spend doing measurable things" would go way up, along with a creeping sense that something was deeply wrong.
If value _were_ purely subjective, I would have expected that we'd have locked into some functioning propaganda loop by now. If value is purely subject, and there's no hardwired human nature to value some outcomes over others, What would be better for the economy than convincing everyone that EVERYTHING IS AWESOME all the time?
I think this is a great insight. Also, from a personal perspective, one of the problems I regularly experience as a consumer of goods is that it is very difficult for me to judge quality, meaning I can explicitly not intuit value. For example, two years ago I bought 3 identical pairs of Levi’s jeans at considerable cost. Granted, they’re all I wear, but given that I follow the washing instructions and don’t put undue stress on them I’d expect them to last 5 years. Two are busted already. I am looking for replacements and apparently buying from what I considered to be a reputable brand at a high price (which I foolishly believed to be an indicator of quality which it no longer is) is not a viable strategy anymore.
I am faced with a choice, do I join the problem and go for fast fashion crap or do I risk being burned again? Who do I believe when I’m researching quality? Google and Reddit have long since been astroturfed and small scale forums are dead.
The search term BIFL (Buy It For Life) helps with some products. With ongoing supply chain, currency and trade variables, it's worth buying spares of proven products, which may later disappear from the market.
As for reputable brands, we may soon need version numbers for both products and companies, based on factors like supply chains, regulation, trade policy, corporate management, leadership or ownership (e.g. PE) changes. 2019 jeans from "Acme Corp v10" may be quite different from 2026 jeans from "Acme Corp v12".
The only solution I know of is just not buying stuff from brands Walmart (and, increasingly, Home Depot, amazon, etc) carries.
A new pair of Levi’s are $20 at walmart and $80 everywhere else (before recent inflation).
In theory, the $80 pair matches their previous quality, but in practice, they were forced to chase profitability with high-volume $20 jeans, so it’s all outsourced to the same overseas factories. The $80 pair are also crap being produced for sustenance wages, but with slightly thicker denim.
This is absolutely intentional, and is the cornerstone of modern retail in the US. Monopoly retailers drove prices below production wages or environmental impact, and their profit is driven by by the frequency with which stuff breaks and is replaced.
It all relies on information asymmetry. Look at the market for grifters discussion on HN yesterday. It talks about the economics of targeted advertising, but similar games are played by name brands. For instance most appliance manufacturers own many brands, and rotate which brand is garbage in a given year. That constantly tricks people into buying garbage from a “reputable” brand.
It's not just being stupid, it's that the information space is overflowing with marketing and BS. It's a mammoth task to parse through it all and not be suckered in by a slick advertisement that says the product you're looking at has everything you want. Amazon is absolutely the worst for false advertising, garbage masquerading as top of the line. And the usual alternative, using Google to search for companies directly, has turned into a largely futile experience as their search results are absolutely terrible, showing almost only the "top" retailers which are the same purveyors of cheap crap.
I have spent a considerable amount of time researching better, more durable pants and this is the first time I've heard about this company. So thank you for that!
The noise is so loud, you can't find any signal. Shannon's Limit has been reached.
Also, the knowledge needed to differentiate has been lost by many, and suppressed given the economic disadvantage of quality vs cheap in a money-printing economy.
Unless you have a fairly good knowledge of sewing, construction, chemicals/materials, you end up getting things that look the same but aren't the same.
With Jeans, most of the durability came from the weave with extra strength from rivets at the stress points in the fabric and the properly locked-off stitching, at the seams; which a lot of industrial machining can't duplicate at the same cost (that's why you get the unraveling with those stitches using 4 threads at once). Then there is the synthetic fibers that are mixed in for flexibility/comfort that become stressed or dissolve upon exposure to detergents, and the use of low-quality cotton thread, or full synthetics and sometimes just glue to bind the seams instead of nylon/silk (both extremely strong).
You won't find any company offering Jeans that last more than a year or so, and any fraying near the belt loops, or main seam lines is a sign of poor worksmanship. I've had Walmart jeans, both the offbrand, and triple price regular brand rip, belt loops break, seams show signs of unraveling within 20 minutes of first use (brand new).
Quoting their description: "Selvage denim of this weight and caliber are rare, expensive and very difficult to manufacture here in USA due to the sheer weight, thickness of the yarn and time factor involved in slowing down the production line.
Each sewing operation has to be considered and necessary adjustments need to be made to accommodate the weight. Our sewing operators are required to wear safety goggles during the sewing process due the frequent exploding needles which can be quite dangerous. Needless to say it's extremely time consuming due to the half speed at which the operations can be accomplished which makes it a very labor intensive production process. "
The link isn't something people buying work pants would buy.
22oz Selvedge has its issues, and under heavy use would last 4 or 5 years given societal constraints (i.e. you don't walk around in stinky clothes multiple days in a row).
At ~$124 + tariff, we're looking at significantly more for a five year period or a comparable minimum of $40/yr replacement.
Comparable products can be found with a replacement every year for that price, often better than that price, if one knows where to look. Its not just the material that is important, its the aggregate of many factors.
Most people don't buy quality for quality's sake.
The value of quality is derived by the benefit to human action, at least in a functioning market where no money-lenders without reserve have caused havoc; and when compared against similar alternative opportunities.
You generally don't buy work pants and care about the country of origin insofar as the functional quality remains the same.
You care about the effective use, and the cost in exchange. Demand isn't need, its the subset of need, who have the money and are willing to make the exchange and buy this over other comparable products at a specific price.
Given alternatives all things being equal with regard to effective use during a period of time, demand goes to the lower priced item or inferior good which serves the need at the lowest cost. (https://austrianeconomics.substack.com/p/the-subjective-theo...)
You don't seem to understand how economics works. I can understand the increased labor requirements, and the love of a craft, but it needs to make economic sense when you talk about buyers and sellers. Anything else is just branding/hype/marketing meant to mislead from the underlying important factors.
> You just don't know how to buy jeans.
I do, and in doing so it must make real economic sense (rationally), not following blindly to the mistakes of Keynes and other misleading variants or factors.
Sigh. Unfortunately, this has become the de-facto response to intelligent debate and conversation, where the person who says it, was being disingenuous from the start and where they can poke no holes in what was being said.
Its a capitulation and worse instead of saying "I disagree", and walking away in good faith, the person refuses to recognize the other person's humanity, and uses this more like an invective under social coercion and mental compulsion, in other words a false accusation with no proof, as a bully; and you won't find proof because what I said is organic, and the reasoning is sound.
I'm a person, and your absurd reality is not my monkey or circus.
That behavior is at the level of a toddler throwing a tantrum when play-acting fails. Overall, its quite a twisted and evil thing to do when you are not a toddler.
Personally, I don't get the impetus to do this because it doesn't matter that you are wrong in a conversation, or hold a different opinion; the simple saying speaks volumes about the person saying it.
You should be aware that making the choice and taking the action, towards willful blindness of evil acts, is how people become evil people.
They self-violate themselves repeatedly through fallacy (wrath), and other deadly sins (sloth=complacency ...), eventually accepting evil into their hearts themselves, where they no longer resist such choices and repeat such actions until someone stops them.
Denial of existence is an evil thing to do. Its what gaslighters, psychopaths, and worse engage in regularly, and they victimize others through such bullying/coercion. When you do such things, you communicate to everyone "I'm part of that group".
Ultimately, it shows a core weakness of a destructive person, just waiting for the right opportunity and circumstance to harm others, with the convenient willful lie "oh I didn't know", you didn't bother to know; and lip service matters not.
Its sad when people do this, because they don't realize what they are actually communicating by doing it; the accusation is easily proven false, because chain of reasoning isn't good enough, and any middle school student can understand reading comprehension, and quirks of writing competently, enough to see the human reasoning followed consistently.
Something AI doesn't "delve" to do. /s
I would say/warn that you might consider the specific things that action says about you, and where your behavior leads you; hopefully before the next time you think about throwing that around as an invective, but I doubt you will, if your previous pattern of behavior is an indicator.
Objective measure trumps subjective every time a conflict arises, and you seem to have lost yourself in subjective experience, which coupled with AI use leads to dangerous delusion given the right time, and circumstance.
As an important parallel, you might consider why doctor's or psychiatrists ask certain questions like what year is it, who is the president etc, and what it means when your answer doesn't match objective reality in such cases.
The professionals do this to check your mental status, when they suspect dementia, alzheimers, schizophrenia and other cognitive limiting issues may be present.
If you use AI regularly, you might want to think about dialing it back. Its cooking your brain.
If you told those professional's in response, "Nice chat-GPT response", the assumption would be they commit you to a facility or hold for observation.
Who would be around to listen, or want to listen to what someone who needs to be at those places has to say. Not the general public certainly, the people who are in those places don't have a firm grip on reality.
The phrase speaks most about the person saying it when it is false, and it is false here, and the fact that you don't have sufficient reading comprehension, or have conflated good writing skills to AI, enough to realize that, is why experts on AI worry about people using and being exposed to AI.
You might find the follow of value, especially the discussion about AI and reality in the latter.
Jeans at old navy or costco or next are $20 to $30. And I can wash them on “normal” cycle every time I wear them, and dry them on normal and never have to worry about taking care of them.
They still last me at least a couple years. And I don’t have to trust that the manufacturer made them well enough to last 7+ years for me to break even.
Wearing unfashionable or ugly clothes will get you treated poorly by others, which leads to negative life outcomes. No one finds old navy or costco 20-30$ jeans fashionable.
You need to trust that the manufacturer didn't cheap out in ways that could negatively impact your health.
"Experts said Shein is not a unique case. Clothes from many large clothing brands like Lululemon, Old Navy, and REI have been found to contain toxic chemicals."
Selvedge Denim from made in america/japan brands (i.e. brave star, gustin, naked and famous, iron heart, etc) is made using 1940s machines/techniques using (usually) 100% cotton denim. No toxic chemicals.
Check out shopgoodwill.com. I get everything there.
Most clothes are incredible value, and even with a few duds in the mix, it's way better (for my wallet, and the environment) than buying new at retail.
I’ve always viewed it as less a discussion about any sort of real defined “quality metric” and more companies asking “what is the least amount of time, money, and effort we can put in before people stop buying it?”
Even more simply put: what is the worst version of the product that people are willing to buy?
Yes! And because all competitors besides niche artisanal players are simultaneously playing that same exact game (or in many cases, there are 10 brands all made by 3 conglomerates), people have little chance of actually stopping buying the product even when its quality level dips to absurdity. People will “stop buying” one brand and buy another, but the root of their frustrations is identical across brands and manufacturers.
The problem I see is that main difference between those options is not quality, but features.
For example with refrigerators you see integrated touch screen, viewing windows, and all kinds of esoteric features.
But the core of the product, the compressor and overall cooling system is not actually any better. In fact, looking at reviews shows that those parts are often garbage quality too.
So it fails at the core job of keeping your food cold, and the added features are just more things to fail as well meaning that buying the more expensive products are generally a lose-lose situation.
[x] I got tired of following footnote disclaimers. Note the headline 20-year warranty and $2,200 price tags are blatant lies. The two year warranty below that claim has footnotes that references more off page disclaimers. When we had a samsung appliance die, we found the actual warranty was only 90 days.
Even worse, there are zero repair companies willing to touch samsung garbage in our area because it’s impossible to debug issues. So, even with their samsung care package, you’re still throwing this thing out in a few years.
I’ve also attempted to call their customer support. It makes the IRS call center seem prompt.
Why on earth you choose product so expensive where dryer is basically fan with heater ?
With that price range you can buy Miele hardware with heat pump dryer that is basically non-breakable and an order of magnitude more energy efficient.
Really - I would like to know how you came to purchase decision :)
With bigger appliance purchases like that the way often/should (clearly not always) work is they should be more robust and effective. A cheap drier needs to be babysat or it becomes a fire hazard. It also can just door a poor job of drying your stuff.
I have the cheapest Costco drier. It’s fine, but I do have to keep an eye on it.
There is some logic to not over-engineering a product or using more materials than necessary to produce something. I wonder why that seems to have manifested in an anti-consumer application some places.
I think it has to do with having no limits on executive compensation.
There is no incentive to create long-term value when you can cost-optimize your brand into the garbage while creating large short term profits from which they can pay themselves outrageous bonuses. It's an easy playbook and there is no shortage of people willing to trade their reputation for a few hundred million.
Our economy has become almost entirely a race to the bottom.
> For most of history, people believed the opposite. For thousands of years, people in every major civilization believed that there WAS an objective notion of quality (i.e. value). The idea that these things are purely subjective is a very recent concept in human history.
Value has always been subjective, people in previous eras simply didn’t have the tools or technology to figure it out as quickly as today.
For example, IKEA furniture does 99% of the job for 90% of the people at less than 50% of the price of what was previously known as “quality” furniture.
The amount of money IKEA has saved me afforded multiple vacations, plus it is easier to move. So is it lower “value”?
Lots of people like to gripe about lower quality houses today. But I don’t want a house that lasts 500 years. I want a house that I can easily modify or repair that lets wireless signals through the wall, with drywall, wood studs, PEX piping, etc. And it will be a lot cheaper than a house built with masonry.
Yes it is lower quality: doesn’t look as good as massive wood or other quality wood, less stable, breaks or loosens up after moves, so light that it easily falls over and must be anchored, etc.
What you’re saying is that low quality furniture is worth it to you for various reasons.
You and parent comment are not going to see eye to eye because of different definitions of “quality”. They are using the term synonymously with the economic idea of “utility”. To them, a higher-quality item is that which provides them the most value.
To the contrary, you are using “quality” to mean something else; maybe you could elaborate on what “quality” is to you, what characteristics make something “high quality”, and why the categories you’ve used to measure quality are the “right ones”.
I read that portion not as arguing that every possible metric is completely subjective, such that some people will actively prefer, for example, a version that doesn't last as long, or costs more for no additional benefit, but rather that quality has a lot of different axes, some of which are mutually exclusive or in active tension, and the relative weighting of different axes is purely subjective. There is no way that one can argue that it is "correct" to value durability over cost. Or aesthetic appeal over simplicity.
Basically, when there are many axes of quality, the pareto frontier gets very large and very complex and no one position on it is inherently better than another, even if everyone universally agrees which direction is "better" on every individual axis.
I agree with you in principle but I would not put as much moral or rational in peoples head. Maybe your comment had some sarcasm in it and I missed it, in this case what's next is pushing an open door.
> ...In the west, and places influenced by it - most elites come to believe that value is purely subjective. We talk, instead, about people's _preferences_ - but we can't measure feelings, just actions. "Some things are more valuable than others" is a very different belief from "people prefer some things over others".
When it comes to functionnal products, my take is this is the rational we give because it is impossible to take down. What I think it really mean is "This is not me who wants it, it's them". It is the same argument as "I do it because if I don't do it, someone else will" when doing something illegal or immoral.
This is why I'm inclined to believe when your argument is this empty you know what you are doing. This is how you end up inventing "customer personas" and asking your consumer themselves why they buy your product.
Subjective things are real and some times even measurable too.
The problem with objective theories of value is that they are demonstrably wrong. If you rent a small apartment and have two washing machines, one of them has negative value to you, people often give those away; try explaining that with objective value.
And yes, people's values do align to a very large extent.
I don't agree with a lot of what you're writing here, but reading through the lines I think maybe there's some common ground.
There is a philosophy that value (including reality) is subjective and that all that matters is making people act. That's quite explicitly the philosophy of Marx. It's in strong contrast to the "philosophical bedrock of western civilization", which is the search for objective truth and objective reality. Whatever one thinks of Marx's idea that objective reality is a middle class fiction, I don't think people would agree that those ideas are associated with the elite of Western civilization. Quite the opposite.
I think what you're ultimately referring to is the use of ordinal utility functions by economists. It's not clear how to write equations in economics where each person's preferences are accurately expressed in well-behaved value-agnostic units. You could try using money, but not everyone values having a lot of money. And even if they did, which currency? Dollars? Euros? Gold? Bitcoin?
Because utility functions are hard to get right theoretically, Paul Samuelson proposed trying to measure them empirically by revealed preference. There are lots of things wrong with this from an academic perspective and it's reasonable to have concerns about the long-term effects if this is adopted for entire economies. But it didn't start until 1938 and it's certainly not a philosophical bedrock of Western civilization. More like a desperate hack.
> we can't measure feelings
We have several ways of measuring feelings, and we use them regularly. But you can't build a utility theory based literally on current feelings. Otherwise opium would have nearly infinite objective value. You want to use something that integrates over time, like life satisfaction. Or something that measures the current feeling, change in feeling, and integral over feeling like a PID controller. But even if you could get the measurements right, doing all the measurements for all 8.2 billion people in real time would be impossible right now. So it's not clear what the right theory is.
Where in Marx do you find claims like reality is a middle-class fiction or all value is subjective? The labor theory of value is premised on an idea of surplus value as a very real thing. Substituting subjective theories takes the air out of the analysis, doesn't it?
I'm perhaps willing to grant "all that matters is making people act" in the sense that he was far more thoroughly a revolutionist than a scientist.
But your antipodal impression of Marx and "Western thought" misses the many strands which make up the latter, as well as the fact that he was no island: he was steeped (and elements of his thought remain visible) in a diverse intellectual tradition which is by no means a monolith.
This is value in the sense of "price". The labor theory of value was from Adam Smith and Ricardo rather than something Marx contributed.
> Substituting subjective theories takes the air out of the analysis, doesn't it?
You're right that this is an apparent contradiction. Technically, Marx was making a prophecy about an upcoming revolution as being a historical inevitability. And when he was being more rigorous he was careful to clarify that this was a statement about historical inevitability (like manifest destiny) rather than something he thought was "good".
But many people have taken this to be a contradiction. Here's an essay from Michael Rosen defending the claim that his critique of morality isn't inconsistent with his condemnation of people's behaviors [0].
Marx's attitude toward morality is discussed on page 7. The basic gist is that morality claims to be objective, but it's really, to quote Rosen, "particular and relative to the society in question".
Nowadays people sympathetic to his approach paraphrase these ideas by saying that reality and morality are "socially constructed."
> But your antipodal impression of Marx and "Western thought" misses the many strands which make up the latter, as well as the fact that he was no island
This is a reasonable claim and one that has also been well-discussed. My personal take is that Marx critiqued and rejected the Enlightenment, which he saw as serving the interests of the middle class.
I group him with Rousseau and many German philosophers of his time as being overly influenced by the Romantic movement and longing for a return to a primitive way of life.
Western thought has been firmly in the direction of the Enlightenment, engineering, and science. And the romantics have generally been a conservative counter culture wanting to return to a simpler time.
I can't easily recognize (post-)modern social construction in his worldview, especially construction of reality at large (morality it is easier to see the argument) but I admit it has been years since my reading. I agree with you that there is a strand in Western thought which is infatuated with science/engineering to a historically novel degree but I am not so sure that enlightenment ideals fit so neatly in the same box, or that statements like "Western thought is firmly X" can be meaningfully interpreted. In any case thanks for your response and for the link, I look forward to reading and learning from it.
> I can't easily recognize (post-)modern social construction in his worldview, especially construction of reality at large
The most relevant piece is probably Theses on Feuerbach. Feuerbach advocated a materialist (e.g. essentially naturalistic) point of view to which Marx objected.
His basic argument is that it doesn't make sense to talk about an objective materialist universe. That point of view leads to middle class society. His own point of view isn't really coherent, but it's essentially that humans create the objective world and truth through interacting with it.
To me it feels like what he's trying to do is try to take German idealism and apply it to groups of people rather than single people. Conceptually you get a sort of Cartesian solipsism at the social scale. But you can read it and you may get a different take away from it.
> he most relevant piece is probably Theses on Feuerbach. Feuerbach advocated a materialist (e.g. essentially naturalistic) point of view to which Marx objected.
One must have a very warped understanding of Marx to claim he didn't advocate for materialism. Are you unfamiliar with his dialectical/historical materialism?
Of course I'm familiar with it. But beyond an unfortunate name clash the ideas aren't very related.
Materialism is the view that everything is fundamentally matter. Historical materialism is almost the opposite. It's the idea that there's some supernatural force guiding human history.
To quote Bertrand Russell:
> His belief that there is a cosmic force called Dialectical Materialism which governs human history independently of human volitions, is mere mythology.
Historical materialism is an idea that social constructs are formed by (obviously) material factors like economics and technology as opposed to historical voluntarism. The dialectical part is that economics and technology in their turn are created by society on the previous iteration of the historical process, but this part isn't much of a discovery. As a result everything is fundamentally matter.
I am glad for our (rather dismissive) interlocutor's comment, because I can now ask you: do you see this in any tension with Marx as an early constructivist? Social construction as I think of it is hardly compatible with a teleological cosmology. What am I missing?
Another quibble: I don't think Marx thought of it as supernatural in our sense of the latter; rather his sense of the natural (like that of many of his contemporaries) had an element of what we might call the supernatural, located in a certain directedness or inevitability.
I guess where you see Marx as an early advocate of modern relativisms, I read him as deeply bound up in positivisms pervasive at the time. Maybe these are not contradictory positions. Curious to hear your thoughts.
Marx in general wasn't self-consistent. That's part of why he wasn't taken seriously as a philosopher or economist until the Soviets evangelized for him as a sort of patron saint.
But you're right to raise the question. A closely related question is: "If Marx thought the revolution was inevitable, then why did he feel the need to advocate for it?". You can also ask this about any sort of prophecy: manifest destiny, the second coming of Jesus, the singularity, etc. There's of course a literature on this, e.g. [0].
But people do in fact hold both views simultaneously. A famous example is Karl Rove, unintentionally echoing Marx's ideas:
> We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
In other words, we construct reality and it's inevitable that we construct reality. Both historical inevitability and social construction in the same thought.
> I don't think Marx thought of it as supernatural in our sense of the latter
I doubt he did either, but it's supernatural in the literal sense. It's not entailed by the collection of physical laws. In fact his theory is empirically false, but even if it wasn't, the existence of a causal force in history requires an additional assumption outside of natural science. Whereas other authors had previously talked metaphorically of a spirit of force in history (e.g. the invisible hand) Marx tried to turn it into a real force the way the ancients thought of gods intervening in human affairs.
> One must have a very warped understanding of Marx
Materialism is an extraordinarily overloaded word/concept.
OP's proposing an idiosyncratic take on Marx's reading of one of his main influences seems rather more in the dialectical spirit than a no true Scotsman (no true Marxist? ;) flung without substantiation. No offense.
Given Marx was famously "not a Marxist", and given the laboriousness/verbosity of his writing, and his tendency to change his mind over time, you could argue he had merely the first in a long lineage of warped understandings of himself.
Friend, if you're trying to convert people to your point of view, neither is yours. Cheers from someone with at least a few somewhat similar political sympathies.
> Whatever one thinks of Marx's idea that objective reality is a middle class fiction, I don't think people would agree that those ideas are associated with the elite of Western civilization. Quite the opposite.
Those are ideas are much more popular on, say, Harvard's campus and among its professoriate, than are the ideas that some things are objectively better than others, and that searching for truth is more important than social justice or people's feelings or racial equality or ending the patriarchy or reducing global warming etc etc. Witness, e.g. the uproar over anyone saying "men and women are different and those differences lead to different preferences which then affect the distribution of genders in different career tracks." That is a claim about objective reality, rooted in biology, measurable. It is, if you care about evidence more than feelings - most likely true. And yet it's deeply offensive to most people who work in an office. It doesn't matter whether or not it _might_ be true - what matters is how people feel about it. That's what i'm referring to as the bedrock.
The bedrock you're referring to _was_ the bedrock, of an older civilization that shared the same name as our own. Western civilization, today, is a distant relative of what it used to be 100 years ago. The bedrock I'm referring to was laid at the start of the 20th century, by the managerial class of the time, who wanted more power and authority, as elites always do. Our civilization today is as alien to that of the late 19th century americans as, say, the ancient romans were to the late-stage byzantines. There's a lineage relationship, for sure - but the mores, values, and guiding concepts are so radically different that it's properly conceptualized as a fundamentally different civilization, even if they both called themselves 'romans'.
You are talking in circles while missing the point, and ignoring quite a lot of established literature on economics.
I'd suggest if you are limited on time that you read Hazlitt. Economics in One Lesson. You seem to conflate need for demand in your examples. The two are not the same.
Need includes anyone who could benefit/find valuable from the use of something, the value being derived from productive human action.
Demand in reality includes only the people who would make an actual exchange at a specific price point. The former is a superset of the latter.
You end up misleading others, and going into delusional territory when you ignore this nuance.
This "grudge downvoting" shit has been a thing on HN for years, with Dang etc refusing to acknowledge it. Might as well join in on it yourself till they notice :)
It makes your comment [nearly] invisible to others, unless they have showdead. It can also limit the rate at which you can post. It achieves what spam-downvoters want, without any downsides to them.
This has been especially pronounced in medical equipments where there’s this unnecessary race to introduce “digital experiences”. An example is hearing aids. A few years ago, it was relatively easy to get an analog model with dedicated volume buttons and off switch. Now, most of the models come without off switch and need Bluetooth pairing with an app installed on your phone. What used to be plug and play is now a clunky mess of hand offs between brittle components.
My favourite example of this was the digital pregnancy test - which instead of having a test strip that changes color based on a chemical reaction, had the same test strip surrounded by a photodiode and a LED, which detected the color change and displayed the results on the screen.
People still buy it because it's digital so it must be better.
I have dealt with a pregnancy test only once in my life, and that was in acting as an interpreter (me: English, wife: Chinese and some English, couple: Chinese, very little English. Not easy!) Reading the instructions is one thing, but figuring out whether the result was positive was another matter. (Although I suspect it was an edge case--the woman's period showed up soon thereafter, I suspect reality was a very early miscarriage and the result was about at the dividing line.)
I run a media-lab at a art university and both HDMI and USB-C is flaming garbage. What you want is a digital video standard that simply pushes an A/V stream over the wire and negotiates the acceptable resolution on the fly. What you get is something that does too much, doesn't work half the time and does things nobody cares about. Last time I plugged in an HDMI source and the darn "smart" television showed the image for 0.5 seconds before displaying a menu that asks me to press a button on the remote to show the image. And don't get me started on DRM/HDCP..
The number of broken HDMI cables (as fraction of cables rented out) is way bigger than for any other connector, suggesting it is completely unsuitable and a broken design.
Whenever I can I go for SDI video, I do. You plug it in and it works. Why "consumer" techology has to be so much more pain than pro stuff makes me wonder.
> Last time I plugged in an HDMI source and the darn "smart" television showed the image for 0.5 seconds before displaying a menu that asks me to press a button on the remote to show the image.
That's entirely the fault of your crappy smart display with some crappy OS and has entirely nothing to do with HDMI as a standard.
I would think as a plug and play standard for A/V stuff, HDMI is one of the farthest along the "just works" spectrum for the vast majority of people. Occasionally I see a device where there's something stupid like switching to a different HDMI source doesn't switch the audio source and you have to use some dumb OSD menu with many nested levels to get to the audio sources, but again, that's not HDMI's fault.
I have had quite a few broken HDMI cables in lecture halls at uni and in meeting rooms at various work places, but I think that's the reality of any connector that gets plugged and unplugged tens of times per day (especially by people who don't care and don't have to pay for them when they break). They just need to replace the cables more often.
> That's entirely the fault of your crappy smart display with some crappy OS and has entirely nothing to do with HDMI as a standard.
Sure yeah, but I don't buy it. If you create a standard that is too complicated or too feature-creeped to be implemented fully and that lack of full implementation means the fundamental role of the standard breaks down, that standard might be part of the problem.
I too could envision a solution that theoretically works perfectly, and all people are doing it wrong if it doesn't. But such standards have to be made with reality in mind. USB-C is another one of those. Cool – now I have a ton of USB-C cables none of which tell me on the cable what capabilities they have. One can't support USB-power delivery, the other doesn't work with video up to certain resolutions, etc.
I get that more data means higher frequency and that this directly translates to more problems, but nobody (at least no consumer) asked for the complexity of the HDMI spec. We want to connect a cable and see the picture in 99.99% of the cases. If that doesn't work 100% of the times the standard is at fault. The base functionality of the thing needs to be so dumb and so clear that it just works, even if the other side doesn't even know what an EDID is. That was the task and the result is catastrophic failure.
I think an awful lot of this could be solved by requiring the ports to export the information they get to the device, and requiring that if the devices can reasonably be able to display the information that they do so. PCs, phones, tablets would all tell you about the cable and the connection. Things without screens and interfaces would not be required to add them, though.
It's not that the cables support varying specs (which I actually have no problem with--you shouldn't have to pay for features you don't need, and some features trade off vs cable length), but that we have no easy way to find them out or test them.
> What you want is a digital video standard that simply pushes an A/V stream over the wire and negotiates the acceptable resolution on the fly.
I think even that is more than it should be. I had made up my own kind of video connection (which is not implemented yet), which only has video (the audio is a separate cable, with balanced analog audio, although the standard arrangement of the connectors is supposed to be defined so that you can clip them together when wanted and unclip them if you want to move them separately), and does not negotiate the resolution (for several reasons).
> Last time I plugged in an HDMI source and the darn "smart" television showed the image for 0.5 seconds before displaying a menu that asks me to press a button on the remote to show the image.
At least a part of that is a problem with the smart TV (which has many other problems, too) rather than with HDMI itself, although HDMI also has many problems.
SDI is better in some ways, but it is not good enough either, I think.
> What you want is a digital video standard that simply pushes an A/V stream over the wire
HDMI is just that - it's the direct evolution of VGA signaling, with each color channel pushing pixels left-to-right top-to-bottom, it even has blanking periods (periods where there's no pixel info transmitted, used to steer back the electron beam on CRTs to the start of the row/column), same EDID format negotiation over I2C, the works.
What makes it crap is the absolute flood of cheap garbage HDMI cables/repeaters/KVMs which barely work even at the best of times and shouldn't be even allowed to be solved, as they are out of spec, but online vendors have flooded their stores with this cheap no-name garbage for some reason.
Unfortunately, the apparent build quality of the cable, or the price mean nothing when trying to get a working one.
Yeah I get that in theory, but then my 10x more expensive pro stuff works worse than the cheap stuff. Sure, because they follow the spec etc. But then it turns out that even name brand laptops (or their GPUs) do it wrong. My point was that the standard is crap. It is way too complicated, wants to be too many things to too many people (most of which are trying to sell stuff to consumers).
HDMI tries to be a video link, an audio hub, a remote‑control bus, and a content‑police checkpoint all at once. Strip out the DRM, kill the optional‑but‑mandatory feature soup, and let the cable do its one job: move bits from A to B. I had Apple laptops not working with 3-digit Pro A/V gear from reputable vendors because HDCP. This is fucking bullshit. By this point I am starting to consider analog video superior to whatever this is supposed to be.
I kinda get what you're coming from - back in college i had a lab where we had to make a NES-style game console from scratch on an FPGA - including peripherals and video output - which used VGA, that's how I got to familiarize myself with the technology. It was super simple, you just output the correct voltages to the RGB pins and sent the proper HSYNC and VSYNC signals, and that was it, worked like a charm as long as you didn't mess up too bad, the monitor figured out the rest.
Recently I dusted off this project and bought myself a new FPGA board, with a HDMI output. Getting that thing to work was a nightmare. Not only did I have to configure the HDMI transciever, I had to build proper EDID support, and get I2C to cooperate, and get the timing of the signals exactly right. And even then, out of the 5 screens I could get my hands on, only 2 worked, one of which would inexplicably go to sleep despite displaying video on the screen.
Getting HDMI working was more painful and took about 10x as long as the rest of the original project did, and even then, it was a partial success.
Yeah, we did do some games, though nothing crazy - we did breakout and asteroids if I remember - not exactly groundbreaking.
The interesting thing about it was that we had very little RAM but the FPGA was quite fast, meaning instead of a framebuffer we scanned out tiles and sprites to the scanline at realtime, at a relatively high resolution (1024x768).
This combined with the low color depth (the 'DAC' was a resistor ladder per color channel, giving us 2 bits per channel, or 6 bits in total), meant we had that dithered, Transport Tycoon-y look, with tilemaps and animaton, so it looked quite okay by the standards of 2d games.
I also thought that HDMI has many problems, like you have, too. My idea is: video and audio and other stuff are separate cables. The video cable will only be sending the digital RGB video data, with the wires for the pixel data and pixel clock, as well as power and ground and vsync. I think it is helpful for the video signal to be digital, but it does not need to be as complicated as HDMI. (The audio cable can be balanced analog audio signal.)
It is not only HDMI; many other common things are too complicated (than they should be) and often have other problems too (you mention some of them, such as HDCP, but there is many more problem than that).
(Someone else wrote: "The sad fact of the matter is that people play politics with standards to gain commercial advantage, and the result is that end users suffer the consequences. This is the case with character encoding for computer systems, and it is even more the case with HDTV.")
I think it makes sense to wire the video and audio separately, e.g. you might connect the audio to a speaker or amplifier, or to a audio recorder, etc. However, my idea was to be able to clip them together and to have a standard arrangement of them so that they can be used like one cable if you do not want to deal with two cables.
Um, you just hit why HDMI sucks. You have a "default broken" state that is required by the standard.
Look, every single interface could have been an evolution of Ethernet (and mostly ARE--HDMI and USB-C are basically enshittified Ethernet). But they weren't because everybody wants to put their fingers in the pie and take out a chunk for profit by being a rent-seeking middleman.
The duty cycle on hdmi connector is like 10k. I imagine probably some of your cables in a lab would actually plausibly hit that without too much issue (then apply standard deviation: some will have broken much earlier, and some won’t quit)
You don't want to know what my headphone extensions (TRSm 3.5 -> TRSf 3.5mm) or my XLR3 cables go through. That is way, way worse than anything the HDMI cables experience, based purey on the look of the cables returned.
I get that HDMI is higher frequency and smaller faults show earlier, but the plug is just inadequate. The plugs are levered off by the stiff cable, the thickness of the cables would require at least something like a Neutrik-D-norm connector, but they do as if something smaller is ok. By this point I am just glad that the receiving side seems to be sturdier 90% of the times, but by this point I also wonder why the heck we don't just use BNC connectors and coaxial cables..
HDMI is a piece of shit designed to keep device owners hostage of the spec consortium and manufacturers, and USB-C is a badly brand collection of specs with infinite diversity that shouldn't even work but somehow some times does.
But there is a reason nobody puts analogical signals in cables anymore. Beyond some bandwidth, the only way to keep cables reasonably priced and thin is to have software error correction.
> Many comments here are arguing that quality has actually gone up over the past decades.
Yes, many people confuse technological development with quality improvements. Technology can improve quality, but it can also be used in other ways.
My personal view is the west, especially North America, never recovered from the oil crisis of the early 1970s. Prior to that energy was almost seen as disposable, at least compared with today, with the result that all sorts of objects were radically heavier than their newer equivalents. You take away the need for handling such enormous weights for everything everywhere and it becomes possible to replace almost our entire infrastructure with things that are simply much flimsier.
It is that combined with the culture of low expectations that puts up with the results.
The curves largely break about 1971 across a wide set of areas, but the energy connection is interesting. J Storrs Hall argues in "Where is My Flying Car?" that the proximate cause is breaking the increasing availability of energy per person, which could only have been continued with very widespread nuclear, and that the turn from nuclear was a symptom of a culture of increasing regulation and excess caution, such that the only major industry that escaped the trap in the 70s and continued existing growth curves was computing.
Now that computing has advanced sufficiently and is being applied to everything else, we're finally getting sudden, major advances again in other areas (electric and autonomous cars, drones, reusable rockets, pharma...), but computing is in the race against smothering that most industries lost in the 20th, and it remains to be seen whether stagnation or abundance will win.
A side note is the resurgence of nuclear, and supersonic flight, etc, which suggests that maybe the problem was more about post-war culture than a systemic turn away from growth and prosperity... we'll see!
Am I the only one annoyed by the continual low-level background radiation (heh) of pro-nuclear propaganda?
It's just another fossil fuel. Sure, it doesn't emit CO2, but the sustainability problem is still there. I'll support nuclear expansion when I see a credible plan to complete the transition to actual renewables within 30 years, using nuclear as a stopgap. We have less than 100 years of known uranium reserves if we use it to power everything. It'll be coal and oil all over again.
And now we don't need one because solar is already here.
We have less than 100 years of uranium assuming we use enriched uranium once, don't reprocess the "spent" fuel, don't use breeder reactors to make plutonium for further energy production (going from 100 to thousands of years at current usage rates), and don't use breeder reactors to produce U233 from thorium, which is so much more abundant and available than uranium that it would extend current use by another 100-270 times, meaning current usage at hundreds of thousands of years, with already known deposits of nuclear fuel. These aren't breakthrough technologies, but just engineering, because we already know how to do this. Electricity was forecast in the 1950s to be too cheap to meter within a few decades of building reactors, and that future was completely practical. We just chose (at least temporary) stagnation, instead.
Solar is definitely cheaper than current nuclear, and continuing to fall rapidly, while battery cost is also improving apace. In the short term, solar can meet most of our needs and let us turn off more coal and oil, and that's certainly useful! In the medium term, though, we can't get back on the Henry Adams curve without denser sources than sunlight, which takes up quite a bit of real estate even if we move most capture to space.
I don't know how you can say with a straight face that solar power is a stopgap and nuclear power is a long-term sustainable solution. I cannot rightly comprehend the confusion of ideas that would provoke such a statement.
Well, I said “medium” term. But ultimately if we stayed on the curve (that is, longer term), humanity would be using the entire output of the sun in less than 2000 years, requiring a Dyson sphere or something. Solar power can’t keep up with human flourishing. We’ll have to have something that is denser and more distributed. :)
I feel like we're talking past each other. If we are to get back on a steady growth rate in energy/person, solar on earth is a great short-term part of that, fission is required for continuing it in the medium term until we figure out something else (fusion, but then whatever we might unlock down the road).
You're globalizing what I said about having enough uranium and thorium in known deposits and at current power usage, but obviously we would outgrow that as we expand into the rest of the solar system.
My point is not that we should stop or slow investment in solar (we shouldn't!), just that we'd all have been much, much better off if nuclear had continued to be adopted at speed in the last 50-60 years rather than being demonized, and for high density or unlit areas, it's still a great option and has no risk of running out of available fuel in the next hundred years.
We don't have to assume infinite growth. We can reach a comfortable sustainable point. We're already living in a pretty comfortable future (but it's not equally distributed). But if you do assume infinite growth and worry about the long term, then why stop at a Dyson sphere? What happens when every single human being wants more power than exists in the observable universe?
We've actually seen a decline in energy-per-utility ratios. We've got a lot more people and (apparently) a lot more utility per person, so we're still using more energy in total, but if we held those constant for the past several decades we'd actually be using a lot less energy per person and in total. It's not at all inevitable that energy/person/time only goes up. The Jevons paradox eventually maxxes out - if we could teleport anywhere instantly for free, we'd still only be making a finite number of teleportation trips each day. The crew of the Enterprise replicate a finite amount of food, and so on.
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Possibly, nuclear could have been a better intermediate energy source for the past 50-60 years than the fossil fuels we did use. In countries that did adopt nuclear energy (like France) it did seem to work out that way.
Now, in the present, which is when we are making decisions, it's time to go all in on renewables (and long-term infrastructure, much more generally). This brings some challenges, but not insurmountable ones. We'll probably need more load shifting, more cross-border power trading, and more batteries. (Hydropower is also renewable and works at all times of day, but it's not available in all locations, which brings us back to cross-border trading).
I don't see why you'd need nuclear power for high-density areas, or "unlit areas". High-density areas are full of all sorts of stuff, including power cables which can import power from the surrounding countryside - there is absolutely no need to build a fleet of nuclear reactors in the middle of New York City. Even with the substantially-lower-than-Chernobyl risk levels assumed by nuclear proponents, I think the idea of building a fleet of them in the middle of NYC should still be concerning to them. And for "unlit areas" - I assume this means extremely rural villages or whatever - you know a medium-size solar farm, a couple of wind turbines, or even a small diesel plant, takes a shitload less maintenance than a nuclear reactor, right? You're not importing nuclear technicians to permanently work in the middle of the Sahara or the Amazon - you're either connecting them to the grid properly, or you're giving them something set-and-forget that can hum away in the corner for years on end.
Big batteries coupled to diesel generators will remain a great local backup source for critical systems for the foreseeable future - if I was world dictator, I wouldn't ban them outright. Somewhat interestingly, the opposite is already also true: battery-buffered solar power is used in remote sites where you might expect to need the reliability a diesel generator, because a small chance of the thing being down outweighs having to keep it refueled.
It seems strange to me to attribute this to the 70s oil crisis vs factors like expectations of unceasing profit growth leading looking for any and all efficiencies, or globalization making extra translate into increased shipping costs from the other side of world.
What is efficient varies based on changes in the prices of different elements of the process.
Energy, materials, logistics, labor, these all vary over time, with the oil crisis being a huge step change both in costs to businesses and consumer behavior.
> Prior to that energy was almost seen as disposable
Turns out that from an environmental perspective, that view was bad anyway and I'm glad it's gone for good (even if the AI hype almost makes us forget that again). I don't fully see how that implies everything having to be crap now. Lighter doesn't mean worse quality.
For a number of product categories it means replacing solid metal parts with inferior materials, and that pretty explicitly does mean worse quality.
Have you used a 1960s KitchenAid mixer? They look almost identical to models that followed - but in the 1970s KitchenAid replaced the metal drive gear with one made of nylon on the consumer-focussed models, and now if you use one heavily, you'll have to replace that gear more or less annually.
The question is, does that prevent something worse from breaking? It's not inherently bad to have wear parts in a device, after all. Shear pins are a great example where you need to replace them, but something more important would break if it wasn't the shear pin, so it's worth it.
IDK the design of the mixers well enough to know if that's true for them, but I do wonder if that is the case.
> The question is, does that prevent something worse from breaking?
That is the stated justification, yes. However, in practice pre-1970s models will happily knead bread dough for years on end, and more recent models tend to explode within the first few times you attempt to make a loaf of bread (leading home bread makers to have to spend more on an expensive commercial model...)
> The question is, does that prevent something worse from breaking?
That doesn't matter if it means, for example, that my new mixer can't actually mix bread dough on a higher speed anymore (citing this as it's actually a failure mode on newer (like 1970s forward) KitchenAid mixers to the point that the manual mentions it).
That is an objective decrease in quality and fitness for purpose.
Lighter can mean worse quality, but it doesn't have to. For example, a whole lot of things don't need metal enclosures, and plastic can be molded into more ergonomic shapes too. Now, whether the plastic enclosure is made tough or super thin is up to the manufacturer, and of course most of them choose the more profitable planned obsolescence route.
It's hard to distinguish "worse because lighter" from "worse because planned obsolescense". Historically, both effects correlated in their introduction into design and manufacturing consumer products. Attributing everything to just once of the two is not doing justice to the actual mechanisms.
It doesn't, but heft of a product is used as a proxy for quality, to the point that electronics will sometimes have a weight glued inside to pretend the item is heavier than it is, in order to seem of higher quality.
Which greatly illustrates the point that it's mote of a feeling than inherent property. People got used to expect crap quality from lighter products, because at the same time as plastics became more available and more versatile, so did planned obsolescence. So they are fallaciously expecting a heavy item to not having been cheaped out on so much.
- With the first version, small rocks got stuck between the carbon spring and the body of the pedal, making it impossible to clip in and eventually dislodging the spring
- The second version fixed that by adding a plastic cover over the spring, and also improved the bearing seals (which was also a problem with the first version)
- The third version made the angles on the outside of the pedal less acute, making it harder to damage the pedals in a fall
I used to be a loyal buyer of a specific Eddie Bauer T-Shirt over at least a decade, until I bought four of them online a few years ago from their website. Despite my ordering all the same size and style, each shirt is a different length (varying by as much as two inches) and fabric weight. Haven't bought one since and won't do so again.
There is truth to this and it has certainly been true of women’s sizing for many years where everyone wants to be a size 2 (or whatever your number is) but no size 2 is the same across brands.
It’s an entirely different problem when I buy two pairs of presumably the same pair of jeans in the same style and size yet one can barely be buttoned up and the other requires a belt at all times.
And then there is the adventure of asymmetric cuts. Quality control has been outsourced to the customer. The return rates have increased a lot, some of it going straight into the bin.
Do you think maybe clothing is size now inferred from an item's weight? Cut close enough and then bin by weight...?
Finding knit caps for my pumpkin sized head is challenging. I'd find a good fit but then couldn't reorder the same item.
I stumbled onto the notion of selecting by weight instead of the declared size. Success!
More recently, there was a HN thread about buying good jeans. I then noticed the better quality mfgs also include the fabric's weight in the item's blurb. Which I then used to inform my foraging.
On the other hand, I bought a pair of hiking boots back in 2011 that are still going strong. So much so that I got another pair of boots by the same company a couple of years ago - same exact model, same size etc - solely as a spare in case they stop making them. Fits like a glove.
The trick? The company in question is Belleville, and they make boots for the US military; they just also happen to be good hiking boots. I suspect that people in charge of logistics as DoD don't like it when things suddenly change, which would explain why they still have the same model still going for 25+ years, and why the sizes and everything else stays the same.
> However, a common experience for me is that I own something of good quality from 5/10/15 years ago and now buy the successor model from the same brand, but the product has gotten worse, being cheaper made.
My most recent experience with this was a Fjällräven 30L backpack. I'd had it for years, loved it to death but it was getting a bit ripped up. Went into the store, bought the exact same model, went out to the RV where I had my current one and did a comparison. I was shocked. No padding on the straps, nice padding on the back replaced with hard foam, many of the nicely designed little details gone. I went back in and returned it and just opted to repair my old one a bit (replaced a broken buckle and sewed up some holes).
I complained the same way about Speed 40, my 2011 one is more intact than 2018 one and I use it more even after buying the newer one. According to people in the outdoor industry the materials are noticeably more flimsy cause everyone wants ultralight ultralight ultralight ultralight. Nobody wants sturdy. Just look at carbon poles .. these things have no reason to exist unless you are setting a winter record on PCT. But they all but replaced much sturdier aluminum poles. Interestingly a few years ago this brand was suggested to me as one of those bucking the trend, but I guess that didn't last.
Yes. To be more specific, look for the point where a Private Equity firm gets involved. Whose aim is extractive and often bankrupts the host company - to cut costs, send production somewhere cheaper, and in general use up the value in the good name that the product has.
Good example. Add https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons which acquired various popular apps (Evernote, Filmic, …), fired most developers, and now exploits these apps to death.
I'd argue that they both represent a kind of efficiency. If your product or service has an unacceptable quality, demand will decrease and you will lose money that way. On the other hand, if in the pursuit of higher quality your production costs become too high, profit will decrease and you will lose money that way. Somewhere between these is a sweet spot where the level of quality and demand are in balance so as to maximize profit.
The difference between cheap rocket launches and cheap clothes in those terms is just where this sweet spot is: there may not be a high demand at all for more failure prone rocket launches, while poorly constructed clothes and appliances have evidently come to seem perfectly acceptable to a lot of consumers.
> If your product or service has an unacceptable quality, demand will decrease and you will lose money
I challenge that assumption. If whole markets are dominated by companies who have downgraded quality to the minimum, then customers have no choice but to keep buying from you or someone else doing the same thing. If they don’t buy from you because of their most recent bad experience, someone else (who bought their jeans that ripped in a month from someone else) will. The only alternatives would be to make your own clothes or to seek out very specific high-quality artisanal sources. Both options are out of the reach of at least 75% of the market.
I don't agree that this is a challenge my assumption. You are talking about the lack of information and of alternatives; factors in how the demand for poor quality products can exist. That naturally affects where the balance point is, but I don't think that rebuts or even addresses my fundamental assumption. In my view there is such a balance point regardless of how the demand has come to exist.
A market without perfect information and where consumption isn't necessarily driven by rational needs is ripe for exploitation. Why should a business create higher quality clothes if they can instead manipulate consumers into thinking they're losers for not replacing their wardrobes every year, flood the market with thousands of labels to create brand uncertainty and pay people to "review" them favorably to further make it hard to be an informed consumre? They can can condition consumers into believing that poor quality is acceptable, so why shouldn't they if it ultimately results in higher profits?
Let me be clear, I didn’t mean I disagree with the rest of your comment in general or to disprove you somehow with my comment. Even with perfect information though most people have to purchase crap, because good stuff is so rare and expensive (though not all expensive stuff is even any good, most actually good stuff is expensive).
It’s interesting when you think of clothes vs appliances though. I don’t think anyone wants to replace their washer every 5 years for fashion, but it’s nearly required. You’re right with clothes though, fashion is geared to promote discarding. I wonder though, wasn’t fashion also a thing in the 1940s? Yet then, clothes still lasted longer.
> Even with perfect information though most people have to purchase crap, because good stuff is so rare and expensive (though not all expensive stuff is even any good, most actually good stuff is expensive).
I'm talking about "perfect information" in the ideal, economic sense: in this case knowledge of every piece of information that could affect a consumption choice. With perfect information you would of course know which brands gave the best value for the money. All brands would necessarily compete by being the brand that gave the most value for the money for different segments of consumers with different ideas of what exactly "the most value" entails. A company that could produce equivalent goods and sell at lower prices would leave competitors in the dust, because you would know about it and have no reason to consider other options.
Of course, the $100 dress that lasts for 10 years might still be less valuable than a $9 dress of similar appearance that lasts for one year in those terms, depending on how much of a cost there is to making the purchase in itself and disposing of the broken dresses.
> I wonder though, wasn’t fashion also a thing in the 1940s? Yet then, clothes still lasted longer.
There certainly was a fashion industry and an awareness of ongoing trends, but I don't think the pace of dissemination and proliferation of new trends was nearly as high then as it is now. I don't know, but I'm betting that the pace picked up when television became a commonplace household item and then again with the advent of social media.
I also don't think they could have produced a $9 1/10 durability alternative to the $100 dress. The difference in production cost between shoddy products and high quality products may have been smaller with the state of the art of the 1940s in terms of production chains, alternative materials, labor, time.
In theory quality gets balanced with price, but it's too hard to measure the difference in quality between different products. "perfectly acceptable" often means being tricked. And some people will say it was an intentional choice to go with the cheap appliance instead of the industrial one that costs 3x as much, but all they really needed was one that had fewer corners cut and cost 15% more to build. When designs are falling into the quality hole, the percent increase in lifetime per percent increase in build cost is really good but good luck figuring out which companies built better and which companies increased the price for nothing.
Why do middle class people spend $1000 on a phone that's, for every single purpose they use it for, basically identical to a phone that would cost a fraction as much? Why do low class urban people buy sneakers for hundreds of dollars that, again, for every single purpose they use them for - are essentially identical to some no brand sneakers that would cost a tenth as much? Somehow, at some point, being overtly ripped off became a way of signaling 'class', which is just about the most idiotic thing imaginable. In 'better times' people would look at somebody with a $1000 phone or $300 sneakers as a gullible idiot, and that seems correct to me.
The way people spend money creates a major incentive for companies to rip them off. Our economic system isn't forcing people to behave this way, although mass advertising is probably playing a huge role in maintaining it.
> Why do low class urban people buy sneakers for hundreds of dollars that, again, for every single purpose they use them for - are essentially identical to some no brand sneakers that would cost a tenth as much?
I just made the mistake of buying cheapo flipflops a few weeks ago. One stroll through the park and they are full of gravel stuck in the sole that left holes when I removed it. A few a days I replaced them with 7x as expensive ones. Already walked around 10x as far distance, no sign of issues. A reminder that buying cheap ends up more expensive. I don't need crap in my life and maybe that holds too for the folks you are thinking of?
You can buy garbage for high prices. You can buy great stuff for low prices. And you can buy great stuff for high prices.
For a market to function properly people need to hone in on the great stuff for low prices quadrant, but that is, increasingly frequently, not what's happening. And it's not like some esoteric art - just check reviews. It's not too hard to ignore fake reviews.
The problem is there's plenty of crap masquerading as the good stuff, at the higher price point, and telling the difference is not easy. (At least pre-purchase!)
When you learn about clothes and fashion, it’s quite easy to tell the difference.
HN is full of computer nerds who can’t fanthom that computers are as mysterious to normies as sneakers are to the nerds of HN. A lot of people know how to tell apart good and bad footwear - it just isn’t you or your crowd!
Few people I know have a turnaround on gear as the footwear nerds. The year is split into multiple seasons, they buy a bunch of shoes for that season, wear them only a few times if at all, and when next season comes it all goes to the trash. Because next season is warmer/colder/wetter/drier, and next year same season the stuff is all out of fashion and they need to buy new models. It' sickening.
Processed foods is another example. Reconstructing well-known food products with cheapest materials. If it still tastes and looks somewhat familiar, its a go.
A couple of days ago on Reddit, there was a thread about “company secrets”. A guy that did food tasting for some cookies company said that most people, when doing the tastings, think they are trying different brands and that the company is trying to get their preference. But what they are really doing, is testing the same cookie, each with one different (cheaper) ingredient than the current recipe in the market. The company is looking for the cheapest new recipe that people will still eat (buy)
No - the term Late Stage Capitalism gets thrown around a bunch as a scarecrow for anything seemingly bad going on, but in this case it’s more likely a symptom of lack of education of materials and/or people not caring, and resource depletion/competition due to overpopulation and rise in living standards across the world.
> With clothes / appliances etc we have reduced quality at our expense - while the companies doing it make more money than ever.
Specifically this is an issue of government failure and cultural malaise - food quality anyone? We need to vote better, and vote with our dollar better. Stop buying dumb DJI drones to race around and buy a nice sweater instead.
Nope just personal observation. There are only so many lobsters and marble quarries, and we can only raise so many sheep for high quality wool. Most of the hardwood trees are gone too. That’s why we have switched to plastic and other industrial materials to keep building suburban houses and we spend all day on Netflix.
> Government failure and cultural malaise are what "late stage capitalism" predicts. It then predicts a collapse of the whole thing under its own weight.
If capitalism gives what the market demands, then you are suggesting that The People want government failure and malaise.
Either your premise is wrong or Late Stage Capitalism is wrong. Likely both.
Terms like Late Stage Capitalism are just there to give you something nice to hold on to and use as your scarecrow for anything bad you see in the world. An intellectual crutch, a helping hand into the graveyard. Car recall? Late Stage Capitalism! Forest fire? Climate change - late stage capitalism. Teeth fell out? Late Stage Capitalism. Covid-19 vaccines or a cure for cancer? Hmm somehow still Late Stage Capitalism.
And now you have your answer to why the world sucks and even better, Late Stage Capitalism says nothing about what comes next! No reason to do anything about it, like support the arts or educate a child, because it’s just Late Stage Capitalism after all.
Hopeless and failed ideologies (Communism/Socialism) love to generate destructive and useless distractions and slogans. Reject them!
>> Government failure and cultural malaise are what "late stage capitalism" predicts. It then predicts a collapse of the whole thing under its own weight.
> If capitalism gives what the market demands, then you are suggesting that The People want government failure and malaise
You are both correct here. Obviously people don't want malaise directly, but some directly seek government failure, and the rest vote for things that result in malaise and government failure, wittingly or otherwise. Often such voters do so because they think it will get them more money, which is a reasonable desire under capitalism.
> Hopeless and failed ideologies (Communism/Socialism)
Oh, I didn't realize till the end that you were treating this discussion as a team thing, and capitalism is "your team", so you must attack "the other team", even though nobody else mentioned it. Maybe instead of treating "the other team" as something nice to hold on to and use as your scarecrow for anything bad you see in the world, you can keep discussing the substance of things? You did a good job of this for a bit.
> Oh, I didn't realize till the end that you were treating this as a team thing, and capitalism is "your team", so you must attack "the other team". Do you think that attitude affected the rest of your response, too?
It’s just empirical. Both Communism and Socialism are failed ideologies. Millions dead. Millions more starved. It’s like when Libertarians want to bring about their ideology and people tell them to move to Sudan and experience it.
The term “Late Stage Capitalism” is a communist slogan. What’s insidious about it is that it tricks you into believing we can’t make things better or right wrongs, and that progress can’t be made. It has entered the American and Western social discourse as yet another instrument to sow distrust, fighting, and hatred. If/when I see the Right Wing Nazi equivalents of those slogans I call them out too.
50,000 people died by suicide in the USA in 2023. 12.8 million thought about it. 3.7 made a plan for it. 1.5 million attempted it. https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html
The majority of US bankruptcies (58.5%) “very much” or “somewhat” agreed that medical expenses contributed, and 44.3% cited illness-related work loss; 66.5% cited at least one of these two medical contributors—equivalent to about 530,000 medical bankruptcies annually. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6366487/
It doesn't look like the USA has a healthy ideology to me. It just spreads it out to 'death by 1000 cuts' and makes everyone's' suffering invisible.
What did Churchill say about Democracy? It's the worst except all the others? Yea. I'll take all this government mismanagement and markets over Communism and Socialism. The State is never good at managing the means of production.
Churchill's democracy in Britain has social housing and social healthcare. Glad to know you'll take it though, because it looks like lot's of Americans are 'taking it', in a pretty brutal and ugly way.
FYI American police kill more people than any other country at 1100 people a year. Guess that's also 'democracy' and not, you know, just America:
I don't care about criticisms about America. They're not interesting or relevant. Democracy and markets are superior to state owned means of production.
> Churchill's democracy in Britain has social housing and social healthcare.
Well it had those but in the case of housing it was primarily private (as it should be) and in the case of healthcare running a healthcare system is not Communism or Socialism any more than roads are.
Are you really going to sit here arguing that the United Kingdom is a Communist country because they build a few houses and have a taxpayer funded healthcare program?
Socialism isn't when the state manages the means of production, it's when the workers do. What we have now, but without 80% of the value you create getting siphoned off to lazy bums who do nothing all day and collect a fat paycheck.
There's nothing that stops you today from creating a business with your fellow workers and doing just that.
That's the great thing about Democracy. You can do things like found a socialist business model and have it compete in the market and you can respect the rights of others to not do so. If your model is better, or if it works well for you and like-minded folks, then all is well.
If they're just lazy bums siphoning away their fat paycheck, surely your method will be better and you will show the other workers a better way and you can all unite and create similar collective ownership models.
> There's nothing that stops you today from creating a business with your fellow workers and doing just that.
There are significant barriers to that, not least of which is access to capital.
But that's also not socialism, socialism is the economic system where that is true across the whole economy.
> That's the great thing about Democracy. You can do things like found a socialist business model and have it compete in the market and you can respect the rights of others to not do so.
Aside from misunderstanding aocialism as a business model and not an economic system, what you describe (where you are superficially free to do this but obstructed by structural barriers and a politico-economic system geared to favor a different model) has nothing to do with democracy and everything to do with capitalism, an economic system that,because political and economic power are fungible and capitalism is centered around around concentrating the latter in a narrow class, is in constant tension with and undermines political democracy.
> There are significant barriers to that, not least of which is access to capital.
That's a barrier to start any business. Life is tough. I'm not sympathetic.
> But that's also not socialism, socialism is the economic system where that is true across the whole economy.
> Aside from misunderstanding aocialism as a business model and not an economic system, what you describe (where you are superficially free to do this but obstructed by structural barriers and a politico-economic system geared to favor a different model) has nothing to do with democracy and everything to do with capitalism, an economic system that,because political and economic power are fungible and capitalism is centered around around concentrating the latter in a narrow class, is in constant tension with and undermines political democracy.
Just because it has various definitions and subcategories, can you just explain what Socialism means to you?
What I'm hearing is you want to abolish capitalism and replace it with workers (not the government) owning the means of production. Is that right/fair?
And then Communism we'd define as the government actually owning the means of production. Is that right/fair?
Its an additional barrier in a capitalist economy to starting an equal-ownership labor coop, because the people who do control capital prefer that businesses they fund be owned by the suppliers of capital.
> Life is tough.
And capitalism is organized around making it tougher for the vast majority so that it can be easier for an elite minority.
> I'm not sympathetic.
Clearly, though I’m not sure why you are so proud of that.
> Just because it has various definitions and subcategories, can you just explain what Socialism means to you?
Socialism means that the workers (which is equivalent to the people at large, since without private ownership of the means of production, the capitalist classes do not exist) owning the means of production and exercising control democratically. There are a large numbers of particular eays that this can be structured.
> What I'm hearing is you want to abolish capitalism and replace it with workers (not the government) owning the means of production. Is that right/fair?
The government is a means by which the workers can exercise some part of their control of the means of production, and in any practical socialist system a robustly democratic government will play some role (possibly not much more or much different in broad shape, outside of specifically rules on ownership of particular assets, than in the modern mixed economies that have replaced capitalism in the strict sense in most of the developed world since the mid-20th century, but also possibly significantly more in some areas.)
But I’m personally an incrementalist and not a radical revolutionary, so while “abolish capitalism” is in a sense technically correct, what I’d mostly prefer is continued incremental steps to reduce the structural favoritism granted to the capitalist class and to distribute increasing power to the working class (either directly as such or by democratically empowering the people without regard to class).
> And then Communism we'd define as the government actually owning the means of production. Is that right/fair?
“Communism” is a proposed utopian end state beyond socialism that some socialists (who are also known as “Communists” for this reason) believe is the ultimate goal, and also a name for the set of socialists who believe in one of the various schools of thought that have that as their end goal.
What you are describing as “Communism” is, ideally, state socialism, wherein the people at large control the means of production through robustly democratic state institutions. In practice, though, attempts to implement an economic system around it have actually ended up being, and mostly getting stuck in state capitalism [0], wherein a narrow and self-perpetuating elite controls both the state and, through the state, the means of production and society more generally.
The extent to which this is an inherent failure of state socialism versus a failure of the particular adaptations of Marxism made in Leninism to bypass (private) capitalism and the frequently associated development of democratic norms to attempt to implement state socialism in environments that are pre- or early-capitalist is a matter of some debate among the socialists outside of the schools that are willfully blind to the problem.
It is popularly associated with “Communism” because movements that have been successulf in taking control of regimes and which call themselves Communist have invariably been from Leninism or one of its derivatives which favor this model, but it isn't centrally what distinguished Communist schools of thought from other socialist ones, nor is it inherent in Communism at all; the relationship is incidental.
[0] there are some cases, like the PRC, that have “escaped” simple state capitalism for something more like fascist corporatism, but whether that's an improvement over being stuck in state capitalism is debatable. It is certainly better from the point of view of private capitalists, but...
> And capitalism is organized around making it tougher for the vast majority so that it can be easier for an elite minority.
How easy is it to start a business in America (or pick another capitalist economy like Denmark or the UK or Japan or something) versus any communist state that has existed?
We could compare over any given time period the number of businesses started in a capitalist country and compare that with Communist or Socialist states that have existed. To better drive the point home we could compare first-time business owners.
> Socialism means that the workers (which is equivalent to the people at large, since without private ownership of the means of production, the capitalist classes do not exist) owning the means of production and exercising control democratically. There are a large numbers of particular ways that this can be structured.
Ok but since you also live in a democracy you have to live with people like, say, me who prefer a different arrangement. Right?
Democracy and even capitalism allows you without any additional barriers to create the business ownership model that you want. Today, you and 50 people can start a new business and you can all share in the ownership of the means of production. You can grow that business and hire 50 more people and give them an equal share too. 100 people, 1% each.
In fact, we've seen co-ops, public benefit corporations, and other models come into existence and thrive!
> What you are describing as “Communism” is, ideally, state socialism, wherein the people at large control the means of production through robustly democratic state institutions. In practice, though, attempts to implement an economic system around it have actually ended up being, and mostly getting stuck in state capitalism [0], wherein a narrow and self-perpetuating elite controls both the state and, through the state, the means of production and society more generally.
Seems to me that it's possible that "getting stuck in state capitalism" is just the actual end result of the implementation of Communist ideology within the nation state framework. Empirically that's what we've seen so far, and Communists seem to recognize this too and they break down the existing nation state (regardless of form, monarchy or democracy), but people don't want to get rid of all of their stuff (airlines, nice watches, whiskey, you name it) and we just wind up with wars and millions dead.
And in the case of most of the Communist nations that have existed that has been what we have seen. You'd have to forgive one for reading a bit about history, and then looking around a country like Sweden or Australia and saying you know this capitalism and free markets thing isn't so bad. Sent from my iPhone
> Seems to me that it's possible that "getting stuck in state capitalism" is just the actual end result of the implementation of Communist ideology within the nation state framework.
Its possibly (and my opinion is that this is likely the case) the unavoidable result of attempting to implement nearly pure state socialism.
There is no real reason to think that other approaches to socialism have this problem, and, again, “Communist” denotes a distinction within socialism that is orthogonal to the form of socialism sought but related to utopian end-goal past socialism, and there's even less reason to think that has any bearing on the outcome being discussed.
> And in the case of most of the Communist nations that have existed that has been what we have seen.
Every “Communist” nation has been an attempt to implement Leninism or one of its derivatives (e.g., Maoism) in a state without developed capitalism, notionally attempting to implement state socialism and often overtly accepting state capitalism as an interim measure (the name “state capitalism” literally comes from the USSR’s own description of what it presented as a temporary measure.)
> You'd have to forgive one for reading a bit about history
Yeah, a lot of ignorance is grounded in reading only a little bit of history and mistaking modern mixed economies (an actual application of a mix of market and state socialist ideas to a mature capitalist starting point, largely through the efforts of socialists including Communists, and which has largely displaced the system originally named “capitalism" by its socialist critics) as defining “capitalism" and the failure mode of state capitalism in Lenninist-derived regimes as the sole form of “socialism" or “Communism”, and drawing conclusions about the relative merit of socialism and capitalism from that mistaken set of premises.
The solution to that problem is to read more than a little bit of history.
> Its possibly (and my opinion is that this is likely the case) the unavoidable result of attempting to implement nearly pure state socialism.
> There is no real reason to think that other approaches to socialism have this problem, and, again, “Communist” denotes a distinction within socialism that is orthogonal to the form of socialism sought but related to utopian end-goal past socialism, and there's even less reason to think that has any bearing on the outcome being discussed.
But we also have to deal with the world as-is for any ideology being implemented or tried. I'm not sure how you move away from state socialism as you have defined it without destroying the state and existing government first.
As you noted already, attempts to implement Communist ideology or Socialist offshoots regardless of flavor have resulted in the state continuing to exist but a narrow and self-perpetuating elite continues to control both the state and, through the state, the means of production and society more generally.
We've already seen this play out. Equally there's no reason to think that other approaches to socialism, regardless of flavor, will play out any differently unless you're also going to advocate for overthrowing the government and destroying the nation state first. Nobody is going to give up their airlines and watches and whatever other things, so you're going to have to seize those.
> mistaking modern mixed economies... mature capitalist starting point, largely through the efforts of socialists including Communists,
You're just doing the same thing so it's only fair.
> The solution to that problem is to read more than a little bit of history.
> As you noted already, attempts to implement Communist ideology or Socialist offshoots regardless of flavor have resulted in the state continuing to exist but a narrow and self-perpetuating elite continues to control both the state and, through the state, the means of production and society more generally.
No, that's exactly not what I said.
What I said was that regimes that are identified as Communist have done that, but that they have also all been one particular flavor (Leninism and its derivatives, which explicitly and centrally focus on extreme and pure form of state socialism -- there are other common factors in Leninism and its descendants, like vanguardism, that have some relevance here, too, but I didn't mention them before and won't go into them in detail now, because its a bit afield.)
I also mentioned that the modern mixed economy that has displaced capitalism stricto sensu throughout the developed world itself is also a (more incremental, and less narrowly focussed on a particular pole of socialist systemic theory) implementation of socialist (incl. Communist) ideals, but with elements of both market socialism and state socialism, implemented largely in places that (in line with Marxist theories of the prerequisites for moving on to the socialist phase) had mature capitalist systems, democratic institutions, and working class consciousness, and that continuing to incrementally build on the progress already made in the modern mixed economy was the best road forward.
> Equally there's no reason to think that other approaches to socialism, regardless of flavor, will play out any differently
Sure there is, because there are other approaches to socialism playing out differently today. That's a pretty good reason to think that other approaches to socialism play out differently than Leninism and its descendants.
> What I said was that regimes that are identified as Communist have done that, but that they have also all been one particular flavor (Leninism and its derivatives, which explicitly and centrally focus on extreme and pure form of state socialism -- there are other common factors in Leninism and its descendants, like vanguardism, that have some relevance here, too, but I didn't mention them before and won't go into them in detail now, because its a bit afield.)
Ah right, we just haven't tried the right style of Communism yet. Fascism works too, we just have to try the right flavor. Benevolent dictators are a thing. I'm not going to give Communism a pass here unless you're willing to also embrace that other ideologies get to have their "we haven't tried the right one yet" examples too.
Instead I think it makes more sense to use empirical evidence.
When Communist systems are implemented, they by and large fail, except China, and to the extent China hasn't failed - the Chinese Miracle [1] the progress that was made to improve the quality of life of the Chinese people stems not from CCP policies and their implementation of Communism (regardless of minor differences around philosophy) but instead from their embrace of capitalism and markets.
> I also mentioned that the modern mixed economy that has displaced capitalism stricto sensu throughout the developed world itself is also a (more incremental, and less narrowly focussed on a particular pole of socialist systemic theory) implementation of socialist (incl. Communist) ideals, but with elements of both market socialism and state socialism, implemented largely in places that (in line with Marxist theories of the prerequisites for moving on to the socialist phase) had mature capitalist systems, democratic institutions, and working class consciousness, and that continuing to incrementally build on the progress already made in the modern mixed economy was the best road forward.
You're just hand-waving the things you agree with or good as being socialist or communist and the things you disagree with as being functions of capitalism. Of course capitalist economies can adopt programs and policies that are run by the government - that doesn't necessarily make them "socialist". Of course, when we spend a few minutes continuing our examination we find that part of the reason that capitalism and markets are so successful is because they are able to embrace policies and procedures that work regardless of whether they adhere to any specific ideology, other than free trade (obviously this is a loaded term, but I mean it in the most basic sense). Capitalist economies allow communist businesses. You can start one today. In a Communist country I can't own the means of production. One is tolerant of new and different ideas (Capitalism), another is not (Communism).
The intolerance and violence of Communist ideology and Socialism to the extent they overlap, is one of the reasons it fails. People are required to adhere to the ideology, whereas in Capitalist systems the best business, the best ideas, the best ideologies tend to win out. Though of course like any system you can get stuck in a local minimum.
When you think back to China this is precisely what we see happen. The Chinese Communist Party, and they are Communists by any definition, cannot allow business owners or political dissidents who speak out to "gain power" and they operate various spy apparatus and other control mechanisms because they can't permit ideology that threatens the existence of the CCP.
Why is that?
You would probably argue that it's because they are implementing state capitalism. Horse shit.
China wasn't a developed capitalist country when the Communists took over [2]. And as I mentioned previously, any attempt at implementing Communism that we have observed requires seizure of the means of production that exist in the real world today: airliners, factories, financial systems - so either you destroy those things to avoid "state capitalism", or the inevitable result of the implementation of Communism on the nation state, as we have observed, is just state fascism or Communism (not capitalism as you attempt to misdirect blame toward) or it requires a destruction of the nation state and the very means of production else they be seized.
In the real world you are stuck in a loop. You can't implement whatever flavor of Communism you'd like to, because it requires people giving up their stuff to the State and nobody wants to do that. You can implement it politically, but then you just end up with state fascism/Communism (honestly they are really two sides of the same coin in practice and we should oppose authoritarian regimes regardless of whether they are fascist or communist or otherwise) because the State has to seize all this stuff from people. But once they seize it, as we have seen, they just keep it for themselves while everyone else has to work without real ownership.
> Sure there is, because there are other approaches to socialism playing out differently today. That's a pretty good reason to think that other approaches to socialism play out differently than Leninism and its descendants.
Is there a socialist country in existence you would point to that we can examine and compare it with, say, Sweden or the United Kingdom or other developed capitalist countries?
[1] We're strangely quick to give the CCP credit for the miracle, which was opening of their markets, but we're blind to the fact that the poverty and mass death that occurred in China was precisely because of the same group. So it's fair to not really give the CCP any credit here.
[2] You said: "Every “Communist” nation has been an attempt to implement Leninism or one of its derivatives (e.g., Maoism) in a state without developed capitalism, notionally attempting to implement state socialism and often overtly accepting state capitalism as an interim measure (the name “state capitalism” literally comes from the USSR’s own description of what it presented as a temporary measure.)"
> Democracy and even capitalism allows you without any additional barriers to create the business ownership model that you want
That's not true - the main one is paying rent. You have to keep selling labor to capitalists in exchange for non-robbery vouchers, which you give right back to capitalists so they won't burgle you and throw you out of your home.
I guess capitalism is a failed ideology too then. Billions dead, with a B. For that matter, I guess all ideologies are failed, so maybe ideological failure is completely meaningless.
I noticed you excluded my entire post except for the parts about communism, which nobody brought up except you.
I'm not interested in rehashing the team game of "capitalism vs communism vs whatever" for the millionth time here, and nobody but you brought up the latter, so you might safely conclude nobody else is, either.
Do you think you can take off your team hat and have a discussion about what we were talking about? Hint: it was capitalism (specifically late stage capitalism). Try responding on the topic without any distractions (like mentioning the other team as you might consider it).
After all, sports teams don't get better by pointing fingers at all the other teams, they get better by looking inward and finding what they should change. Here's an example:
> What’s insidious about [the term late-stage capitalism] is that it tricks you into believing we can’t make things better
The term absolutely doesn't do that, because it's 2 words, one meaning capitalism, the other meaning "a later stage of". You're free to suggest ways to motivate companies to stop enshitifying things for profit within the confines of late-stage capitalism, without resorting to one of your dreaded ideologies. But you'll have to actually do that. So let's look inward: how can we fix that?
I am confident that you are smart and capable of discussing the effects we're seeing in the article, arguably driven by late-stage capitalism (not a slogan, just 2 terms, one a noun and one an adjective, despite what you may personally believe and unconvincingly assert without evidence).
I'm further confident that you can do it without bringing up "the other team". Give suggestions here. Look inward. Again: look inward. A third time: look inward.
Wait! I worry what you heard was, "rant against communism yet again, argue over the meaning of terms yet again", etc. I did not say that, so please don't feel like you need to keep doing that. Instead, try to participate constructively.
For example: you might suggest ways to motivate companies to stop enshitifying things for profit within the confines of late-stage capitalism, without changing the topic to how much you dislike a given ideology. But you'll have to actually do that. So let's look inward: how can we fix the issue?
> Both Communism and Socialism are failed ideologies. Millions dead.
Geez, seriously? The most successful societies in the world and human history have combined aspects of capitalism and socialism. A market based economy with social constructs that just provide better lives for people than pure capitalism would. Examples are not just the often-cited nordic countries. Germany, France, even the U.S. in its not-so-distant history have embraced that to great success. "Millions dead" is just as much populistic nonsense as the equally misguided doomsday scenarios painted by hardcore haters of capitalism.
The Nordics are highly capitalist economies with mostly private ownership of the means of production. The usage of "socialism" here is misguided. Public programs including healthcare != Socialism or Communism.
If that were the explanation then you'd need another explanation for declining quality issues in communist countries.
A test claim that some problem caused by "capitalism" should always backed up by a proof that the problem doesn't exist in the many other economic systems the world has tried. If only because this forces people to actually think about the economics instead of just using words to evoke an emotional reaction.
There really isn't anybody with state ownership of the means of production. It's hard to find anything to make a comparison to.
Communism would have its own reasons for declining quality: the lack of an individual profit motive. The hope would be that you would no longer be alienated from the products of your work, but that never came close to happening.
So if you were referring to China... they are the world's foremost capitalists right now. Their products get worse because that's what the market tells them.
Cuba, the Indian state of Karelia (and I think one other), and North Korea would like a word with you re: no state run enterprises. That means your back goes against the wall…
Communism has been tried many times always with severe quality issues. But my point isn't just about communism. You have to run a different argument for mercantilism, command economies, mixed economies, barter economies, etc.
The fact that people have historically tried devaluing currency for as long as they've had currency suggests that there's a force that favors attempting to sell inferior goods without decreasing price and that this force predates the industrial revolution.
> So if you were referring to China... they are the world's foremost capitalists right now.
This is the same logic by which communists called socialists who believed in democracy "fascists". It's just an attempt to excommunicate people from the church if their interpretation is different from yours.
> This is the same logic by which communists called socialists who believed in democracy "fascists". It's just an attempt to excommunicate people from the church if their interpretation is different from yours.
I mean, China is second only to to the US in minting new billionaires. Sure, gatekeeping and no true Scotsman are real things, but at the end of the day so are definitions. I don't see any definition of communism that allows for the private acquisition of billions of dollars of private capital.
The distinct term "late stage capitalism" is exactly 100 years old, in fact.
Given that the entire history of capitalism spans several centuries, I don't think the term is even necessarily wrong. But it certainly has nothing to do with declining standards of quality - that is a much more recent phenomenon.
Yes, capitalism requires perpetual growth. When the opportunities for growth through innovation dry up, businesses resort to cutting costs which usually involves cutting quality and hoping most consumers won’t notice.
Incidentally, this is the exact strategy that VC and Private Equity use. They know how the game is played.
This is correct. Capitalism requires perpetual growth because capitalist logic does not apply in saturated markets with excess capital.
Anyone who believes in capitalism must by necessity believe thatcapital produces part capital and part consumer goods and that the rate of capital production must exceed the rate of capital depreciation. But in the face of stagnating population growth this logic must by necessity result in excess capital, threatening investor profit, to which they respond with drastic anti consumer measures.
Those plastic clips work better than the traditional backing nails they used to use. Those nails couldn't hold back shit in the presses wood they used.
I have to agree, I just bought these and was at first skeptical, but they seem like a much better engineered solution. The two-part clip expands in the hole, greatly increasing friction to keep it in vs a static (and smooth!) nail, and their heads are also bigger than those little tacks reducing chances of the hole in the backboard failing.
Ah ah I have several white "Billy", the oldest dating back to the late 80s. The shelves are painted solid wood planks. The latest one has shelves made of beehive cardboard.
IKEA has some of the best quality cheap furniture. To get something noticeably better you need to spend at least 2x for any given item; 3-5x is common for not at all fancy stuff.
It’s true, but they used to have some of the best quality cheap-mid priced furniture.
They changed their target market segment to lean into the “discards their furniture in less than 5 years” ICP, and they also heavily optimized for shipping (eg their bottom-end Kallax is now actually made of corrugated cardboard instead of plyboard, strength-to-weight is amazing, but still less durable).
So both are true, that they still represent “good value” in a dollar-per-value sense, but also lowered their absolute quality. (This is the exact point OP is making.)
I’m glad IKEA exists but it really only serves very specific use cases these days. They are great for the moves apartments every 12 months crowd and the needs a piece for the spare bedroom that will rarely get used crowd. They are also great for young kids furniture that will get trashed no matter what quality you buy.
I appreciate it for what it is but consumers really need to understand what they are buying.
OP is flat out wrong. Some SKUs got value engineered to be less durable over time to keep up with inflation (or material costs, i.e. solid wood is just more expensive now), i.e. expedite->kallax, billy. But new SKU enabled by new tech/manufacturing processes like their power coated steel / stamped metal pieces are absurd dollar per quality relative to engineered or even solid wood. Of course it's not to everyone's taste, but fundamental reality if ones taste is solid wood, that material is no longer abundant/cheap/affordable, like how we use to feed lobsters to prisoners. A $90 heavy duty BROR shelf is ~$30 IN 1990 DOLLARS, about a cost of a Billy back then, except it's larger and much stronger.
BILLY quietly slid from mid-tier to cheap tier in order to keep the nostalgic momentum. The twist is that there are certain products that people use as benchmarks of quality (like Arizona iced tea).
If the tier changes without some sort of inflection, you perceive it as degradation of quality.
Not a good example. Arizona tea is held in high esteem only because it never went up in price. The beverage itself has always been of a clearly dubious quality.
Some of my non-IKEA furniture were just really lucky finds. I was looking for bookcases at a time when there was no nearby IKEA, and they did not deliver.
I ended up going to a local store, finding an unfinished bookshelf that was able to paint to my liking. It was absolutely a BIFL find. Another I bought at a close-out sale.
There is no one suggestion, but rather piece things together. This was about a decade and a half ago, and it seems that everyone is hustling so good deals are hard to find.
I’ve found many beds ship with the minimum viable hardware to hold them together. You might see if you can find better screws/bolts/etc and replace the cheap ones that come with your frame.
On reflection (being an engineer) it makes sense this would happen even without malice. Engineering teams on existing products are incentivized to keep innovating. It's ideal if you can reinvent a part of a product or process while maintaining functionality but often it's easier to get an 80/20. So, a large number of small corner cuts reduce overall quality and costs. If in fact you try to increase functionality, that's actually a new product. The inevitable S curve of profits from any given product means businesses are incentivized to move improvements to new products, leaving old ones to be cut to death.
I design and repair electronics for the past decade and quality has gone down, significantly so. A part of this is increased complexity introducing more failure modes, but the main reason is bean counters trying to reduce the BOM cost as far as they can get away with. This naturally means the perfect product (from a bean-counter-perspective) uses the cheapest components and fails reliably one day after the warranty has run out.
They even have succeeded in selling people bean counting solutions as "design". So instead of a satisfying 1.50 € power switch and a 2.50€ rotary switch you get a SMD push button for 0.05 € and have to memorize multiple gestures for that button. Long press means off or something among those lines.
I think that's a good take. Market pressure for durability decreases with brand awareness. Though I think the article argues there's little market pressure regardless.
I'm also worried it's all survivorship bias. If you acquired 100 items in 2010 and 5 of them lasted until 2025, it's hard to say if the 5 surviving would be the same 5 from another household or if the items you still have were all on the hardier end of that particular items quality distribution. Another house with 100 items from 2010 will have a different 5 remaining in 2025. If that's the case, the chance you'd buy those 5 again and even have 3 with the same 15 year life span is (1/20)^3 (I think. is that math right?)
Survivorship bias is an important thing to consider, but the weird thing about it is that although sometimes (usually?) people have a blind spot for it, other times I think it gets used as a kind of "just so" explanation for degradation in quality because it's hard to refute.
My experience with clothing kind of suggests it's not just survivorship bias. I once had a pair of pants that lasted maybe 10 years or so with regular washing, each use (yes I know, not ideal, I don't do that anymore), and I had to replace them. When I ordered a new pair, from the same company, same model, I noticed the new ones didn't last nearly as long, maybe 2 years, and seemed thinner. I emailed the company about this, and they acknowledged that they had made the fabric thinner, and even gave me the old and new fabric densities. I think clothing is one area where new brands have come in to partially move the needle back toward quality a teeny weeny bit, but experiences like that, tracking the actual material quality of the same products over time, leads me to conclude it's not always just random survivorship bias.
I wouldn’t mind that much if switching to another brand/model would solve the problem. But sometimes I order half a dozen of the most well-reviewed alternatives, and they are all worse in some way in comparison.
This comes up for me most often with running shoes. By the time the model shoe I've loved wears out, it'll be out of production and the n+1 iteration re-balanced whatever decisions to make the shoe a worse-for-me fit.
(It's tempting to think the big-sneaker cabal conspires to ensure consumers are perceptually exploring options)
Increased financialization of the economy plays a role as well. It tends to consolidate market players though M&A. That in turn that allows firms to similarly profit from rent-seeking in captured and semi-captured markets, leading not just to lower quality but higher prices as well. Rising corporate profit margins have been a major contributor to the inflation of the past few years.
> However, a common experience for me is that I own something of good quality from 5/10/15 years ago and now buy the successor model from the same brand, but the product has gotten worse, being cheaper made.
Yes, absolutely. Quality has gone down across the board in nearly everything. What has gone up is more features. So at a high level comparison it seems like the newer thing does a lot more than the older same thing. Which is true, but that is not a measure of quality. Many of the added features are gimmicks that provide no meaningful value and at the same time the product is far more brittle and built much cheaper, so the overall quality is far lower.
Mine is that a Billy bookcase that I bought from Ikea 25 years ago is must stronger and more stable than a Billy bookcase I bought from Ikea 5 years ago.
And, when looking at what Ikea is selling in 2025 as a Billy bookcase, it's worse yet again.
But, with the cost of living increasing, companies have to cut corners to keep pricing down.
I wonder where the inflection point is where used items become more valuable than the new items being made at current quality levels, including degradation due to age.
When Ikea first expanded beyond Scandinavia, it was the 'fast fashion' of furniture: beautiful design, but sometimes made of particleboard or polyurethane foam.
Quality of the basic model Maytag washer I bought 25 years ago versus one today.
Quality of a Reese's cup I bought 25 years ago versus one today.
Quality of Levi's I bought 25 years ago versus a pair today.
Quality of the Billy that I bought 25 years ago versus today.
That's fair if we only strictly care about the Billy line and it's history.
From there we can't generalize to any other product without acknowledging IKEA's internal decision process or their vision for Billy across the years.
To parent's point
> where the inflection point is where used items become more valuable than the new items being made at current quality levels, including degradation due to age.
Buying the actual modern equivalent of what Billy was 25 years ago answers that question.
The distribution of peoples needs even out. The quality settles where the "good enough" is. That could be super high quality or just mediocre. Once that settles the super high quality has a new price point (economies of scale are no longer being subsidized by the people that need less). If that price point is too much for the people of quality to pay the product disappears.
Actually, they seem to have gotten their act together.
I love their trackballs. They dropped the warranty to 1 year--and even then every one failed within warranty. Disgusted but buying one every year was better than using an inferior product. But my latest has been sitting here for years, no erratic clicks.
> My suspicion is that when products are successful and mature but reach market saturation, profit growth pressure leads to cutting some corners on every iteration, and hence to a slow decline in quality over the years.
I'm sure that's one component. I can also imagine that another component is that in order to broaden the customer base, there is cost pressure as well as the pressure to appeal to more people. The initial market may have consisted of more quality focused nerds who were ok with spending a little more to get a robust thing with more knobs to tune behavior, while the mass market is fine with buying new stuff all the time, given that it's cheaper, and they don't care about fine tuning things, just want it to work out of the box, until they anyway buy a new thing in a year or two.
I agree too. And originally the company had multiple motivations to produce high quality. For pride reason (express your skills, new challenger mindset) and to gain brand recognition. Once that's settled, this forces get replaced by profit/ growth mindset.
A subtle variant of this is incorrect metrics. In 2000s, full featured audio chipsets started to show up, all in one chip 24bit audio. Soon everything used these, the 24bit resolution wasn't enough to make a good audio interface... (I think it was noisier) But it was too late, most devices used this and old audio cards were priced out.
It is often easier to make another sale of a downgraded product using earned customer goodwill than it is to continuously innovate, delight existing customers, and win new ones based on quality. It's less risky just to run a brand into the dirt, get paid, and screw any shareholders remaining.
Also many of these kinds of activities are illegal, but people do it anyway on the reasonable calculation that they won't be sued and that the government won't investigate them.
I totally agree! Philips diamondclean toothbrush anyone?
The first one lasted literally 10 years, it was one of the best consumer purchases I ever made.
Ever since then each replacement has crapped out within a year or two, despite same usage pattern. I bought one at Costco on sale and after returning it broken after just six months, a record for a $100+ device, the clerk at the return counter said they have piles of those. Crazy.
Its this way for me, with restaurants, especially those that have expanded a lot. A good example of this for me is the restaurant Dig Inn. It used to be one single place and was called “The Pump Energy Food” and used to my goto place for lunch. Then it changed names and expanded to 2-3 other locations and was still relatively good. It then started expanding a lot more and now the food absolutely sucks
Yeah. You do not want my wife to like your restaurant. Every single restaurant she has ever liked has within a few years it's either gone or she no longer likes it because of price increases or quality decreases (usually associated with a change in ownership.)
I'm in the same camp of the people who like using things forever. However, I find that I'm in a small minority... I am not even talking about clothing, fast fashion etc., people around me are constantly doing kitchen renovations, changing cars every few years, phones every year, etc.
What's the point of building for durability if there's no demand for it?
Moreover, if you look at expensive cars or furniture, the markup on them has to be higher than cheap stuff. Honda Fit is like 20% of the price of a BMW, but I bet doesn't cost 20% to manufacture... So if people wanted quality it would be better for companies to produce more of the expensive option. Either companies are dumb or people don't want quality.
I just recently got a coffee grinder that costs 3 times as much as my old one and it's actually better across multiple dimensions, including material e.g. metal vs plastic . But how many units do you think the plastic junk at 0.33x the price sells vs mine?
Like with much in the political situation, I think it's sort of a polarization.
The quality of some things has gone up significantly. This is going to be the things where improvements in technologies have made improved quality easier and cheaper (and that's not just electronics—materials technology, better manufacturing, etc can do this). It's also in products where other technological improvements have made it viable for there to be independent and artisanal (or similarly small-batch high-quality) production of them.
The quality of other things has declined precipitously. These are more likely to be commodities where improving quality still costs more, and the "innovation" they've done is in finding ways to make it cheaper and worse without it just always failing immediately (clothing is a prime example here).
Overall, I think that if you look into any given case of a product's quality getting better or worse over the past couple of decades, you'll almost invariably find that either way it's because that's how the manufacturers can make more money.
It's possible for that to be true while also there being competitors that are just making a name or themselves and aren't cutting corners. Incumbents in areas of low competition always get complacent and attempt to maximize profits without any further investment. Quality really only depends on the competition, since it removes those who lack it.
True, but as I said I often fail to find a good replacement when surveying the market for alternatives. Sometimes everyone copied the product but didn’t copy the original quality.
In that case it might've been that the original product wasn't cost effective to produce in the first place, or that most people buying it don't really care much about quality but just about the price, so that's what each provider optimizes for instead?
One recent example is a sturdy fold-out clothes drying rack I owned. All reviews praised its quality. My unit unfortunately got damaged in a heavy storm when I left it outside by mistake. The manufacturer got bought up in the meantime, and the product now is more flimsy and unstable, metal axes have been replaced by plastic ones. And I haven’t found any other model comparable to the old one on the market. I’d be willing to pay double or triple the price because of how good it was, and it wasn’t particularly inexpensive to start with.
I very much doubt that such a product can’t be manufactured sustainably in robust quality.
It’s gotten absurd. I’ll easily pay 10x the regular price of some object if I’m confident it will last a very long time and I won’t have to think about it anymore. I’ve replaced all the crappy LED bulbs in my house with Yuji Sunwave brand. I’ve not had a single bulb flicker or go out in years now, and the quality of the light is superb (i.e. more akin to what everyone used to have with incandescent bulbs). I bought a Control Freak induction cooktop in 2018. The whole family uses it far more than the cheap gas range that came with the house and is a pain to clean. Similarly, I replaced all the Food Network brand pots and pans I had in college that were chipping paint and rusting with Demeyere versions. Not a single problem since.
And to your point, I’ve probably gone through six clothes drying racks by now that all break down after a short time. I have yet to find a high-quality one.
It sounds expensive, but I suspect that in the long-term, the approach of buying higher quality up front ultimately ends up cheaper in terms of time and replacement costs. I’ve debated replacing some home appliances with commercial or restaurant versions, but there are some notable tradeoffs with that unfortunately, as the purpose of the appliance becomes somewhat different than a home use case.
Of course this strategy is all well and good if you can foot the initial high cost of the products, which many people cannot on the typical family income. There’s been a lot written about how those of lower income are often taken advantage of in this way—they end up paying a higher “lifetime cost” for lower quality products and service, because the system attempts to produce the minimum viable affordable product, which then sets the bar for the “new normal”.
> My suspicion is that when products are successful and mature but reach market saturation, profit growth pressure leads to cutting some corners on every iteration,
I'm sure that is certainly part of it, especially when multiple players are competing at least partly on price or apparent value. One consideration once price based competition is significant is that absolute quality may drop while measures of quality/price value improve¹.
Another issue is that when something is new, to the company or the buying audience, it is often a flagship product/service so gets a lot more attention. As things become something the company rattles off as a matter of course and we consumers interact with them daily, that level of attention per production unit diminishes considerably.
As well as playing directly into this, possibly leading to an actual drop in quality, mass production has a less obvious effect on the perception of quality. If you are making hundreds or less and a couple fail, they are probably noticed before leaving the factory and if not the consumer gets a relatively personal service with fixing/replacing the item. If you are making hundreds of thousands many more bad units get into circulation (the absolute failure rate increasing even if the failure ratio drops) and processing returns is less logistically easy. That perception problem has become more significant in the last couple of decades as unhappy voices always tended to be louder and social media can act as a megaphone for both happy and unhappy voices.
This is a complex area with many things feeding into actual quality issues, the perception of them, and sometimes the perception of the matter being worse than it really is overall.
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[1] for instance, maybe in a made up example quality goes down by 5% when cuts or mass production bring the price down by more than 10%, so buyers get better for the same money but worse absolutely
This might be the key issue. Let's say you bought a Roomba 10 years ago, and now go buy the successor model. Will it be any good ? probably not. At least not as good as the competition who got better than iRobot.
It will be the same for cars. If you bought a Nissan 10 years ago, I wouldn't be surprised if the successor isn't as good. Same for cameras, computers, bikes etc.
More than ever blind brand loyalty isn't paying off and even with brands staying at the top of their game the "successor" or best buying strategy might not be obvious.
Some see the world as having become more complex, I'd argue having stagnating signals was worse.
This is far more prominent in women’s clothing. My wife always says how buying from the same brands over the years that materials get thinner and thinner, as well as becoming more and more synthetic blend %s until it’s practically disposable.
I have noticed that woman’s clothing seems incredibly poor quality a lot of the time. Incredibly thin, and just looking at stuff on the racks and stores it was extremely common to find minor defects and loose threads.
Men will buy a shirt and wear it until its seams break in 2-10 years.
Women will buy blouses or dresses with cuts/colors that only work in certain seasons to be worn for a specific occasion that won’t come to pass again soon.
Now where women have more trouble is just in the utility work wear shopping space because that clothing is utilized frequently and until it fails.
So many people of HN need to google the terms “raw denim” and “selvedge denim”. Companies like naked and famous make high quality BIFL tier work wear clothes aimed at women.
Normies just don’t know about it cus denim heads are autistic.
This is the way I’ve been treating my clothes for years. I still have clothes that would’ve been thrown away a decade ago, but now they’re my favorite, softest shirts.
LuLuLemon is guilty of this. Their quality was pretty good about 10 years ago, but since then all the materials have gotten thinner and less durable. I have some LuLuLemon clothes from 10+ years ago which outlasted things I bought 3 years ago.
Now the quality is objectively bad and things get holes right away or are not even tailored correctly, but hey $7 billion wasn’t enough for Chip Wilson so he is going to keep sucking the brand dry.
Lulu also fell prey to a typical pattern of building a brand on quality, at a higher price point for higher income consumer. Then as they grew and targeted the broader market, getting copied by low cost competitors and then trying to pivot to compete with them.
You see similar in NYC with fast casual / quick service type places that scale from 2-3 locations into a national chain. Stuff becomes less handmade, less fresh, ingredient quality goes down, all the care&attention gets optimized away into a sad bowl of slop.
I've had that experience in three categories, all for different reasons.
I have clothing that I bought shortly after high school, and it's now more than 25 years old and still good. It's tougher and thicker cotton than anything I seem to be able to buy now. Aside from clothing getting worse (made overseas, made cheaply, or from poor materials), the textiles themselves have gotten worse. Cotton crops have yielded fibers of very low quality in recent years, especially post-pandemic. Once-dependable brands no longer make clothing that lasts. Brooks Brothers used to be the last hold out for high quality clothing in the U.S., and they sold their brand and turned to crap even before the pandemic.
Appliances are another thing. Washing machines routinely lasted more than twenty years. Same for refrigerators. The microwave my parents got as a wedding gift didn't have a lot of features, but it kept on heating for 30 years. Now, it's difficult to find machines that don't need replacing in 5 years, and microwaves are almost exclusively made in China. The good stuff that you used to be able to get just isn't made by manufacturers that attempt to make durable items. They're made to shave margins and turn to junk in a few years.
The third thing extends to all manner of consumer goods, and it is actually a materials and chemicals issue. So many of the things that worked really well, were made from materials that turned out to be actively harmful. Harmful plastics, harmful coatings on non-stick pans, and while I can still go out and purchase those things if I wanted, we've had to eliminate or replace them with worse alternatives.
Tea, when brewed from loose leaf in a pot and strained through a metal strainer instead of plasticized tea bags (they're not actually paper) means you need actual high-quality tea instead of the junk that's on grocery store shelves. It turns out that's actually difficult to come by. Porcelain and glass not made in China (China's porcelain and glass all--all--have unsafe lead levels) is also difficult to find. There very few safe sources: France and Turkey for porcelain, and Italy for glass.
There are a whole series of reasons, but consumer goods, are, in fact, worse than they used to be. It's not just fuzzy nostalgia.
I sometimes wonder how long it is before open-source manufacturing can fill the gap.
For a long time it’s been the case that it’s prohibitively expensive to do bespoke manufacturing using eg 3D printing and CAD lathes, vs. the cost attainable using mass manufacturing.
But perhaps a “made in America” option that can only compete on quality, not on price, could focus on “bring your own design” and fabricating nice, durable, repairable designs that apparently can’t be found elsewhere.
I guess the problem is that modern products need quite complex integrated electronics which are hard to build in an OSS paradigm.
I was searching recommendations at r/BuyItForLife the other day and saw a pattern of used-to-be-known-for-quality manufacturers scaled up and moved production abroad, which resulted in drop in quality.
Yes. Recommendations like that are not reliable, because the fact that a product has proven to hold up well for 10 or 20 years doesn't at all imply that it’s current incarnation will as well. The general trend is that it won't.
I think there is something to it. My favorite analogy for this is the car. I had a 2003 Acura TL once. By far, the best car I owned between the value, comfort and its specs. Compared to today's version, I can't help but notice that 2003 TL was one of company's initial foray's into US market so they had to offer something decent, useful or at least something that stood out.
In my first job out of engineering school 15 years ago I was working on a project to give people something they never had before.
Today most of my work goes towards making something that already exists cheaper. Not to pass on the savings to the customer of course, but to make the company's books look better and to make investors happier.
I had the same impression when buying clothes. I often buy the Shirts Form H&M. I have some old Shirts and the quality IS a Lot better. No loose Threads, the colors did Not wash out for and after washing they stayed how they are. Today all of that is not the Case anymore.
Same popular product gets value engineered over iterations to be worse. At same time, most category of products likely has competitors that have cropped up over last 20 years that has much better quality to price ratio.
A major problem with the whole model of production is that if you make a good product and saturate the market you die. It’s not the result of some conspiracy to make shit products. It’s a simple outcome from the fact that purchases are one time while businesses are ongoing, combined with shareholder demands to boost growth. Those demands in turn come from things like pension funds that have promised a return to their customers.
One “solution” is to build subscriptions into everything but there’s already a customer revolt against that for obvious reasons. It’s obnoxious.
I think the best solution is to decouple and unbundle production. Have small design houses (or even individuals) that design products and have low ongoing costs and big manufacturing concerns that make things. Something always needs to be made so they always have business. Design products around commodity parts as much as possible to make retooling affordable.
This kind of already exists in the form of boutiques with kickstarter and Etsy products, or at least those folks have trailblazed this model.
Razer deathadder is a great example. I didn't want to "upgrade" to the new model until I didn't have the choice and I'm stuck with enshitified, plastic version of what used to be a nice piece of hardware.
Perhaps something to that, but there is also consumer pressure to not raise prices. Think of those things you bought 5 / 10 / 15 years ago and adjust pricing for inflation… would you pay that much now?
We have become addicted to cheap. Same phenomenon with airlines: everyone bemoans how awful the experience is, and virtually everyone buys the cheapest possible ticket.
The state of modern personal electric vehicles (PEVs) is outstanding though; good enough to replace owning a car for most people! I personally have been riding an electric scooter this summer, and paired with a nice backpack, it has comfortably replaced all of my regular driving. For people who want to carry more than me, an e-bike with panniers or a cargo e-bike would likely meet your needs. Electric longboards and electric unicycles are also worth considering, and I have seen a couple of those around my city, but the e-scooters and e-bikes have dominated due to their capacities and how easy they are to ride.
It's also interesting, as you said, that everyone seems to want to defend crap. It's like corporations keep spreading the idea that you're always getting more for your money and everyone just seems to parrot that verbatim.
My life is a constant struggle when it comes to finding nice things.
I gave up and started buying $4 rshirts. Why? Because each year the clothes I'd buy were were on quality than my previous clothes.
When buying a $4 shirt I know the price:quality ratio, it's cheap:crap. Whereas majority of the time buying more expensive it might be slightly better, but it's still expensive:crap.
Try Uniqlo. Their $20 shirts have lasted me years. I haven’t thrown a single one out yet and I just have got around 90 uses out of some of the older ones so far.
I remember a number of years back when people were equating the feeling of sturdy and heft with quality. Just feelings. No actual metrics. I would constantly look down at my beaten up plastic junk and shake my head. At least my junk still worked. Everyone else seemed to be replacing their stuff all the time because their favourite products were only designed to give the illusion of quality. In reality, the very things that gave those products the illusion of quality were diminishing the longevity of the product or ensuring that it could not withstand any abuse.
The math on advertising and brand loyalty has changed. There was an article posted to HN this week that explained it pretty well I think. It's easy to start a new brand now, so it's OK to risk ruining your current brand. The decline in quality isn't bewildering, it's exactly what our form of capitalism encourages.
As long as there are customers who will pay for low quality, and there is no external [read: "regulatory"] goad, there will be vendors that will sell it.
Basic human (and capitalist) nature. Not good, but not evil, either. It's just the scorpion and the frog story.
It sucks, trying to actually create things with higher levels of Quality. It's a lot more expensive to add even rather incremental levels of Quality, and companies that try, usually (but not always) get ground into the dirt.
If we deliberately create substandard quality, it can really eat at our souls. I think many folks are able to work out a deal with their conscience, but I was never able to do that, so I worked for most of my career at a company that was all about Quality.
That boots model is fascinating compared the the actual boot market in the USA. I can get an excellent pair of made in America, vibrax/goodyear welted extremely sturdy boots for 200 USD - maybe less. Redwing, danger, etc other PNW brands all exist and sell at this price point.
Compare to popular fashion boots like timberlands which are also 200 USD and reasonably sturdy but no Goodyear welt or proper sole so they fail in 5 years or less of regular wear.
exactly! i came to this thread to smugly type “capitalism” in a comment. but i’d like to, less smugily, posit that it’s really just enshittification. MBA-driven physical-goods enshittification. It’s cheaper to use cheaper glues. To slightly change the fabric blend towards polyester. Thinner gauge wiring.
There are tradeoffs towards more complex devices being made, sure, but that’s not exactly what “quality” is, to me. There’s an extensive discussion about the iphone vs a snake-era nokia, which i feel like misses the point entirely
Do you not think it's capitalism driving enshittification? It's captialism that's the driving force pushing companies to reduce costs or be outcompeted. It's captialism that means that "it's cheaper" (in the short term) is what ends up driving decision making.
I think the "MBA-driven physical-goods enshittification" is a simplification and a cop-out because this is not just MBA-driven. This is across the board in all of society, and I believe the reason being that people, in general and enmass, are not being taught how to live with active critical analysis, and as a result when they choose an enshittificating decision, they do not realize it. They are not connecting the ramifications beyond their own mini-benefit. This is with the entire general population.
Making physical goods low quality, cheap, and therefore disposable is the equivalent of rent seeking.
Instead of growth and innovation, it’s how can the Company get recurring revenue after first sale.
The balance for the Company is finding a quality to price point ratio where either 1) the customer doesn’t care if it breaks because it was cheap and they know it’s cheap or 2) it’s cheap and breaks but the utility of it to the customer warrants (or with some goods, necessitates) them buying a replacement.
In the second case, the trade off would also include brand risk, but in the world of Amazon and TEMU, you can just sell the same thing under a new random name, there is no brand identity.
a simplification and a cop-out of what? blake, i am writing a hn comment and not an academic textbook
> This is across the board in all of society
ok but the article is largely about physical goods, that's what we're talking about
> I believe the reason being that people, in general and enmass, are not being taught how to live with active critical analysis
lmao i clicked on your bio and just knew i'd see MBA in there. maybe there's something that has happened to institutions that do this teaching. maybe it's because they, too, have mastered business administration
I've got multiple degrees, and the presence of an MBA invalidates my opinion?
I'm serious when I say this is not just "MBA think", this is everywhere. People are being short sighted. People are not thinking things logically through, and this is widespread.
Yes, we're talking physical goods. Items where short sighted thinking destroys brands, exactly what the original post discusses. It's too easy to just blame the MBAs. This is a widespread issue that is not just in physical goods, it is at the core of what is required to sustain democracy - a critical thinking population. We've educationally failed the population en mass by not having education verticals that stress perspective. We only teach short term perspectives as meaningful and worth action, and all this is coming home, today.
Those that should be able to talk sense in the critically short sighted decision makers have not been taught how to make their points and be understood. That is real, and widespread. Continue to label the cliche and get no where. We need to recognize this critical failure, because it is destroying one hell of a lot of foundation we need.
You're getting downvoted because a huge chunk of HN spends their 9-5 making things worse with a fuggit attitude because that's what their KPIs incentivize.
Those MBAs didn't come out of nowhere. They answer to C suites who answer to boards. They have to weigh their decisions against the cost of customer attitudes and employee morale. The fact that we get the outcomes we do indicate this is a top to bottom societal problem.
The economics are simple when you know and understand the main driver, but its inconvenient, and there are entities that want it hidden, because you have bad people doing bad things, and wanting to hide those things, and historically leftist leaning places/people do all of the above to a greater or lesser degree rather then engaging in actual truth telling.
The simple fact, that will probably get your post downvoted to remove from view, is this reduction of quality is driven by fiat money-printing.
It may be non-reserve issued debt (Basel3), or government subsidy, or contract. There are many sources, laundered, and the economy for the most part today has been silently nationalized, which is why it fails. Bailout is required to overcome the end of the boom/bust cycle and continue forward for a time thereafter, it happens cyclically (a true-up, the difference between actual production and fraud/loss) and it requires exponential amounts each time which are taken from every person holding money. There have been at least 4 instances that I can see where this has happened since the 1970s changeover to fiat (de-peg from gold/petrodollar).
The inflation/debasement in purchasing power causes companies to debase their product, to keep up with the escalator of inflation to continue on moving forward. This is worsened when you have foreign entities using slave labor through controlling their own currency, to destroy domestic business; such as manufacturing over a long period of time.
There is obviously an objective point where eventually that can't continue, because the economics of money-printing fail, but that point is what many leftists knowingly or unknowingly aim for; the ones that know just don't want others to know the emperor has new clothes because knowing and communication of that knowledge allows reaction and adaption, and there are some people who believe if an individual can't express words, or convey meaning, then that negative behavior associated with that conveyance (in their deeply flawed perspective) doesn't exist, and they can make people better that way.
The strategy for doing this is through sieving and concentration of resources into fewer and fewer hands, while retaining control of such resources. The lead market players today based in money-printing can control and continue operating because of their preferential banking ties, while competitors cannot enter or compete in the market because the market no longer meets the conditions of a market. Namely adversarial price discovery which requires visibility, and non-cooperation. Money-printing/banking isn't given for free, it forces many entities to cooperate; and adversarial independent decisionmaking is needed for economic calculation. Mises wrote about this extensively in broad strokes. There are quite a large number of impossible hysteresis problems that mark the system the boomer's pivoted to as unsustainable, hyperbolic, and inevitably fails to impossible to solve hysteresis problems (where knowledge of a state needed to react doesn't provide sufficient time to change course because the effects precede that knowledge).
Artificial distortions, trending towards chaos will grow and self-sustain, eventually causing whipsaws that cause it to fail, but that takes time since the point of failure is stage 3 ponzi, where monetary properties lose all value seemingly overnight. Where objectively, outflows exceed inflows.
This is what also drives enshitiffication, why the business growth curve is an S adoption curve (following ponzi), and the inevitability of consolidation/hostile takeover.
The leftist connection is the strategy of sieving, you have to concentrate wealth in few hands first before you can seize it from those hands, and this is what the Fed has been doing. A gradual fabian-based induction to non-market socialism, while ensuring the political power base remains through bad actors that call out other bad actors decrying the public, and others in the group instigating and inducing bad actions while undermining, subverting, and making the resilient system brittle, at every point. Destroying the rule of law through shock doctrine and demoralization up to just prior to bringing it to crisis for the seizure, and re-normalization where either a socialist/communist takeover occurs, or when that fails; a rise of fascism to power. The same regime-change plan that all governments use (give or take). Also, the same driving dynamics that led to Hitler's rise to power.
Jamming communications so people don't catch on and can't react is part of that plan, which is why you have so many bots running around, and the platforms are complicit with the same people as those who want to enable this. Jamming doesn't work without the plausible deniability of karma systems that allow the platforms to grant moderator powers to a large group of sockpuppet accounts (sybil attacks), controlled by a surreptitious moderator. Who may also utilizes many psychological blindspots we all have to manipulate, and damage readers through structured distortion of reflected appraisal (or narrative control, memetics, or belief contagion to the layman, which includes Le Bon's works as a basis).
People are easily manipulated when they don't know the mechanism behind the how. Cialdini in his book Influence touch on the foundations, except reflected appraisal, but to understand distorted reflected appraisal you have to understand how torture works, and what it is really, and if you knew you would see it in almost everything today.
Torture is the structured imposition of psychological stress in sufficient exposure to cause involuntary hypnosis.
Your stated suspicion is a well crafted induction of a common lie that's been repeated so many times, many believe its truth, but it fails under close objective examination.
If the lie were true, you would have competitors coming into the market, and staying in the market; but its not because of the asymmetrical connection to a money printer; directly or indirectly.
Lowering prices below market value to drive competitor companies out of business has occurred in many places where a leveraged buyout or hostile takeover wasn't possible.
You need to operate on debt to compete, but in so doing you become food for takeover, until the parasitic nature has nothing left to eat. That hasn't happened yet, but its probably going to happen in our lifetime. These dynamics in the historic lifecycle is what is driving the adoption towards BRICS, and the chaos we see everywhere.
Eventually you get to a point where everything breaks, and you've been trapped by decisions your parents or grandparents generation chose through aggregate.
Decisions that result in worsening conditions, and your and your family; and their children's futures, being collapse into violent law of nature, or submission to enslavement and a life of suffering before death.
Either result in a loss of control from the choice upfront, that decreases until a point of no return, after which the dynamics cannot be stopped, but you can get out of the way, it just requires a ruthlessness, education, and knowledge that has been deprived from nearly everyone raised in recent generations today. Lone wolves die because they are weak, the movies promoting this concept are (5GW).
My suspicion is that when products are successful and mature but reach market saturation, profit growth pressure leads to cutting some corners on every iteration, and hence to a slow decline in quality over the years.