I am also worried that we are in a lot of Inadequate Equilibria—and that it might get worse. But I think your explanation is too simple:
“manufacturers of consumer products, whose goal is to maximize their profits, and who serve to fulfill the values of consumers only to the extent that it maximizes their profits”, and the reason often is “because the new, considerably worse, product is cheaper to manufacture and will sell just as well to uninformed (and deliberately misled) consumers, thus increasing profits”.
This argument would work for all domains including new great stuff people do like and have no complaints about today. Also, easily influenceable people existed at all times. I guess there have been a lot of inferior products 100 years ago too. You just don’t see them today. So this could be availability or survivorship bias.
I think a better explanation would look like this (not saying this checks out if challenged):
The industry providing household goods and esp. metal cookware was once a much bigger fraction of industry overall. It was closer to the edge of innovation at that time—mass produced high quality metal products making it to the market in many areas. Especially metal working was making big strides and benefits were easily observable and there was a lot attention on this.
Compare this to know where innovation has moved on and whoever produces cookware now has to compete with metal working engineers in a lot of very different more specialized industries. Just retaining existing knowledge of metal working is hard and will degrade over time as it gets more and more difficult to hire and train people interested in driving this forward.
On the subject of “this proves too much” (which is more or less what you’re saying, yes?), I disagree, but that is quite a long discussion and I’m afraid I don’t have the resources to devote to that right now.
However, as far as “retaining existing knowledge of metal working is hard”, I really don’t think this is plausible. Nobody has lost the knowledge of how to sand down a piece of cast iron so that it’s smooth. This is something you can do at home, there areinstructionsavailableonline… this isn’t a lost art. The “only a few old experts still know how to do this” argument, or the “this is a very advanced technique and so only the best people in the industry can do this” argument, do not make sense here.
The same applies to all the other examples I mentioned. We still know perfectly well how to make borosilicate glassware, how to cast aluminum, how to make simple plastic parts, how to use stainless alloys that don’t rust, how to stamp a piece of steel with a zigzag hole pattern, etc., etc. None of this is lost knowledge, nor any advanced techniques.
The “innovation” argument simply does not hold water.
OK. I retract the innovation part. My argument doesn’t hinge on this being advanced. I still think that you overestimate the strength of your counterargument:
This is something you can do at home, there are instructions available online…
I think you overestimate the impact of innovation and underestimate the effort needed to get even simple things reliably to production. Execution is hard.Really hard. And you need dedicated competent people to drive this. And competent people gravitate to more interesting and/or better-paying jobs. Except for the occasional Kickstarter.
Maybe this is easier to see with software: For all the technical problems you can find answers online. On Stackoverflow or already learn this in college. How to build a scalable resilient infrastructure. How to set up a secure cloud service. But if you check nobody does it that way. It turns out that knowing how to do it is not enough.
The software example is indeed a good one, but it supports my point, rather than yours. People don’t do these things in the right way, not because (almost) nobody knows how, or can execute, etc., but because they choose not to—because the incentives favor merely pretending to do things the right way (or not bothering even with that).
Fair point. It seems we agree that it is incentives driving this and we place different weight on which incentives specifically. Monetary incentives sure are key but there are both those of the consumer, the producer, the people and the producer, and maybe other actors in the relevant industries. I don’t see the primary weight on consumer and producer (and wouldn’t even be sure which of these more).
I am also worried that we are in a lot of Inadequate Equilibria—and that it might get worse. But I think your explanation is too simple:
This argument would work for all domains including new great stuff people do like and have no complaints about today. Also, easily influenceable people existed at all times. I guess there have been a lot of inferior products 100 years ago too. You just don’t see them today. So this could be availability or survivorship bias.
I think a better explanation would look like this (not saying this checks out if challenged):
The industry providing household goods and esp. metal cookware was once a much bigger fraction of industry overall. It was closer to the edge of innovation at that time—mass produced high quality metal products making it to the market in many areas. Especially metal working was making big strides and benefits were easily observable and there was a lot attention on this.
Compare this to know where innovation has moved on and whoever produces cookware now has to compete with metal working engineers in a lot of very different more specialized industries. Just retaining existing knowledge of metal working is hard and will degrade over time as it gets more and more difficult to hire and train people interested in driving this forward.
On the subject of “this proves too much” (which is more or less what you’re saying, yes?), I disagree, but that is quite a long discussion and I’m afraid I don’t have the resources to devote to that right now.
However, as far as “retaining existing knowledge of metal working is hard”, I really don’t think this is plausible. Nobody has lost the knowledge of how to sand down a piece of cast iron so that it’s smooth. This is something you can do at home, there are instructions available online… this isn’t a lost art. The “only a few old experts still know how to do this” argument, or the “this is a very advanced technique and so only the best people in the industry can do this” argument, do not make sense here.
The same applies to all the other examples I mentioned. We still know perfectly well how to make borosilicate glassware, how to cast aluminum, how to make simple plastic parts, how to use stainless alloys that don’t rust, how to stamp a piece of steel with a zigzag hole pattern, etc., etc. None of this is lost knowledge, nor any advanced techniques.
The “innovation” argument simply does not hold water.
OK. I retract the innovation part. My argument doesn’t hinge on this being advanced. I still think that you overestimate the strength of your counterargument:
I think you overestimate the impact of innovation and underestimate the effort needed to get even simple things reliably to production. Execution is hard. Really hard. And you need dedicated competent people to drive this. And competent people gravitate to more interesting and/or better-paying jobs. Except for the occasional Kickstarter.
Maybe this is easier to see with software: For all the technical problems you can find answers online. On Stackoverflow or already learn this in college. How to build a scalable resilient infrastructure. How to set up a secure cloud service. But if you check nobody does it that way. It turns out that knowing how to do it is not enough.
The software example is indeed a good one, but it supports my point, rather than yours. People don’t do these things in the right way, not because (almost) nobody knows how, or can execute, etc., but because they choose not to—because the incentives favor merely pretending to do things the right way (or not bothering even with that).
Fair point. It seems we agree that it is incentives driving this and we place different weight on which incentives specifically. Monetary incentives sure are key but there are both those of the consumer, the producer, the people and the producer, and maybe other actors in the relevant industries. I don’t see the primary weight on consumer and producer (and wouldn’t even be sure which of these more).