Also, did you even look at what was on the search results page you linked? Most of those results aren’t even pots of any kind, but instead are… driveway signage, I guess?
Yes, I did. I don’t see “driveway signage” on there, so maybe the same search turns up different results on our two computers, or something? Here’s a whole website full of new high-quality heavy-gauge aluminum cookware.
I’m not going to spend a lot of extra time looking for companies manufacturing new versions of the precise design of borosilicate measuring cups and potato mashers that you have in mind. My guess, though, is that if I cared enough, I could probably find something comparable.
You shouldn’t be asking whether a person doing a quick epistemic spot check on an internet comment can spot the difference between the particular forms of nice stuff you’re interested in, and other things. You should be asking whether a motivated, informed buyer can find what they’re looking for. I think they probably can.
I happen to be a pianist, not a cook. If I wanted to find a high-quality new piano, I definitely could. In fact, there are design improvements that have been made in recent decades. And for most people, I think that a relatively inexpensive electronic piano with weighted keys is a better investment than a cheap acoustic. Most people simply will not pay to have their piano regularly tuned, and it’s more important to get used to playing music in tune than to get an acoustic sound. Also, shyness and concern for noise levels is often a barrier to practice, so the ability to use headphones really helps.
So in the market for nice stuff that I’m most familiar with, newer is just straight-up better. I think that also holds true in other markets for products that a lot of people use regularly, such as computers and cars.
Most people will happily accept cheaper, lower-quality products, because they only use them occasionally or for purposes that are within the capability of those products to handle. My cooking, and my ability to improve my cooking, is definitely not bottlenecked by the quality of my cookware or, say, the precise design of my measuring cups. So I’m happy to buy inexpensive, probably crappy products, and spend my money elsewhere.
My girlfriend, who’s an excellent cook, feels differently. She shops for nice stuff at thrift stores, because she enjoys bargain hunting and her time/income tradeoff is such that it makes more sense for her to search for grandma’s old things at Goodwill rather than to spent a few minutes finding what she wants new online.
If you want to make an argument that we could all be enjoying better cast-iron, thicker aluminum cookware, borosilicate measuring cups, and of course the sturdiest of potato-mashers, at a price equivalent to what we’re paying now for worse stuff, then I’d be interested to hear it! Right now, it just looks to me like we are mainly dealing with a quality/cost tradeoff, and that the vast majority of people prefer cheaper and lower-quality stuff. Those who become aficionados, like yourself, then upgrade their equipment when it becomes a bottleneck, or just when they feel like it.
I don’t want to oversell this argument. I think you probably can find examples of products where the market for high-quality stuff is too small to support its manufacture, where that demand can be satisfied by the second-hand market, or where knowledge of how to make the nice stuff has died out. I just think that, in aggregate, progress permits people to purchase goods and services at an expanding range of quality/cost tradeoffs, and that it often simply improves the quality of products while also making them cheaper.
I could imagine a couple mechanisms that might drive a trend of quality/cost tradeoffs that we might not be comfortable with. I’m talking about a substantial worsening quality, with only a modest decrease in price, for goods and services bought infrequently.
One such mechanism is that high-quality goods require skilled manufacturers. Perhaps people with those skills are being pulled into more profitable areas of the economy. The engineer who at one time would have built heavy-gauge aluminum cookware is now working in the computer industry, and cooks everywhere are suffering for it. Baumol strikes again. While people might mostly be glad that we can get such nice computers, the potato-mashing victims of this trend might find that it overall makes their lives worse.
The other is at the intersection between information asymmetry and economies of scale. I don’t really know (or believe) that there’s such a big difference between borosilicate and tempered glass that it’s worth my time to investigate. Pyrex can therefore sell me the cheap version, but price it higher, and pocket the difference. Nobody can outcompete them by offering an almost-as-cheap borosilicate version, both because they can’t compete with Pyrex’s brand name recognition and scale, and also because I, being an idiot about cookware, would still buy the Pyrex version. So you, an expert cook, are stuck buying much more expensive borosilicate with a slightly worse shape, because idiots like me are incentivizing Pyrex to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It’s a race to the bottom in these unhappy circumstances.
These aren’t crazy to me, I think that with sufficient investigation you could provide sufficient evidence that this is really what’s happening in particular cases. But overall, I think that people can almost always get their needs satisfied better and cheaper via normal economic progress of the kind that Jason is talking about here. Also, that even in the worst-case scenario, you can still buy either a handcrafted piece on commission, or buy vintage—and that your ability to find and afford such products is enhanced by progress in other areas of the economy.
Also, did you even look at what was on the search results page you linked? Most of those results aren’t even pots of any kind, but instead are… driveway signage, I guess?
Yes, I did. I don’t see “driveway signage” on there, so maybe the same search turns up different results on our two computers, or something?
Here’s a whole website full of new high-quality heavy-gauge aluminum cookware.
That’s closer (in some ways), but it’s still not the same thing. (Note, by the way, that this manufacturer doesn’t seem to ship to the United States, and is not available via Amazon, nor, as far as I can tell, via any distributor that caters to the American market.)
Are you just putting “heavy-gauge aluminum cookware” into Google and pasting the search results here? What in the world makes you think that this will yield meaningful results without being familiar with what you’re looking for in the first place?
I’m not going to spend a lot of extra time looking for companies manufacturing new versions of the precise design of borosilicate measuring cups and potato mashers that you have in mind. My guess, though, is that if I cared enough, I could probably find something comparable.
What’s the point of discussing your guesses, when either of us could, if we wanted to, actually check—and one of us has?
You shouldn’t be asking whether a person doing a quick epistemic spot check on an internet comment can spot the difference between the particular forms of nice stuff you’re interested in, and other things. You should be asking whether a motivated, informed buyer can find what they’re looking for. I think they probably can.
Yes. You should be asking that. And I am a motivated, informed buyer.
I happen to be a pianist, not a cook. If I wanted to find a high-quality new piano, I definitely could.
But the topic of discussion was cookware, not pianos. More importantly: how many people use pianos, and how many people use cookware? Which of these is more relevant to the day-to-day experience of people in our society? Which is more relevant to questions about “progress in consumer products” or the like?
So in the market for nice stuff that I’m most familiar with, newer is just straight-up better. I think that also holds true in other markets for products that a lot of people use regularly, such as computers and cars.
It most certainly does not hold true for computers. I am hesitant to launch into the computer analogue of this argument, but I could easily provide a list, similar to the one in my top-level comment, of ways in which various computer products have degenerated in quality, etc.
My girlfriend, who’s an excellent cook, feels differently. She shops for nice stuff at thrift stores, because she enjoys bargain hunting and her time/income tradeoff is such that it makes more sense for her to search for grandma’s old things at Goodwill rather than to spent a few minutes finding what she wants new online.
Do you really think that this is not at all related to the availability (or lack thereof), via a few minutes spent online, of stuff comparable to what your girlfriend prefers to use?
If you want to make an argument that we could all be enjoying better cast-iron, thicker aluminum cookware, borosilicate measuring cups, and of course the sturdiest of potato-mashers, at a price equivalent to what we’re paying now for worse stuff, then I’d be interested to hear it! Right now, it just looks to me like we are mainly dealing with a quality/cost tradeoff, and that the vast majority of people prefer cheaper and lower-quality stuff. Those who become aficionados, like yourself, then upgrade their equipment when it becomes a bottleneck, or just when they feel like it.
The problem is precisely that aficionados, quite often, do not upgrade—in the modern sense of “switch to a newer model, and/or the more expensive version of the current models”—but rather (in that same sense) downgrade; which is to say, we switch to an older and better version of the product, which is no longer being manufactured.
And remember that we’re talking about cooking here, not some exotic activity. How many people cook? And thus (taking some fraction of that population) how many cooking “aficionados” are there? It’s not a small number! We’re not talking about a tiny, dedicated cadre of “hardcore” home cooks.
You ask if we could be enjoying better stuff at a price equivalent to what we’re now paying for the worse stuff. Consider this: in 1956, a 10.5-inch Griswold cast-iron skillet cost $2.69 ($27.53 in 2021 dollars). Today, you cannot purchase a comparable item for that price, or even for twice that price. Why is this? Shouldn’t technological advancements make it cheaper to manufacture simple household goods? If it’s now impossible to produce an item of comparable quality for an equal or lower price—why? What has gone wrong?
I don’t want to oversell this argument. I think you probably can find examples of products where the market for high-quality stuff is too small to support its manufacture, where that demand can be satisfied by the second-hand market, or where knowledge of how to make the nice stuff has died out.
But this isn’t the case for cookware. The market for high-quality stuff isn’t small. Demand can’t be satisfied by the second-hand market. Knowledge of how to make the nice stuff hasn’t died out. It’s just that it’s more profitable to have many of your customers purchase low-quality goods, be dissatisfied with them, and then be unable to do anything about it.
I just think that, in aggregate, progress permits people to purchase goods and services at an expanding range of quality/cost tradeoffs, and that it often simply improves the quality of products while also making them cheaper.
But I’ve given at least a half-dozen examples where that’s manifestly not the case. Are you simply saying that cases like the ones I’ve described constitute a minority of all consumer goods? If so, then on what basis would you make this claim?
I could imagine a couple mechanisms that might drive a trend of quality/cost tradeoffs that we might not be comfortable with. I’m talking about a substantial worsening quality, with only a modest decrease in price, for goods and services bought infrequently. … The other is at the intersection between information asymmetry and economies of scale.
Yes. You’ve got it. This is precisely what is happening, in the cases that I’ve described, and in many, many others. (Once again, see Bruce Tognazzini’s famous essay on this dynamic.)
These aren’t crazy to me, I think that with sufficient investigation you could provide sufficient evidence that this is really what’s happening in particular cases. But overall, I think that people can almost always get their needs satisfied better and cheaper via normal economic progress of the kind that Jason is talking about here.
I’m sorry, but this reads to me like a declaration of faith. If multiple counterexamples (just in one category of goods!), described in detail by someone well-versed in the relevant domain, don’t cause you to update your beliefs on this, is your view truly a reasonable one?
Also, that even in the worst-case scenario, you can still buy either a handcrafted piece on commission, or buy vintage—and that your ability to find and afford such products is enhanced by progress in other areas of the economy.
The “buy a handcrafted piece on commission” comment is, frankly, laughable, and I’ll assume that you did not mean it seriously. As for buying vintage—yes, of course I can do this. But: firstly, it’s not even always possible to buy vintage (for example, the springform pan I described is often simply unavailable on eBay and similar sites). And second—the more things I have to buy vintage, the more this seems to me to be an obvious indication that our society’s ability to provide essential products is deeply unhealthy.
The search results page you linked to, as it appears for me.
Yes, our results look completely different from each other. Sorry about that!
Are you just putting “heavy-gauge aluminum cookware” into Google and pasting the search results here?
No, I was searching for aluminum cookware of a specific mm thickness (i.e. “4mm thick aluminum pot”), and then checking the thickness of the results to see if it was at least 4mm. I repeated this with 5mm and 8mm.
It most certainly does not hold true for computers. I am hesitant to launch into the computer analogue of this argument, but I could easily provide a list, similar to the one in my top-level comment, of ways in which various computer products have degenerated in quality, etc.
This seems very out there, and in line with some of the ways in which your hyper-focus on minutiae is causing you to miss the point. Computers are transparently, overwhelmingly better, year by year, decade by decade.
With cooking vs. piano, I understand your point, but I also think that the evidence you’re supplying cuts both ways. A country full of cooks, who ought to be informed enough not to fall for manufacturer’s tricks, still haven’t successfully created a market for mainstream borosilicate glass measuring cups or thick-walled aluminum pots. That could mean that the manufacturers are just so conniving and powerful that they’ve still managed to get away with marketing the worse products and pocket the difference. Or it could mean that, even to the vast majority of competent cooks, the price difference means more than the quality difference.
By contrast, even in a country/world deficient in serious pianists, we have managed to sustain an industry capable of maintaining and even improving the technology of new-built pianos, at every price point. This suggests to me that informed demand on the part of consumers for various quality/cost tradeoffs is what’s driving manufacturing decisions, not so much the exploitation of fools.
In fact, let’s think about the vintage cookware market. If that stuff is somewhat more expensive to manufacture, but it’s also very durable, then perhaps what’s going on is that the high-quality manufacturers are forced to compete against the secondhand market, which is able to circulate, rather than manufacture, a nearly-adequate quantity of high-quality durable cookware sufficient to meet the needs of aficionados like yourself. I, by contrast, would not care to invest the money to buy such nice stuff. I like things that are lightweight, easy to clean, cheap, and disposable, because I don’t have a nice kitchen to put them in, and I’m still at a stage in my life where I’m moving often.
If multiple counterexamples (just in one category of goods!), described in detail by someone well-versed in the relevant domain, don’t cause you to update your beliefs on this, is your view truly a reasonable one?
You’ve updated my beliefs somewhat in the realm of cookware, although I still think you’re exaggerating the inaccessibility of new-manufactured high-quality cookware. More importantly, though, I don’t base my entire economic point of view on the economics of measuring cups. I think you’ve probably just found a niche area in which your perspective is at least plausible, and have then tried to extrapolate your kitchen-focused point of view into a sweeping belief about the state of the economy as a whole.
And second—the more things I have to buy vintage, the more this seems to me to be an obvious indication that our society’s ability to provide essential products is deeply unhealthy.
This is interesting to me. Most of the serious cooks I know enjoy and appreciate their ability to buy what they need vintage. From an alternative point of view, we could view this as a phenomenon in which society has successfully reallocated its skilled manufacturers from a domain where we no longer need their expertise as much—cookware—to other domains in which their expertise is needed much more.
In any case, this is becoming a bit of a rabbit hole, and also somewhat socially unpleasant. If you respond, I’ll read and consider what you write, but I don’t expect to continue the discussion further.
Computers are transparently, overwhelmingly better, year by year, decade by decade.
The only evidence you have for that is clock speed, transistor density and memory/storage capacity. Yes, I will fully admit there have been truly incredible gains there.
But in terms of software? I fail to see how most pieces of software are “transparently, overwhelmingly better, year after year, decade by decade”.
Let’s take text editors, as an example: GNU Emacs was released in 1985. Vim was released in 1991. These are old tools, and they’re still considered better than modern text editors by a fairly sizable fraction of programmers. If computers are getting transparently overwhelmingly better, year after year, decade by decade, then why does anyone use Emacs or Vim?
The difference between computers and cookware is that (open source) computer programs don’t wear out, so it is possible for us to continue to use them for years or decades. Where that isn’t the case in software (like closed source office suites, for example), you will readily find examples of people complaining that the new version is slower, more difficult to use, and requires more system resources than the previous version.
Maybe we should ask, “better for whom?” That’s more relevant in the software case than in the hardware case.
For the average user, I think that the ease of use, auto save, and cloud backups offered by modern word processors is really helpful. Also, the affordability and increasing accessibility of computers and the internet. And most users are average users. I remember how mad my dad got when he’d forget to save and lose hours of work 20 years ago.
I know there are power users who appreciate the keyboard-centric features of Vim, and more power to them.
In general, people complain when new versions are worse, and just use them when the new versions are better, rather than gushing about them.
Alternatively, I work as an engineer. The things that can be done with software now would have been impossible not too long ago, both as a result of those underlying improvements in hardware and algorithmic improvements. Also, with time simply comes an expanding range of software options, as well as access to content provided via that software.
Computing improvements have a positive relationship with content delivered by those computers. Better computers result in improved logistics and processes for making and delivering physical products. One way of looking at software improvements is “Amazon.com and Netflix and Google and podcasting can exist.”
Can you find examples of product/market fit where things have been in stasis for a long time (ie Vim for power user programmers), or where things have moved backward at some point in time? Sure! Is the overwhelming sweep of both hardware and software relentlessly leaping forward? I think the answer is clearly yes.
The difference between computers and cookware is that (open source) computer programs don’t wear out, so it is possible for us to continue to use them for years or decades.
Although open source computer programs don’t literally “wear out” — the bits are still the same — the machines change under them and security faults surface that must be fixed. Is anyone using an Emacs or Vim that hasn’t been updated in decades?
Let’s take text editors, as an example: GNU Emacs was released in 1985. Vim was released in 1991. These are old tools, and they’re still considered better than modern text editors by a fairly sizable fraction of programmers. If computers are getting transparently overwhelmingly better, year after year, decade by decade, then why does anyone use Emacs or Vim?
If they’re not getting better, then why do even more programmers not use Emacs or Vim?
Yes, I think that we’ve exhausted most of what it would be fruitful to discuss in this thread; the remaining disagreements would probably take more effort to resolve than would be feasible to expend at this time (for either of us). I do want to comment on this part, though:
It most certainly does not hold true for computers. I am hesitant to launch into the computer analogue of this argument, but I could easily provide a list, similar to the one in my top-level comment, of ways in which various computer products have degenerated in quality, etc.
This seems very out there, and in line with some of the ways in which your hyper-focus on minutiae is causing you to miss the point. Computers are transparently, overwhelmingly better, year by year, decade by decade.
Conversely, I would say that computers are transparently (!) not “overwhelmingly better, year by year, decade by decade”. They’re certainly better in some ways, but also much worse in other ways. (Input latency is one well-studied example, but there are quite a few others.)
It is also noteworthy that many of the ways in which computer hardware has improved (“raw” performance characteristics such as clock speed, memory capacity, storage capacity, etc.) are used to support behaviors that are of dubious value at best (various fancy compositor features and graphical capabilities of window managers), and user-hostile at worst (adtech and other dark patterns of the modern web).
Understand that the things I am referring to, when I make claims like the one you quoted, are not “minutiae”; rather, they are basic aspects of the everyday user experience of the great majority of personal computer users in the world.
Input latency and unpredictability of it. One famous example is that for many years there were usable finger-drumming apps on iOS but not on Android, because on Android you couldn’t make the touchscreen + app + OS + sound system let people actually drum in time. Something would always introduce a hundred ms of latency (give or take) at random moments, which is enough to mess up the feeling. Everyone knew it and no one could fix it.
So in the market for nice stuff that I’m most familiar with, newer is just straight-up better. I think that also holds true in other markets for products that a lot of people use regularly, such as computers and cars.
I agree. I don’t buy much cookware, and I was surprised to see Said Achmiz come up with so many good examples of cookware declining in quality.
I’d be interested in seeing how this compares to other markets. My guess is that cookware might fall on a rather extreme end of a spectrum, where on the other end we would see computer hardware and accessories, which has definitely not declined in quality.
… computer hardware and accessories, which has definitely not declined in quality
This is not my experience. I can easily provide examples from the computer hardware / accessory market where there’s been a decline in quality. (Three examples just off the top of my head: MacBook keyboards, buckling-spring desktop keyboards, and consumer-grade wireless routers.)
MacBook keyboards, buckling-spring desktop keyboards, and consumer-grade wireless routers.
These are strange things to cite. Keyboards are optimizing for something you clearly don’t want (cheapness for most keyboards, thinness for laptop keyboards, and fashion for anything from Apple), but that doesn’t mean you can’t get the “better” ones. Laptops with mechanical keyboards exist, they’re just not very popular: https://www.fifthgeek.com/laptops-with-mechanical-keyboards/
(I’m assuming you’re aware that mechanical desktop keyboards still exist)
I’m not sure what you’re talking about for consumer grade routers. According to this article, the WRT54G cost $199 in 2001 (~$300 today with inflation). For the same price today, I could buy a router that’s 20x faster, supports significantly more concurrent clients, has security that actually works, and is more stable (not to mention all the other bells and whistles new routers have, like how they almost all support printers and network storage).
These are strange things to cite. Keyboards are optimizing for something you clearly don’t want (cheapness for most keyboards, thinness for laptop keyboards, and fashion for anything from Apple), but that doesn’t mean you can’t get the “better” ones.
I’m sorry, but this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. If this were the case, then either (a) MacBooks with significantly better keyboards than the current ones would never have existed (but in fact they very much did and I am typing on one right now), or, at the very least, (b) change in Apple laptop keyboards over time would’ve been monotonic in the direction of increasing thinness and cheapness and decreasing quality (but in fact nothing remotely like this is true).
Laptop keyboards need not be mechanical (in this sense) to be good, as demonstrated by the MacBook Pro on which I am typing this comment.
(I’m assuming you’re aware that mechanical desktop keyboards still exist)
I am aware. I do not particularly like modern mechanical keyboards, but I recognize that reasonable people can differ on this point.
But note that I did not say “mechanical desktop keyboards”. What I said was “buckling-spring desktop keyboards”—which also still exist, but they are of an inferior quality, because the plastic parts are molded using three-decade-old, worn-down tooling. No one is producing that manufacturing equipment anymore; no one is making new buckling-spring keyboards that match the build quality of the old ones (to say nothing of “better”).
I’m not sure what you’re talking about for consumer grade routers. …
I used a WRT54GL for a decade, and have owned three Archer C7/A7 boxes so far (as well as various other Linksys, TP-Link, and Netgear devices), so yes, I am familiar with the market. Merely citing the prices, speeds, and advertised features of the available router models is missing the point entirely—I am talking about quality, not modern-ness. However, I am not sure that this is a discussion I want to get into at this time.
I do not particularly like modern mechanical keyboards, but I recognize that reasonable people can differ on this point.
But note that I did not say “mechanical desktop keyboards”. What I said was “buckling-spring desktop keyboards”
To what extent do you think your argument is merely that “we don’t make the old stuff anymore” as opposed to “the new stuff is worse than the old stuff”?
Like, suppose instead of growing up with buckling-spring keyboards, you grew up with mechanical keyboards, which became obsolete with the release of buckling-spring keyboards. In that world, would we be having the same conversation about how they don’t make ’em like they used to, except in regards to the inferior buckling spring mechanism?
It’s well known that people are nostalgic about the past, and status-quo bias is well-documented. In what sense can you reasonably assert that the new stuff is worse rather than merely different? And what general measure would you propose to test this claim?
I didn’t grow up with buckling-spring keyboards. The first keyboard I owned was an AppleDesign Keyboard (beige, model M2980, non-mechanical, with the membrane-based design), which was of mediocre quality at best. I discovered mechanical keyboards (the older Apple Extended and Apple Extended II keyboards were the first I saw) later, and buckling-spring keyboards (the even older IBM Model M) even later. I didn’t get much of a chance to use a buckling-spring keyboard to type on until I had been using computers for many years. However, it was immediately obvious, at each stage of that discovery process, that mechanical keyboards were superior to non-mechanicals, and that buckling-spring keyboards even more so (for typing).
Similarly, the first laptop I owned was the original “Dual USB” white iBook. At around that time, I got a job in a small shop that sold and repaired Macs and other Apple products, and so, for about five years, I had the chance to test every Mac laptop, every Apple-made desktop keyboard, etc. I’ve also owned a succession of Apple laptops since then, culminating in the MacBook Pro whose specs I linked upthread. That first iBook’s keyboard was emphatically not the best laptop keyboard I’ve ever used; actually, it was fairly bad. Apple’s laptop keyboards improved substantially over the years… and then, that trend reversed, quite dramatically.
So, you see, my view does not boil down to “nostalgia-tinted glasses”. And given my experience, I can confidently assert that the new stuff is worse than the old stuff.
(By the way… it is telling, I think, that you assumed that the older products whose quality I claimed to be superior were simply the things I’d grown up with, and had gotten used to—despite the fact that I have given no indication of this, no hint that this should be the case! Yet to you it seemed like an assumption so natural as to be made unconsciously. Does this not seem to you to be significant, to be indicative of something worth investigating further?)
Point taken. This is good evidence that you don’t have “nostalgia-tinted glasses” as you put it.
By the way… it is telling, I think, that you assumed that the older products whose quality I claimed to be superior were simply the things I’d grown up with, and had gotten used to—despite the fact that I have given no indication of this, no hint that this should be the case! [...]
Does this not seem to you to be significant, to be indicative of something worth investigating further?
I don’t know how old you are, but I referred to growing up in a more general sense, to mean that those things were around when you were a child. In context, it referred to a reversal of what had been the actual progression of technology. Of course, I’d agree it was an unwise choice of wording—more off-the-cuff than anything.
I don’t know what you mean by the last part. Perhaps you mean that I could have deep biases, blinding me from an objective analysis here. Can you clarify?
I don’t know what you mean by the last part. Perhaps you mean that I could have deep biases, blinding me from an objective analysis here. Can you clarify?
Sure. My meaning is perhaps essentially as you say, but with rather different emphasis. I do not think that it is terribly useful to look for personal biases here (and it seems unlikely that you should have any unique or unusual bias in this regard).
It seems more likely (or in any case it’s more fruitful to approach the matter thus) that the bias is “in the water”, so to speak. Neophilia (and its complement, which the internet informs me should be called ‘paliophobia’) is deeply ingrained in modern Western culture. The assumption of progress, too, is deeply ingrained (the OP is hardly making a novel or surprising argument, for instance). From this it follows that anyone who prefers the old to the new, in any context, cannot be doing so for any ‘rational’ reason. And thus when you hear that someone has this preference, you assume that it’s due to nostalgia, etc.
But the consequence of this is that it’s more difficult for you to notice cases where the old is better than the new. You see that someone prefers the old; you say “ah, mere nostalgia”; you therefore do not investigate the question of why they prefer the old to the new (and why would you, if you already have the answer?); and so you never get the chance to learn whether, in this case, the old is better, even if that is actually true.
Of course this is nothing but another of (as Eliezer once put it) the thousand faces of confirmation bias (and thus should not at all surprise us).
I apologize, by the way, for this blatant Bulverism. I don’t actually know, to any great degree of certainty, whether your views on this topic are informed largely (or even partially) by any bias of this kind! I am quite ready to accept a denial of any such fault in you, personally.
I only want to point out that it is a very common sort of distortion, easily discernible in many, many discussions like this. I’ve encountered it more times than I can count. I think that it’s very much worth being wary of it, and perhaps even worth making a special effort to counteract.
Neophilia (and its complement, which the internet informs me should be called ‘paliophobia’) is deeply ingrained in modern Western culture. The assumption of progress, too, is deeply ingrained (the OP is hardly making a novel or surprising argument, for instance).
Consider a few facts for a moment,
“In 1982, the second major study of [the hostile media effect] was undertaken; pro-Palestinian students and pro-Israeli students at Stanford University were shown the same news filmstrips pertaining to the then-recent Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian refugees by Christian Lebanese militia fighters abetted by the Israeli army in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. On a number of objective measures, both sides found that these identical news clips were slanted in favor of the other side.”
Economist Paul Krugman writes, “the obvious bias in things like acceptance of papers at major journals is towards, not against, a doctrinaire free-market view.” Whereas economist Bryan Caplan claims, “Even among economists, market-oriented policy prescriptions are often seen as too dogmatic.”
69 to 25 percent of Republicans and Democrats believe big tech is biased in favor of liberals, compared to 5 to 19 percent of Republicans and Democrats believing big tech is biased in favor of conservatives.
Now consider, regarding the assumption of progress,
In the United states, 41 percent believe that things are worse now than they were 50 years ago, compared to 37 percent who believe it is better. When you ask people about finances specifically, this goes to 45 percent compared to 32 percent compared to 20 years ago, with differences being larger in Greece, the UK, Italy, France and Spain—nations traditionally considered at the heart of Western culture.
“More than two-thirds (68%) of U.S. respondents said they think today’s children will be financially worse off as adults than their parents, up from 60% in 2019. Only 32% think children will be better off.” Source.
In 2017, “Four in ten Americans (39%) think the odds that global warming will cause humans to become extinct are 50% or higher.”
I’m sure you’re familiar with these types of facts. I could continue with them, but I don’t think it’s necessary to add much more for the point I’m trying to make.
The first set of facts, I believe, collectively implies that people are not consistently able to read whether a particular culture is actually biased in the way they claim. Often, an accusation of bias reveals the opposite: namely that the speaker is biased themselves.
The interpretation of bias comes from the fact that the world is not far enough in the direction of how the speaker wants it to be, even if it is indeed quite far. It’s easier to see the biases in other people than to see the biases in yourself. Hence how you can get Paul Krugman writing about how market fundamentalism rules his field, all the while his own Nobel Prize speaks to the opposite truth.
I’m not just accusing you of just the same thing. I do suspect that you are doing something like the equivalent of what Paul Krugman does, as your top comment is currently upvoted more highly than the post itself. But this is not the entirety of my objection.
Instead I’d just ask you to consider as a test of your thesis, to propose an actual general measure for progress in consumer goods.
Imagine a world in which, over time, we expect 15% of things to get worse and 85% of things to get better. In such a world, one could spend an inordinate amount of time finding example after example of things that have gotten worse, because there are a lot of consumer goods. But that would prove approximately nothing, as it would ignore the 85% of goods that got better.
I understand that such a measure would be difficult to construct. The inherent subjectivity of the subject is what makes it difficult. But, perhaps as Richard Feynman once said, “‘Oh you’re dealing with psychological matters. These things can’t be defined so precisely.’ Yes, but then you can’t claim to know anything about it.”
Hang on, though. Before I respond to the rest of your comment, I want to point out that the second set of bullet points you list do not have anything at all to do with what I am talking about. You see that, yes? (Or were those points not meant to be responsive to the quoted bit from my comment? But in that case, what is their significance…?)
Before I respond to the rest of your comment, I want to point out that the second set of bullet points you list do not have anything at all to do with what I am talking about. You see that, yes?
You stated,
The assumption of progress, too, is deeply ingrained (the OP is hardly making a novel or surprising argument, for instance).
I interpreted the assumption of progress as referring to one of these two possibilities,
The world has gotten better
The world will get better in the future
This makes a lot of sense considering Jason Crawford’s other posts.
My first bullet point addresses the first interpretation. It points out that the assumption of progress is not “deeply ingrained” as you claimed. It seems more that about half of people, or less, believe that the world has gotten better.
My other two bullet points address the second interpretation of the assumption of progress.
Neither of those interpretations are (a) what I meant, nor (b) entailed by the OP.
There are also several other serious problems with the points you made, having to do with their provenance, the possibility of sensibly interpreting them, etc.
However, I’m afraid I am becoming increasingly uncertain that it’s productive to continue this conversation…
I am interested in a direct way of testing this hypothesis. The part about the assumption of progress was a minor digression. I hope you will understand.
The specific aim I had was to dispel the objection that I was merely biased. I may be biased. In fact, I probably am. But these sorts of arguments don’t normally lead anywhere. People pick “sides” and accuse the other side of being biased. But, as you wrote yourself, what matters is what’s actually true.
There will of course be a few examples of declining progress in any domain. But it would take a ton of evidence to convince me that there’s been a general decline in the quality in computer hardware, given the mountains of evidence otherwise.
First—why, actually, should there be “a few examples of declining progress”? We accept this as normal, but why? It doesn’t seem to me to be what we’d expect, on the basis of the naive view of free-market capitalism and so on. At the least, such phenomena (especially if they’re so ubiquitous as to merit an “of course”!) seem like puzzles that we need to explain.
Second—I do have quite a lot of evidence for my view, of course. (I don’t think it’s worthwhile to present it here in this comment thread, though. But I’ll give some thought to the best way to organize my thoughts on this, and perhaps we might return to it.)
Third—I don’t, actually, think that we have “mountains of evidence” for the contrary (i.e., mainstream) view. I entirely understand why you say that we do, and I readily admit that it is indeed the mainstream consensus that we do, indeed, have these “mountains”, but I think that belief about how much evidence we have (for the “progress-affirming view”) is mistaken.
Clearly, that third point is entirely non-obvious, and demands justification. I am, at this time, not providing any such thing. I say this only to make known the general shape of my position—without, for the moment, defending it.
First—why, actually, should there be “a few examples of declining progress”?… It doesn’t seem to me to be what we’d expect, on the basis of the naive view of free-market capitalism and so on.
Well, the answer’s obvious, no? The naive view is wrong.
Economists have studied ways how markets don’t reflect consumer preferences for decades. There are reasonable people on both sides: some people say that these failures are exaggerated, and some say that they haven’t been emphasized enough. But I haven’t seen many respectable economists argue that the market always and uniformly reflects the needs of fully informed consumers.
Here’s one example of Tyler Cowen, a pro-market economist, talking about planned obsolescence. Or you can read his book in which he claims that progress in consumer goods has been unimpressive recently.
As you fully admitted, you are not providing the full evidence for your claim about computer hardware, and so I cannot meaningfully evaluate it.
However, I should note that such debate often draw people into intense, but rather fruitless disputes over definitions. What does progress mean? How can we judge the quality of a consumer good from an objective point of view?
I don’t mean to downplay the strength of the examples you pointed to. I think they’re actually rather fascinating. But, if we were to continue the debate further, I would wish to caution you about the following.
I have now been in many similar debates about “progress” with people before, and it seems that one or both sides will often merely assert an “obvious” benchmark for progress. Yet this obvious benchmark usually seems oddly ad-hoc and, uncharitably, appears to be chosen deliberately to make the speaker’s thesis look correct. Alternative benchmarks, which to others seem profoundly important, get handwaved away as “not ultimately meaningful” by the other side, and vice versa.
I think ultimately a lot of this comes down to simple differences in preferences. People often just disagree about what’s considered “good” and that’s OK; not unexpected at all. A diversity of opinion about whether something is “better” than another thing is pretty much exactly what I’d expect, given the diversity of human thoughts, feelings, and values.
Yes, I did. I don’t see “driveway signage” on there, so maybe the same search turns up different results on our two computers, or something? Here’s a whole website full of new high-quality heavy-gauge aluminum cookware.
I’m not going to spend a lot of extra time looking for companies manufacturing new versions of the precise design of borosilicate measuring cups and potato mashers that you have in mind. My guess, though, is that if I cared enough, I could probably find something comparable.
You shouldn’t be asking whether a person doing a quick epistemic spot check on an internet comment can spot the difference between the particular forms of nice stuff you’re interested in, and other things. You should be asking whether a motivated, informed buyer can find what they’re looking for. I think they probably can.
I happen to be a pianist, not a cook. If I wanted to find a high-quality new piano, I definitely could. In fact, there are design improvements that have been made in recent decades. And for most people, I think that a relatively inexpensive electronic piano with weighted keys is a better investment than a cheap acoustic. Most people simply will not pay to have their piano regularly tuned, and it’s more important to get used to playing music in tune than to get an acoustic sound. Also, shyness and concern for noise levels is often a barrier to practice, so the ability to use headphones really helps.
So in the market for nice stuff that I’m most familiar with, newer is just straight-up better. I think that also holds true in other markets for products that a lot of people use regularly, such as computers and cars.
Most people will happily accept cheaper, lower-quality products, because they only use them occasionally or for purposes that are within the capability of those products to handle. My cooking, and my ability to improve my cooking, is definitely not bottlenecked by the quality of my cookware or, say, the precise design of my measuring cups. So I’m happy to buy inexpensive, probably crappy products, and spend my money elsewhere.
My girlfriend, who’s an excellent cook, feels differently. She shops for nice stuff at thrift stores, because she enjoys bargain hunting and her time/income tradeoff is such that it makes more sense for her to search for grandma’s old things at Goodwill rather than to spent a few minutes finding what she wants new online.
If you want to make an argument that we could all be enjoying better cast-iron, thicker aluminum cookware, borosilicate measuring cups, and of course the sturdiest of potato-mashers, at a price equivalent to what we’re paying now for worse stuff, then I’d be interested to hear it! Right now, it just looks to me like we are mainly dealing with a quality/cost tradeoff, and that the vast majority of people prefer cheaper and lower-quality stuff. Those who become aficionados, like yourself, then upgrade their equipment when it becomes a bottleneck, or just when they feel like it.
I don’t want to oversell this argument. I think you probably can find examples of products where the market for high-quality stuff is too small to support its manufacture, where that demand can be satisfied by the second-hand market, or where knowledge of how to make the nice stuff has died out. I just think that, in aggregate, progress permits people to purchase goods and services at an expanding range of quality/cost tradeoffs, and that it often simply improves the quality of products while also making them cheaper.
I could imagine a couple mechanisms that might drive a trend of quality/cost tradeoffs that we might not be comfortable with. I’m talking about a substantial worsening quality, with only a modest decrease in price, for goods and services bought infrequently.
One such mechanism is that high-quality goods require skilled manufacturers. Perhaps people with those skills are being pulled into more profitable areas of the economy. The engineer who at one time would have built heavy-gauge aluminum cookware is now working in the computer industry, and cooks everywhere are suffering for it. Baumol strikes again. While people might mostly be glad that we can get such nice computers, the potato-mashing victims of this trend might find that it overall makes their lives worse.
The other is at the intersection between information asymmetry and economies of scale. I don’t really know (or believe) that there’s such a big difference between borosilicate and tempered glass that it’s worth my time to investigate. Pyrex can therefore sell me the cheap version, but price it higher, and pocket the difference. Nobody can outcompete them by offering an almost-as-cheap borosilicate version, both because they can’t compete with Pyrex’s brand name recognition and scale, and also because I, being an idiot about cookware, would still buy the Pyrex version. So you, an expert cook, are stuck buying much more expensive borosilicate with a slightly worse shape, because idiots like me are incentivizing Pyrex to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It’s a race to the bottom in these unhappy circumstances.
These aren’t crazy to me, I think that with sufficient investigation you could provide sufficient evidence that this is really what’s happening in particular cases. But overall, I think that people can almost always get their needs satisfied better and cheaper via normal economic progress of the kind that Jason is talking about here. Also, that even in the worst-case scenario, you can still buy either a handcrafted piece on commission, or buy vintage—and that your ability to find and afford such products is enhanced by progress in other areas of the economy.
The search results page you linked to, as it appears for me.
That’s closer (in some ways), but it’s still not the same thing. (Note, by the way, that this manufacturer doesn’t seem to ship to the United States, and is not available via Amazon, nor, as far as I can tell, via any distributor that caters to the American market.)
Are you just putting “heavy-gauge aluminum cookware” into Google and pasting the search results here? What in the world makes you think that this will yield meaningful results without being familiar with what you’re looking for in the first place?
What’s the point of discussing your guesses, when either of us could, if we wanted to, actually check—and one of us has?
Yes. You should be asking that. And I am a motivated, informed buyer.
But the topic of discussion was cookware, not pianos. More importantly: how many people use pianos, and how many people use cookware? Which of these is more relevant to the day-to-day experience of people in our society? Which is more relevant to questions about “progress in consumer products” or the like?
It most certainly does not hold true for computers. I am hesitant to launch into the computer analogue of this argument, but I could easily provide a list, similar to the one in my top-level comment, of ways in which various computer products have degenerated in quality, etc.
Do you really think that this is not at all related to the availability (or lack thereof), via a few minutes spent online, of stuff comparable to what your girlfriend prefers to use?
The problem is precisely that aficionados, quite often, do not upgrade—in the modern sense of “switch to a newer model, and/or the more expensive version of the current models”—but rather (in that same sense) downgrade; which is to say, we switch to an older and better version of the product, which is no longer being manufactured.
And remember that we’re talking about cooking here, not some exotic activity. How many people cook? And thus (taking some fraction of that population) how many cooking “aficionados” are there? It’s not a small number! We’re not talking about a tiny, dedicated cadre of “hardcore” home cooks.
You ask if we could be enjoying better stuff at a price equivalent to what we’re now paying for the worse stuff. Consider this: in 1956, a 10.5-inch Griswold cast-iron skillet cost $2.69 ($27.53 in 2021 dollars). Today, you cannot purchase a comparable item for that price, or even for twice that price. Why is this? Shouldn’t technological advancements make it cheaper to manufacture simple household goods? If it’s now impossible to produce an item of comparable quality for an equal or lower price—why? What has gone wrong?
But this isn’t the case for cookware. The market for high-quality stuff isn’t small. Demand can’t be satisfied by the second-hand market. Knowledge of how to make the nice stuff hasn’t died out. It’s just that it’s more profitable to have many of your customers purchase low-quality goods, be dissatisfied with them, and then be unable to do anything about it.
But I’ve given at least a half-dozen examples where that’s manifestly not the case. Are you simply saying that cases like the ones I’ve described constitute a minority of all consumer goods? If so, then on what basis would you make this claim?
Yes. You’ve got it. This is precisely what is happening, in the cases that I’ve described, and in many, many others. (Once again, see Bruce Tognazzini’s famous essay on this dynamic.)
I’m sorry, but this reads to me like a declaration of faith. If multiple counterexamples (just in one category of goods!), described in detail by someone well-versed in the relevant domain, don’t cause you to update your beliefs on this, is your view truly a reasonable one?
The “buy a handcrafted piece on commission” comment is, frankly, laughable, and I’ll assume that you did not mean it seriously. As for buying vintage—yes, of course I can do this. But: firstly, it’s not even always possible to buy vintage (for example, the springform pan I described is often simply unavailable on eBay and similar sites). And second—the more things I have to buy vintage, the more this seems to me to be an obvious indication that our society’s ability to provide essential products is deeply unhealthy.
Yes, our results look completely different from each other. Sorry about that!
No, I was searching for aluminum cookware of a specific mm thickness (i.e. “4mm thick aluminum pot”), and then checking the thickness of the results to see if it was at least 4mm. I repeated this with 5mm and 8mm.
This seems very out there, and in line with some of the ways in which your hyper-focus on minutiae is causing you to miss the point. Computers are transparently, overwhelmingly better, year by year, decade by decade.
With cooking vs. piano, I understand your point, but I also think that the evidence you’re supplying cuts both ways. A country full of cooks, who ought to be informed enough not to fall for manufacturer’s tricks, still haven’t successfully created a market for mainstream borosilicate glass measuring cups or thick-walled aluminum pots. That could mean that the manufacturers are just so conniving and powerful that they’ve still managed to get away with marketing the worse products and pocket the difference. Or it could mean that, even to the vast majority of competent cooks, the price difference means more than the quality difference.
By contrast, even in a country/world deficient in serious pianists, we have managed to sustain an industry capable of maintaining and even improving the technology of new-built pianos, at every price point. This suggests to me that informed demand on the part of consumers for various quality/cost tradeoffs is what’s driving manufacturing decisions, not so much the exploitation of fools.
In fact, let’s think about the vintage cookware market. If that stuff is somewhat more expensive to manufacture, but it’s also very durable, then perhaps what’s going on is that the high-quality manufacturers are forced to compete against the secondhand market, which is able to circulate, rather than manufacture, a nearly-adequate quantity of high-quality durable cookware sufficient to meet the needs of aficionados like yourself. I, by contrast, would not care to invest the money to buy such nice stuff. I like things that are lightweight, easy to clean, cheap, and disposable, because I don’t have a nice kitchen to put them in, and I’m still at a stage in my life where I’m moving often.
You’ve updated my beliefs somewhat in the realm of cookware, although I still think you’re exaggerating the inaccessibility of new-manufactured high-quality cookware. More importantly, though, I don’t base my entire economic point of view on the economics of measuring cups. I think you’ve probably just found a niche area in which your perspective is at least plausible, and have then tried to extrapolate your kitchen-focused point of view into a sweeping belief about the state of the economy as a whole.
This is interesting to me. Most of the serious cooks I know enjoy and appreciate their ability to buy what they need vintage. From an alternative point of view, we could view this as a phenomenon in which society has successfully reallocated its skilled manufacturers from a domain where we no longer need their expertise as much—cookware—to other domains in which their expertise is needed much more.
In any case, this is becoming a bit of a rabbit hole, and also somewhat socially unpleasant. If you respond, I’ll read and consider what you write, but I don’t expect to continue the discussion further.
The only evidence you have for that is clock speed, transistor density and memory/storage capacity. Yes, I will fully admit there have been truly incredible gains there.
But in terms of software? I fail to see how most pieces of software are “transparently, overwhelmingly better, year after year, decade by decade”.
Let’s take text editors, as an example: GNU Emacs was released in 1985. Vim was released in 1991. These are old tools, and they’re still considered better than modern text editors by a fairly sizable fraction of programmers. If computers are getting transparently overwhelmingly better, year after year, decade by decade, then why does anyone use Emacs or Vim?
The difference between computers and cookware is that (open source) computer programs don’t wear out, so it is possible for us to continue to use them for years or decades. Where that isn’t the case in software (like closed source office suites, for example), you will readily find examples of people complaining that the new version is slower, more difficult to use, and requires more system resources than the previous version.
Maybe we should ask, “better for whom?” That’s more relevant in the software case than in the hardware case.
For the average user, I think that the ease of use, auto save, and cloud backups offered by modern word processors is really helpful. Also, the affordability and increasing accessibility of computers and the internet. And most users are average users. I remember how mad my dad got when he’d forget to save and lose hours of work 20 years ago.
I know there are power users who appreciate the keyboard-centric features of Vim, and more power to them.
In general, people complain when new versions are worse, and just use them when the new versions are better, rather than gushing about them.
Alternatively, I work as an engineer. The things that can be done with software now would have been impossible not too long ago, both as a result of those underlying improvements in hardware and algorithmic improvements. Also, with time simply comes an expanding range of software options, as well as access to content provided via that software.
Computing improvements have a positive relationship with content delivered by those computers. Better computers result in improved logistics and processes for making and delivering physical products. One way of looking at software improvements is “Amazon.com and Netflix and Google and podcasting can exist.”
Can you find examples of product/market fit where things have been in stasis for a long time (ie Vim for power user programmers), or where things have moved backward at some point in time? Sure! Is the overwhelming sweep of both hardware and software relentlessly leaping forward? I think the answer is clearly yes.
Although open source computer programs don’t literally “wear out” — the bits are still the same — the machines change under them and security faults surface that must be fixed. Is anyone using an Emacs or Vim that hasn’t been updated in decades?
If they’re not getting better, then why do even more programmers not use Emacs or Vim?
Yes, I think that we’ve exhausted most of what it would be fruitful to discuss in this thread; the remaining disagreements would probably take more effort to resolve than would be feasible to expend at this time (for either of us). I do want to comment on this part, though:
Conversely, I would say that computers are transparently (!) not “overwhelmingly better, year by year, decade by decade”. They’re certainly better in some ways, but also much worse in other ways. (Input latency is one well-studied example, but there are quite a few others.)
It is also noteworthy that many of the ways in which computer hardware has improved (“raw” performance characteristics such as clock speed, memory capacity, storage capacity, etc.) are used to support behaviors that are of dubious value at best (various fancy compositor features and graphical capabilities of window managers), and user-hostile at worst (adtech and other dark patterns of the modern web).
Understand that the things I am referring to, when I make claims like the one you quoted, are not “minutiae”; rather, they are basic aspects of the everyday user experience of the great majority of personal computer users in the world.
Input latency and unpredictability of it. One famous example is that for many years there were usable finger-drumming apps on iOS but not on Android, because on Android you couldn’t make the touchscreen + app + OS + sound system let people actually drum in time. Something would always introduce a hundred ms of latency (give or take) at random moments, which is enough to mess up the feeling. Everyone knew it and no one could fix it.
I agree. I don’t buy much cookware, and I was surprised to see Said Achmiz come up with so many good examples of cookware declining in quality.
I’d be interested in seeing how this compares to other markets. My guess is that cookware might fall on a rather extreme end of a spectrum, where on the other end we would see computer hardware and accessories, which has definitely not declined in quality.
This is not my experience. I can easily provide examples from the computer hardware / accessory market where there’s been a decline in quality. (Three examples just off the top of my head: MacBook keyboards, buckling-spring desktop keyboards, and consumer-grade wireless routers.)
These are strange things to cite. Keyboards are optimizing for something you clearly don’t want (cheapness for most keyboards, thinness for laptop keyboards, and fashion for anything from Apple), but that doesn’t mean you can’t get the “better” ones. Laptops with mechanical keyboards exist, they’re just not very popular: https://www.fifthgeek.com/laptops-with-mechanical-keyboards/
(I’m assuming you’re aware that mechanical desktop keyboards still exist)
I’m not sure what you’re talking about for consumer grade routers. According to this article, the WRT54G cost $199 in 2001 (~$300 today with inflation). For the same price today, I could buy a router that’s 20x faster, supports significantly more concurrent clients, has security that actually works, and is more stable (not to mention all the other bells and whistles new routers have, like how they almost all support printers and network storage).
Or I could get a router that’s only 10x faster than the WRT54G (and has security that actually works, etc.) for $60.
Or I could get a low-end enterprise router for $300 if I care about enterprisey features more than raw speed.
I’m sorry, but this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. If this were the case, then either (a) MacBooks with significantly better keyboards than the current ones would never have existed (but in fact they very much did and I am typing on one right now), or, at the very least, (b) change in Apple laptop keyboards over time would’ve been monotonic in the direction of increasing thinness and cheapness and decreasing quality (but in fact nothing remotely like this is true).
Laptop keyboards need not be mechanical (in this sense) to be good, as demonstrated by the MacBook Pro on which I am typing this comment.
I am aware. I do not particularly like modern mechanical keyboards, but I recognize that reasonable people can differ on this point.
But note that I did not say “mechanical desktop keyboards”. What I said was “buckling-spring desktop keyboards”—which also still exist, but they are of an inferior quality, because the plastic parts are molded using three-decade-old, worn-down tooling. No one is producing that manufacturing equipment anymore; no one is making new buckling-spring keyboards that match the build quality of the old ones (to say nothing of “better”).
I used a WRT54GL for a decade, and have owned three Archer C7/A7 boxes so far (as well as various other Linksys, TP-Link, and Netgear devices), so yes, I am familiar with the market. Merely citing the prices, speeds, and advertised features of the available router models is missing the point entirely—I am talking about quality, not modern-ness. However, I am not sure that this is a discussion I want to get into at this time.
To what extent do you think your argument is merely that “we don’t make the old stuff anymore” as opposed to “the new stuff is worse than the old stuff”?
Like, suppose instead of growing up with buckling-spring keyboards, you grew up with mechanical keyboards, which became obsolete with the release of buckling-spring keyboards. In that world, would we be having the same conversation about how they don’t make ’em like they used to, except in regards to the inferior buckling spring mechanism?
It’s well known that people are nostalgic about the past, and status-quo bias is well-documented. In what sense can you reasonably assert that the new stuff is worse rather than merely different? And what general measure would you propose to test this claim?
I didn’t grow up with buckling-spring keyboards. The first keyboard I owned was an AppleDesign Keyboard (beige, model M2980, non-mechanical, with the membrane-based design), which was of mediocre quality at best. I discovered mechanical keyboards (the older Apple Extended and Apple Extended II keyboards were the first I saw) later, and buckling-spring keyboards (the even older IBM Model M) even later. I didn’t get much of a chance to use a buckling-spring keyboard to type on until I had been using computers for many years. However, it was immediately obvious, at each stage of that discovery process, that mechanical keyboards were superior to non-mechanicals, and that buckling-spring keyboards even more so (for typing).
Similarly, the first laptop I owned was the original “Dual USB” white iBook. At around that time, I got a job in a small shop that sold and repaired Macs and other Apple products, and so, for about five years, I had the chance to test every Mac laptop, every Apple-made desktop keyboard, etc. I’ve also owned a succession of Apple laptops since then, culminating in the MacBook Pro whose specs I linked upthread. That first iBook’s keyboard was emphatically not the best laptop keyboard I’ve ever used; actually, it was fairly bad. Apple’s laptop keyboards improved substantially over the years… and then, that trend reversed, quite dramatically.
So, you see, my view does not boil down to “nostalgia-tinted glasses”. And given my experience, I can confidently assert that the new stuff is worse than the old stuff.
(By the way… it is telling, I think, that you assumed that the older products whose quality I claimed to be superior were simply the things I’d grown up with, and had gotten used to—despite the fact that I have given no indication of this, no hint that this should be the case! Yet to you it seemed like an assumption so natural as to be made unconsciously. Does this not seem to you to be significant, to be indicative of something worth investigating further?)
Point taken. This is good evidence that you don’t have “nostalgia-tinted glasses” as you put it.
I don’t know how old you are, but I referred to growing up in a more general sense, to mean that those things were around when you were a child. In context, it referred to a reversal of what had been the actual progression of technology. Of course, I’d agree it was an unwise choice of wording—more off-the-cuff than anything.
I don’t know what you mean by the last part. Perhaps you mean that I could have deep biases, blinding me from an objective analysis here. Can you clarify?
Sure. My meaning is perhaps essentially as you say, but with rather different emphasis. I do not think that it is terribly useful to look for personal biases here (and it seems unlikely that you should have any unique or unusual bias in this regard).
It seems more likely (or in any case it’s more fruitful to approach the matter thus) that the bias is “in the water”, so to speak. Neophilia (and its complement, which the internet informs me should be called ‘paliophobia’) is deeply ingrained in modern Western culture. The assumption of progress, too, is deeply ingrained (the OP is hardly making a novel or surprising argument, for instance). From this it follows that anyone who prefers the old to the new, in any context, cannot be doing so for any ‘rational’ reason. And thus when you hear that someone has this preference, you assume that it’s due to nostalgia, etc.
But the consequence of this is that it’s more difficult for you to notice cases where the old is better than the new. You see that someone prefers the old; you say “ah, mere nostalgia”; you therefore do not investigate the question of why they prefer the old to the new (and why would you, if you already have the answer?); and so you never get the chance to learn whether, in this case, the old is better, even if that is actually true.
Of course this is nothing but another of (as Eliezer once put it) the thousand faces of confirmation bias (and thus should not at all surprise us).
I apologize, by the way, for this blatant Bulverism. I don’t actually know, to any great degree of certainty, whether your views on this topic are informed largely (or even partially) by any bias of this kind! I am quite ready to accept a denial of any such fault in you, personally.
I only want to point out that it is a very common sort of distortion, easily discernible in many, many discussions like this. I’ve encountered it more times than I can count. I think that it’s very much worth being wary of it, and perhaps even worth making a special effort to counteract.
Consider a few facts for a moment,
“In 1982, the second major study of [the hostile media effect] was undertaken; pro-Palestinian students and pro-Israeli students at Stanford University were shown the same news filmstrips pertaining to the then-recent Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian refugees by Christian Lebanese militia fighters abetted by the Israeli army in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. On a number of objective measures, both sides found that these identical news clips were slanted in favor of the other side.”
Economist Paul Krugman writes, “the obvious bias in things like acceptance of papers at major journals is towards, not against, a doctrinaire free-market view.” Whereas economist Bryan Caplan claims, “Even among economists, market-oriented policy prescriptions are often seen as too dogmatic.”
69 to 25 percent of Republicans and Democrats believe big tech is biased in favor of liberals, compared to 5 to 19 percent of Republicans and Democrats believing big tech is biased in favor of conservatives.
Now consider, regarding the assumption of progress,
In the United states, 41 percent believe that things are worse now than they were 50 years ago, compared to 37 percent who believe it is better. When you ask people about finances specifically, this goes to 45 percent compared to 32 percent compared to 20 years ago, with differences being larger in Greece, the UK, Italy, France and Spain—nations traditionally considered at the heart of Western culture.
“More than two-thirds (68%) of U.S. respondents said they think today’s children will be financially worse off as adults than their parents, up from 60% in 2019. Only 32% think children will be better off.” Source.
In 2017, “Four in ten Americans (39%) think the odds that global warming will cause humans to become extinct are 50% or higher.”
I’m sure you’re familiar with these types of facts. I could continue with them, but I don’t think it’s necessary to add much more for the point I’m trying to make.
The first set of facts, I believe, collectively implies that people are not consistently able to read whether a particular culture is actually biased in the way they claim. Often, an accusation of bias reveals the opposite: namely that the speaker is biased themselves.
The interpretation of bias comes from the fact that the world is not far enough in the direction of how the speaker wants it to be, even if it is indeed quite far. It’s easier to see the biases in other people than to see the biases in yourself. Hence how you can get Paul Krugman writing about how market fundamentalism rules his field, all the while his own Nobel Prize speaks to the opposite truth.
I’m not just accusing you of just the same thing. I do suspect that you are doing something like the equivalent of what Paul Krugman does, as your top comment is currently upvoted more highly than the post itself. But this is not the entirety of my objection.
Instead I’d just ask you to consider as a test of your thesis, to propose an actual general measure for progress in consumer goods.
Imagine a world in which, over time, we expect 15% of things to get worse and 85% of things to get better. In such a world, one could spend an inordinate amount of time finding example after example of things that have gotten worse, because there are a lot of consumer goods. But that would prove approximately nothing, as it would ignore the 85% of goods that got better.
I understand that such a measure would be difficult to construct. The inherent subjectivity of the subject is what makes it difficult. But, perhaps as Richard Feynman once said, “‘Oh you’re dealing with psychological matters. These things can’t be defined so precisely.’ Yes, but then you can’t claim to know anything about it.”
Hang on, though. Before I respond to the rest of your comment, I want to point out that the second set of bullet points you list do not have anything at all to do with what I am talking about. You see that, yes? (Or were those points not meant to be responsive to the quoted bit from my comment? But in that case, what is their significance…?)
You stated,
I interpreted the assumption of progress as referring to one of these two possibilities,
The world has gotten better
The world will get better in the future
This makes a lot of sense considering Jason Crawford’s other posts.
My first bullet point addresses the first interpretation. It points out that the assumption of progress is not “deeply ingrained” as you claimed. It seems more that about half of people, or less, believe that the world has gotten better.
My other two bullet points address the second interpretation of the assumption of progress.
Neither of those interpretations are (a) what I meant, nor (b) entailed by the OP.
There are also several other serious problems with the points you made, having to do with their provenance, the possibility of sensibly interpreting them, etc.
However, I’m afraid I am becoming increasingly uncertain that it’s productive to continue this conversation…
Look, forget the specific bullet points for now.
I am interested in a direct way of testing this hypothesis. The part about the assumption of progress was a minor digression. I hope you will understand.
The specific aim I had was to dispel the objection that I was merely biased. I may be biased. In fact, I probably am. But these sorts of arguments don’t normally lead anywhere. People pick “sides” and accuse the other side of being biased. But, as you wrote yourself, what matters is what’s actually true.
There will of course be a few examples of declining progress in any domain. But it would take a ton of evidence to convince me that there’s been a general decline in the quality in computer hardware, given the mountains of evidence otherwise.
Well, there’s a couple of things to say here.
First—why, actually, should there be “a few examples of declining progress”? We accept this as normal, but why? It doesn’t seem to me to be what we’d expect, on the basis of the naive view of free-market capitalism and so on. At the least, such phenomena (especially if they’re so ubiquitous as to merit an “of course”!) seem like puzzles that we need to explain.
Second—I do have quite a lot of evidence for my view, of course. (I don’t think it’s worthwhile to present it here in this comment thread, though. But I’ll give some thought to the best way to organize my thoughts on this, and perhaps we might return to it.)
Third—I don’t, actually, think that we have “mountains of evidence” for the contrary (i.e., mainstream) view. I entirely understand why you say that we do, and I readily admit that it is indeed the mainstream consensus that we do, indeed, have these “mountains”, but I think that belief about how much evidence we have (for the “progress-affirming view”) is mistaken.
Clearly, that third point is entirely non-obvious, and demands justification. I am, at this time, not providing any such thing. I say this only to make known the general shape of my position—without, for the moment, defending it.
Well, the answer’s obvious, no? The naive view is wrong.
Economists have studied ways how markets don’t reflect consumer preferences for decades. There are reasonable people on both sides: some people say that these failures are exaggerated, and some say that they haven’t been emphasized enough. But I haven’t seen many respectable economists argue that the market always and uniformly reflects the needs of fully informed consumers.
Here’s one example of Tyler Cowen, a pro-market economist, talking about planned obsolescence. Or you can read his book in which he claims that progress in consumer goods has been unimpressive recently.
As you fully admitted, you are not providing the full evidence for your claim about computer hardware, and so I cannot meaningfully evaluate it.
However, I should note that such debate often draw people into intense, but rather fruitless disputes over definitions. What does progress mean? How can we judge the quality of a consumer good from an objective point of view?
I don’t mean to downplay the strength of the examples you pointed to. I think they’re actually rather fascinating. But, if we were to continue the debate further, I would wish to caution you about the following.
I have now been in many similar debates about “progress” with people before, and it seems that one or both sides will often merely assert an “obvious” benchmark for progress. Yet this obvious benchmark usually seems oddly ad-hoc and, uncharitably, appears to be chosen deliberately to make the speaker’s thesis look correct. Alternative benchmarks, which to others seem profoundly important, get handwaved away as “not ultimately meaningful” by the other side, and vice versa.
I think ultimately a lot of this comes down to simple differences in preferences. People often just disagree about what’s considered “good” and that’s OK; not unexpected at all. A diversity of opinion about whether something is “better” than another thing is pretty much exactly what I’d expect, given the diversity of human thoughts, feelings, and values.