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.
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.