> Moving the goalposts. I said that planned obsolescence is not, as you originally alleged, a general property of a market-driven economy.
I had to ask, because that's otherwise your MO.
> Because like I already explained, product and brand reputation are extremely important for market success.
There's no brand reputation risk if most large manufacturers have similar durability.
> The example that I gave was how Apple's hard-earned excellent reputation
How can you keep using Apple as an example when it has been one of the most obvious offender and is also one of the giants within the most obviously offending industry - smartphones.
> It demolishes this idea that the market has a general incentive to reduce product longevity.
No, it just shows that technology has moved forward with regards to a advanced industrial product.
> like consumers consciously choosing more disposable products over longer-lasting ones
You've cherry-picked the only type that fits your narrative, preference for disposable products (which I actually agree with you on, but causes of this is an interesting topic in itself). But to pick that and not to explain the type where billions of dollars each year are spent on trying to create new non-essential needs that aren't really there making the existing products obsolete, a.k.a "Perceived obsolescence"? How is this "efficient"?
> but any reasonable person who read your original comment would agree that the latter was what you were originally referring to.
This is my original comment:
"Well, yes, that capitalism will cause a production craze is even written in the Communist Manifesto. What "effective" means in practice however is another thing - there's nothing effective about planned obsolescence, great for the current measurement of economic growth though."
How is this inconsistent with focusing on the inefficiencies of all kinds of planned obsolescence of the free market?
> Googling to find a bunch of articles about planned obsolescence and then listing them without checking first to see if they are credible sources or even providing a summary of the evidence they contain to accompany them is completely inconducive to constructive discussion.
Once again, you linked to a single reddit post, eat humble pie.
> It is not obvious at all. There is no evidence at all of a general trend toward planned obsolescence. This is another layman's talking point.
All incentives in capitalism encourages quick cyclic consumption, and corporations spend vast amounts of resources to various forms of obsolescence [0]. This can't just be ignored even if you would like it, because it blatantly shows how wasteful the current system is.
> You didn't even address what I provided about Pareto Efficiency
"I ignored your questioned and posted something else, now please answer what I posted meanwhile I'll keep ignoring the question".
> Yes it is alleging a conspiracy, and you're claiming Economics in general has been coopted by it. This is no different than anti-vaxxerism.
A field of study with so close connections to power and wealth must be seen with skepticism. It's like not questioning the upper-classes theories of society of old. There's a lot of examples of theories justifying their privileges.
There's also an important distinction to be made. It's true that capitalism/free-market produces alot of stuff. But it's certainly not true that it produces freedom, happiness, and justice for all. The problem is that you will take the former to justify the latter injustices. That's obvious bias.
"Yale University economics professor Judith Chevalier explained to the BBC that companies react to consumer tastes, and that planned obsolescence is not simply a deception by manufacturers, but in certain situations the fault lies with consumers, who do not value a more durable product, but one that possesses the latest technology." (admits to its existence, but just blames it on the consumer instead)
>Look at something like the handle on a paint roller. A wooden handle will probably last a lifetime, plastic handle - with carefully measured amount of plastic - can be designed to break the second time you use it: At which point we go to the shop and buy another cheap piece of crap that will do the same.
I'm skeptical of this, at least to this extent. What company is going to invest the engineering resources to reliably design a particular failure mode in something as inconsequential and cheap as a paint roller?
It's probably far more mundane. Aim to reduce cost/increase profit > use less materials, or use cheaper materials, or use a cheaper-to-make design.
>but what capitalist company wants to make goods that last a lifetime
> There is no reason for that. A more solid/reliable machine doesn't have to be more expensive. Using better materials may cost up to 20% more i believe, but will certainly not cost several times the price of the reference (faulty) product.
Source? I have a hard time believing that there exists the ability to sell a longer lasting product at a sufficiently low price, and yet no business is taking advantage of this to steal business from the incumbents.
> Also it's important to note planned obsolescence is usually not even the result of bad materials, but conscious sabotage. For example, placing capacitors near a source of heat (looking at you TV manufacturers).
I don’t know about this. I’ve always bought mid to higher end TVs and they have never died on me. The commercial ones I buy for hotels also come with 5 year warranties, and over 10+ years of LCD/LED TVs I can’t recall a single one that simply died. My electronics seem to be lasting longer and longer, but I also don’t buy the lowest price products.
> That's not entirely true. The few that did had to stop because unfair competition (using poor labor/environmental regulations) were driving the prices down.
Yes, but that’s the world we live in. As I wrote, the solution to this is increasing taxes on fossil fuels and other sources of pollution and imports from countries with lax environmental and labor regulations.
> Many people will if the arguments are exposed in a reasonable manner. Durable products with available spare parts are considerably cheaper in the long run: a washing machine that lasts 60y for 2000$ (plus maybe 200$ of repairs over the years) is more viable than buying a 500$ machine every five years (2200$ vs 6000$). And that's assuming hardware even lasts 5y, which in many cases it does not.
How are you projecting labor costs over 60 years? In my adult life of 15 years, labor costs for anything remotely skilled have double, and I don’t expect to pay anything less than $100/hour today. And I don’t know anyone who is replacing hardware every 5 years. It just doesn’t jive with my experiences that all these appliances people have are breaking down so often in 5 years.
And I do not think that the people buying cheap products today are doing so because they don’t have the information. People buy cheap garbage because they either can’t afford the more expensive, higher quality products, or they are sacrificing durability for some other feature.
People buy German or American cars when surely everyone by now knows Toyota and Honda are bulletproof and easy to repair. And that’s a bigger purchase than any household appliance.
Why would they? They get paid to put out crap, so they'll continue doing it.
Bottle water continues to come in plastic bottles, even though glass if far cheaper/easier to reuse or recycle. Plastic bottles are literally trash, yet it'll continue being produced if people keep buying it.
Near-disposable phones (both hardware and software) won't stop being manufactured if they continue being in high demand.
>>So do you deny that the entire concept of planned obsolescence exists at all
Moving the goalposts. I said that planned obsolescence is not, as you originally alleged, a general property of a market-driven economy.
>If so, why wouldn't more profits as an incentive not be pursued using planned obsolescence?
Because like I already explained, product and brand reputation are extremely important for market success. The example that I gave was how Apple's hard-earned excellent reputation for product quality played a massive role in the growth of its sales and it becoming the most valuable company in the world.
>>Why would I stop at a more narrow definition when criticizing the incentives of the free market, when all types all grounded in that same incentives?
Again with the bad faith disingenuity. The so-called narrow definition is the only one economically harmful or involving deceit and consumers being worse off. It's the one almost universally referred to when activists use the term.
If you're now going to try to claim you were talking about the looser definition all along, then I'll respond that the type of activity under this looser definition, like consumers consciously choosing more disposable products over longer-lasting ones because they judge the up-front cost-savings to be worth the more frequent replacement costs, is not economically harmful. It's what people want for themselves, and their judgment on what is in their own interests is more credible than yours.
>>You have posted a single link that show, allegedly, that specifically cars are more durable nowadays.
It demolishes this idea that the market has a general incentive to reduce product longevity. If that were the case, every major product class would see a trend toward shorter lifespans. There certainly wouldn't be a major product class not only maintaining product lifespans, but increasing them.
Any way, the burden of proof was always on you. I just provided that link to show that these angsty lift-wing comments about the world are often not corroborated by what you actually see in the world when you take a closer look.
>>hide behind telling me what I actually meant with planned obsolescence
Again with the blatant lies. When people are complaining about how capitalism allegedly produces planned obsolescence, they are not talking about a general consumer preference for disposable products.
Read any of your own links and you'll see what kind of behavior they are referring to when they use the term.
They are talking about the phenomenon where, unbeknownst to consumers, companies are reducing product lifespans to get more reorders.
You can pretend otherwise to try to avoid admitting you were wrong, but any reasonable person who read your original comment would agree that the latter was what you were originally referring to.
Of course we're dealing with natural language with a lot of the meaning of statements extrapolated from the wider context of where they appear, so there's no formal proof you are lying now. Only reasonable conjecture that you're free to dismiss as part of your culture war against the people you imagine to be your enemies.
>>But instead you go on the defensive, dismiss the links as left-wing
A lot of your links were from left-wing sources and were not scientific sources or even primary evidence showing declining product lifespans.
Googling to find a bunch of articles about planned obsolescence and then listing them without checking first to see if they are credible sources or even providing a summary of the evidence they contain to accompany them is completely inconducive to constructive discussion.
> What quantity of conflict minerals and questionable labour went into the disposable thing?
What quantity went into the more expensive version I'm forced to buy so some upper-class do-gooder can satisfy their sense of moral superiority?
If you think that "questionable labour" is a problem, fix that directly instead of making vaguely related warranty regulations.
I'd be perfectly happy with efforts to make the price of items more closely match their total cost including externalities, but piecemeal regulation of warranty policy is not the way to do that.
> He then attacks planned obsolescence as the dumbest outcrop of this process,
Planned obsolescence is an economic myth. There is very little evidence that it actually exists in the real world, unless you are really willing to stretch the definition. It's just not possible to successfully pull it off in a competitive market.
> Cars, phones etc all have to do the thing they're designed to do before they're sold to consumers.
Do you mean that someone individually uses each product sold? I don't think so.
Things wear down in use. It's just reality. Not only does the market value drop, but accounting systems recognize it through depreciation. You've tried to redefine 'used' as superior reliability, but that's only in the rhetorical world where 'war is peace', 'freedom is slavery', etc.
There is uncertainty to brand new, untested technology, but that's not what we're talking about. There is uncertainty to a more limited extent in unused individual products, but I've already addressed that.
> The reason for this imho isn't that people don't care about the resources. It is rather that everyone has been conditioned to assume that products are crappier than specified.
Personally I'm very aware of the labor and resources required to build a high quality item. This is why I buy them. It's made by humans, with great effort, to have a long life.
Honestly, I want all my items to "positively age" with me as much as possible, and even if they become slightly insufficient (storage devices, or electronics in general), I try to find uses for them until they reach their true end of their life.
And yes, I don't like crappy items. I want to buy one item once (or as few times possible) and have good performance performing its function. It can be an umbrella, a shoe, a keyboard or a pen. Anything, actually.
> I don't believe manufacturers should have to build things to be easy to take apart, to be replaceable or upgradeable, or anything else along those lines.
Why not?
> I'd rather see legislation that ensures when a piece of tech reaches the end of its useful lifetime it can be submitted back to the manufacturer and properly recycled at no cost to the user.
It is always and exclusively at the cost of the user?
>I would argue that the current economic system does not plan for maximum longevity of products.
Of course not. And you don't want that. If you want quality, you can get quality but you'll have to pay for it. Are you willing to pay $500 for a quality drill, when a cheapo $40 drill is all you need? What's wrong with that?
Planned Obsolescence is an urban myth - there may be some examples, and if there are that's a tiny slice of the market. The reality is what OP said, price and quality are tradeoffs. Manufacturing things that can last 100+ years of wear and tear means those things would be costly, with very limited use cases.
> The mechanism I described isn't one to disagree or agree with.
And yet you failed to account for the embodied energy in building the product and the fact that maintaining any appliance or equipment requires repairs. So there is quite a bit to disagree with.
It is much more wasteful to build a product with no methods of repair, noting that a large number of components will statistically fail due to variability of tolerances or usage patterns.
A 50 yr product requires maintenance, replaceable parts and access to documentation. All of these are lacking in our modern consumer environment. You can blame this on complexity, or designs towards sleekness or what not but the truth is that product failure after a short amount of time (planned obsolescence) creates a reoccurring customer base, and the ability to pass off cheaper parts that don't need to be able to handle removal (glue vs. screws, etc.).
Yes, you misunderstood. I stated that the fearsome weakness in the system is a market which is mostly made by careless buyers who will disregard low quality, absurd specifications and dystopian features in the products.
A product would not circulate in the market if people did not buy it, and people in general most unfortunately tend to buy what is available, without assessing it, without considering the effect of their purchases on the market.
You would not struggle to find e.g. telephones with replaceable batteries in the market if people generally refused to purchase otherwise. The same is valid for bluetooth-operated only washing machines (and other appliances), etc.
Bad products are around because people buy them.
> I fear very much my not being able to buy what I want
Exactly: that is already largely the situation, and it comes from a polluted market, spoiled by purchasers accepting bad products.
> This is written to mislead people who do not know the relevant background information.
How dare you put words in my mouth. I have no skin in this whatsoever. It was written as a statement of fact as I see it. The motive behind the scarcity is not something I was discussing, and is, as I said a commercial one. Legislating that a 3rd party parts market must be catered for is potentially a slippery slope.
As for anti-capitalist? This is right out of the capitalist playbook! False scarcity leads to control of the market place, which leads to capital, by way of higher repair parts or increased revenue in terms of new device sales instead of repairs.
That is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Yes, free repairability would be fun, but as everything comes with a cost, values are encoded as trade offs between desirable outcomes, rather than the desirable outcomes themselves. When some desirable outcome is not obtained in society, almost always the reason is that there are other tradeoffs being made. So society values affordability, competition, performance, longevity, quality, repairability, customizability -- and that's just on the product side. Then these product trade offs compete against things like labor market protections, use of resources for competing products, etc.
When Apple decides to solder RAM into the motherboard, it is making a trade off between performance and repairability. When Tesla chooses megacasting that might result in a fender bender totaling your car, they are choosing reliability and lower production costs over repairability. Just bemoaning that some product is less repairable and that society values repairability so therefore some dark force must be working to subvert society's values is not a useful or insightful analytical approach. Everything boils down to tradeoffs.
Counterexample: gorilla glass on phones. Surely using it isn't "absolutely necessary" either?
Also, you can apply the same logic to planned economies. What are you going to do, buy it from the competitor?
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