Simply put, mass production. The cost (and value) of nearly all manufactured goods have dramatically fallen relative to average incomes. Consumers have access to a much wider range of goods with a much wider range of attributes. In the global west (and increasingly in middle-income Asia) we live in an age of abundance. I think it's overwhelmingly a positive thing that we no longer cherish the few possessions that we have, because we have built a world in which increasingly large numbers of people have the luxury of choice.
I don't want an antique set of china, because my dishwasher will probably ruin it. I don't want silver salt and pepper shakers, because I prefer freshly ground black pepper and there are a much wider range of condiments that might go on my table. I don't want a roll-top desk, because my office is oriented around a computer rather than papers.
Like a rotary telephone, most of these objects were designed to serve the needs of people who lived very different lives to me. Unlike previous generations, I have the privilege of being able to very cheaply buy things that suit my needs, rather than having to settle for what I can afford, what I am gifted or what I inherit. If you happen to value any of those things, then you're in luck - they're available in abundance, like most things you might want to own.
Those things became cheaper to produce because of technological advancement, largely developed by people who did not benefit from this rise in production. They do not represent wealth in any meaningful sense. Wealth is economic power, and 55" TVs dont help you start a buisness or pay a downpayment for a mortgage. Internet connection may once have served as some measure of economic power, but its no coincidence that those with the power currently are doing everything they can to restrict the rights of normal people to create using it.
Imo, its really about things that give you more agency over your own life and the world. Cars are good, they represent a great increase in our ability to travel and make decisions for ourselves.
> We don't have two houses, but the ones we have are worth twice as much.
This is largely a wealth transfer to the elderly. Among under 40s, home ownership has fallen consistently since the 1990s, with only a brief increase in 2001-2005.
>TVs are cheap now. So are 3D printers, travel, and phones.
Being able to own disposable gadgets made in China doesn't make you rich. Those are not necessities. But you now what is? Housing, stable well paying jobs, healthcare and education , all of which are now massively out of reach for the average joe than they were a few decades ago.
It's interesting the migration of trends from the hand-crafter (but expensive) to the mass-produced, but cheap, and then starting to come back to the hand-crafted, where it can be afforded.
I'm not sure if that is a natural cycle of fashions - or a choice that has become repopular by increasing affluence.
I see a lot of low-volume, handcrafted things growing in size, whether it is low-volume hand-crafted vehicle manufacturers (like Morgan), low-volume handcrafted products (like craft beer) and even low-volume, hands-on farming.
At this point I take the re-emergence of these things as a sign of growing affluence, where there is so much disposable income it can be spent on things which are off the cost/benefit ratio in comparison to competitors. Perhaps it is a swing away from owning large properties as a form of wealth consumption and more towards individual items, betraying a gradual lowering in the average age of people who are able to afford such things.
At any rate, it's an interesting phenomena to watch.
Also amazing how the value of our possessions is plummeting. There is very little one can buy which will hold value to any meaningful degree, much less appreciate in value.
It may not spotlight the fact that lower prices facilitate accessibility, but I'm not oblivious to it. I definitely don't want to exchange cheap cotton knit t-shirts with hand-woven garments that cost me a month's labor or something. However, only considering the consumer-side satisfaction is characteristic of our culture's obsession with consumerism and economy at the cost of everything else. We all have to work, even with ever increasing tech we work probably more than anytime in history. I don't believe we're going to hit some inflection point where suddenly humans will be freed from labor. There is satisfaction to be found in craft and honing skill. If we delegate all that to machines that spit out crummy imitations, and humans are relegated to the mind-numbing task of babysitting a glitchy piece of tech, clearing a paper jam and hitting reset all day, I think that is a net loss for life satisfaction. Who cares if you can own a shitty McMansion when what you experience during majority of your wakeful life is mind-numbing frustration?
The drive for experiences has always existed and there have always been people that prefer experiences instead of possessions. That is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the point in time where material possessions are so cheap that anybody can have them, whether you want them or not.
i.e. Several decades ago only large institutions could own a computer. Now one can carry in their pockets computers that would have been considered super computers not very long ago and costing millions of dollars. See the trend? Eventually production will be almost as free as air, especially if we invent strong AI.
What that future will be like is very hard to imagine. How will our culture change because of that? Especially our world culture.
As things get cheaper due to increased productivity, people want more things. For example, due to the declining cost of air travel, people routinely fly places, even commute by jet.
This was inconceivable not long ago.
Furthermore, vast industries have sprung up whose only product is entertainment. Back when economies were less productive, there was no room for such industries.
Even low end cars have what were once considered luxury only features. The list covers every facet of our economy.
Because the economy no longer demands that everybody work in fields or factories, and no longer demands that everybody spend their money on essentials.
Basically, things like this are a glimpse into a post-scarcity society, where people make and buy things "just because".
Your post made me cringe because I mentally extrapolated the trend for cheap goods you set up onto everything else. Honestly I don't know if it would be for better or worse without living in such a world, but I cannot fathom disposable computers, high end electronics, or tools.
This also makes me worry about the concept of ownership. If we have no attachment to anything because the price is driven to zero, will that erode our values (craftmanship, upkeep, environmental stewardship, ...)? Sounds like a future full of walled gardens, shovelware, and products headed for the landfill.
There seems to be a great amount of enthusiasm in the zeitgeist about the future, positive and negative predictions. A lot of it comes with some far out economics baked in nonchalantly. Basic incomes, abundance economies & zero marginal cost everything.
I like it and I do quite a bit of indulging in this sort of thing myself. But…
I don't think I'm seeing the trends in gadgetry, software, and manufactured goods at work everywhere. The production cost (and often the price) of manufactured goods (used to be "mass produced) has come down tremendously compared with average income. The trend is hundreds of years old. Underpants, sugar bowls, cereal commodities and almost everything else you can fit under a very wide umbrella of "manufactured goods" is heading towards free, or at least extremely cheap. We've seen it happen with a lot of things. Clothes pins & pencils used to be worth something, but I can't remember cost ever being a factor. They're basically free. Software also. I agree that a lot of things are headed towards "abundance." The things that aren't are often things that keep getting better, things where we have an appetite for (qualitative) more, iphones & whatnot.
The bicycles come into it at the points where there isn't a fruitful trend towards more, better everything. Housing & transport are still most people's 2 biggest expenses. These have improved in quality over time and we consume more (bigger house, long commute, overseas holiday…) but there isn't an obvious "trend towards abundance."
The fact that a radical idea (radical because of the radical trade off of eliminating cars) like this is interesting is kind of proof that this thing is not moving and we're frustrated. We still commute a lot, and we don't enjoy it. It pollutes. It's noisy. Expensive. Slow. It's not much different than 1980 or even 1965.
I think housing and transport are the stick in the abundance ideas. In 25 years roads might be full of quite, clean, electric, driverless, parkingless cars but even that amazing achievement will still not match the technology trends that have brought other things up the quality and abundance curve.
Could combine permanent long term decline in standard of living with the decline in physical consumer goods. So my high school educated grandfather bought my grandmother a mink coat way back in the 50s. Now a days an average middle class college educated guy couldn't afford to give his wife a consumer good like that (aside from "fur is murder", just simply couldn't afford it). On the other hand I gift my wife an evernote subscription and an amazon prime subscription fee. Its easy for an unskilled criminal to figure out how to successfully steal a $3000 coat, but really hard for an unskilled criminal to steal an evernote subscription. You can't steal my wife's mink coat; she doesn't have one. On an enormously smaller scale, before 1962 every middle/upper class white male wore an expensive formal hat with his suit, after '62 statistically no one wears them; you could steal my grandfather's fedora, but you'll never steal mine because I don't own one and likely never will. You could steal joe average's fishing boat in 1970 because joe average could afford a boat. In 2015 joe average cannot and will never afford a boat, with the side effect of no one will steal it.
Likewise every dollar I spend on medical, which only goes up 10%/yr or whatever it is, is money I'll permanently never be able to spend on something physical, small, stealable. If you steal my kindle I'll merely download my books again. You could steal my dad's 1980s laserdiscs (remember those?) but you can't steal my streamed movies, well, maybe you can "steal" as in piss off the copyright holders, but you can't take the experience of having watched them in the past away from me.
Consumer goods is great, things nobody really truly needs except to satisfy a missing dopamine hit from no longer really being engaged in society, nature, and life, only living an image, an appearance, existing only as a commodity.
Just about everything else is worse though. Wages stay the same while costs rise, markets continue to monopolize and we get fewer choices.
The west, particularly the USA, sacrificed so many industries on the alter of globalization. We gutted our workforce and told ourselves we were keeping the best jobs for ourselves. The loss of all those jobs and economic activity has contributed significantly to the wealth gap IMO. I don’t think that having lots of cheap trinkets available on Amazon has been worth it, to be honest.
My feeling is that we've been giving our wealth away for trinkets.
True wealth sustains life: strong social ties, housing, food and the means of production.
We've been convinced to trade true wealth away for non-essentials. Fancy vacations in far away places and 2-3 cruises a year-people used to do that maybe once in their lives, 50inch flat panels in every second room in the house, huge houses with fewer kids in them, 64 bit cellphones, fancy kitchens with wolf stoves and granite counter tops all these things are non-essential.
My parents used to save for years to buy a new car or to buy a new stereo. It was easy, just write "New car" on an envelope and put cash in it every month, then 4-5 years later you bought the car cash, no loan. This went even moreso with luxury items like new TVs and stereos.
The quality of cars and electronics has increased, but the quality of our food and our social lives has decreased.
Cooking of real food at home must be on the decline. Every time I go to the grocery store every other person's order consists entirely of boxed processed food.
Instead of cooking and having dinner with the kids, in our industry, we now get texts[1] on our fancy cellphones at 7:00 pm to fight a fire in production because no software company wants to properly plan anything anymore[2] and then we feel awesome about solving the problem we created by being disorganized scatterbrains.
My suggestion, buy as many of the essentials of life in cash. The rest that you have to borrow for; pay it off quickly. Invest in long term investments and start early. Be frugal and forget about the fancy new doodad, or if you insist save up for it an pay for it cash. Cook at home and spend time with you kids and your friends.
[1] A text, god forbid not a human voice! People are addicted to texting because it allows them to have conversations with multiple people at once. We communicate more than ever but those conversations are shallower.
I think what you're worried about is the death of ownership and how people are increasingly starting to either sell their information or rent the things they need.
Being able to buy things for cheaper from elsewhere is just specialization and it's one of the first things that brought humans from the store age to more modern civilization.
It's the proliferation of credit combined with increasing ubiquity of equating consumerism with success.
Using other people's money to act like you can afford the things that other people who have much more money than you can actually afford.
The easier and more common this has gotten, the crummier deal everyone ends up getting for their money.
Back when average consumers still had to save money for years before making big-ticket purchases, the shrewdest of manufacturers achieved the greatest success with product lifetimes having quite good multiples of those saving years.
When that became no longer as much of an issue, then never mind.
Expanded credit opened up opportunities for spendthrifts to dominate, who love to consume so much that they replace purchases that are still perfectly good after a few years anyway.
Remember all those 70-year-old juicers where there's far more in the landfills than remaining in the kitchen? Most of those were landfilled while they were still working.
Technology has been improving our production capacities over the centuries. It also brought new needs that in turn created more jobs.
I think that the widespread criticism of consumerism is the sign of an important event : now that we have a car, a fridge, a computer, a TV, more clothes we need, hot water, and a fully equipped bathroom, we just don' have any more demands.
If the population had the same demands as in 1700, it would be trivial to fulfill them. It would require maybe one day of labor per month per individual. Our demands grew faster than our production capacities, making the working week just a bit shorter, but now the demands do not increasing at the same pace as our productivity.
We have just reached the point where our material needs are fulfilled and we demand immaterial things : free time, healthcare, etc...
Could this be the point of inflexion toward a post-scarcity economy. I really wish.
I don't want an antique set of china, because my dishwasher will probably ruin it. I don't want silver salt and pepper shakers, because I prefer freshly ground black pepper and there are a much wider range of condiments that might go on my table. I don't want a roll-top desk, because my office is oriented around a computer rather than papers.
Like a rotary telephone, most of these objects were designed to serve the needs of people who lived very different lives to me. Unlike previous generations, I have the privilege of being able to very cheaply buy things that suit my needs, rather than having to settle for what I can afford, what I am gifted or what I inherit. If you happen to value any of those things, then you're in luck - they're available in abundance, like most things you might want to own.
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