I have the internet at my fingertips. I know a thermostatically controlled toaster is feasible to make into a cheap product because it existed in the 1960s and we now have transistors. Every single toaster is exactly the same with cosmetic differences. They're priced from $10 to $500 with no distinguishing features in the first $200.
The market is not working, we just have the tools to realize how badly it's broken.
No thermostatic control, but the defaults are fine for my uses.
Currently on year 10. The power button got a little finicky so I have to wedge it with a piece of cardboard to make contact, but otherwise as good as the day I bought it.
> The market is not working, we just have the tools to realize how
badly it's broken.
"The market" is not a single thing. It's an idea(ology) from
economics, and a cultural mythology, that vaguely intersect at some
point.
We all think we know what "The Market" is, supply, demand, competition
and so on. It's existence and operation underwrites many a political
argument.
Then there is the reality:
Walk in to a supermarket and "choose" from 20 different brands of
tinned vegetable, grown in the same region, processed in a handful of
factories ultimately owned by the same parent company.
"Own" a movie, on a device that you don't actually control in any way,
that you were effectively forced to purchase, with money you don't
have.
And so on....
So, in respectful mockery of Thatcher I say "There's no such thing as
The Market" - not because I don't believe in the values of property,
choice, competition, innovation.... but because we don't have these,
and haven't for some time. The myth of "The Market" lives on the place
of early (real) capitalism as we head toward "consumer communism".
But there are choices, sometimes you're not conscious of the effect of your choice but it was made nonetheless.
For your supermarket example, instead of going there you could go to a local farmer's market for those vegetables. It might cost more, but most expect higher quality there than at the supermarket. So there is another "market" option, you shouldn't just expect all your "market" options to be placed in convenient aisles at the grocery store.
If you live in the city and have to drive over an hour to get to a farmer's market, well that was also a choice you made. Perhaps you didn't make that choice because you wanted to be away from locally grown produce, but the supermarket being your only option is a consequence of that choice.
I'm not trying to be a jerk, just trying to point out that much of the choices we make will reduce the other choices we have and we should be conscious of the ones that drive us to become mindless consumers and remove other options from us in the market.
> be conscious of the ones that drive us to become mindless consumers
and remove other options from us in the market.
Nicely put. I see that sort of "choice affecting choices" you describe
leveraged/manipulated a lot in tech, to "funnel" people into worlds
with ever smaller horizons. Every product has an inbuilt con or trick
that seems out to get you. It's essence is anti-choice masquerading
as forms of economic freedom.
How to remain conscious of that? It's tiring. Like being in a jungle
surrounded by predators.
> > The market is not working, we just have the tools to realize how badly it's broken.
>"The market" is not a single thing.
Who seriously think it is? I think most people here knows that "the market" doesn't refer to an actual thing or place, just like "the internet" doesn't refer to an actual actual thing or place.
> I know a thermostatically controlled toaster is feasible to make into a cheap product because it existed in the 1960s
Having bought a toaster and electric kettle recently, I completely agree with your main point: buy the cheapest one you can bear to look at, because they're all the same in the essentials.
But this anecdote about your aside might be diverting. One of my earliest extended memories (in the 1960s) is watching my dad repair our toaster. winding new resistance wire around the mica central divider. (The toaster was a manual model with flip-open sides, toasting one side of the bread at a time.)
I don't think automatic toasters were all that cheap in the 1960s. Not everywhere, anyway, if repair of a manual toaster was worthwhile to do.
Manual repair of just about everything was worthwhile to do back then. Partly it was because labor was cheap and physical stuff was expensive (which has inverted) and partly because the overall <pick the appliance> was well built enough otherwise where one could expect to get years more service out of it post-repair. This approach doesn't payoff nearly as well when everything in the device is engineered to be within an inch of it's life once the warranty period ends. (if you're lucky)
The market works fine. For any category of good you can think of there will be producers that make a high quality version of it. Consumers who care about that quality (according to however you’re measuring it) will make their decisions accordingly. Consumers who reveal a preference for caring less about that quality will make decisions based on other criteria.
If your complaint is that this requires effort from the consumer, then that’s not something any market could fix. The consumer will always have to consider what their preferences are and how the offerings in the market align with them, if the want to end up purchasing goods/services that align with their preferences.
No it's doesn't work "fine". One of the failings is the artificial information asymmetry imposed by the companies' constant churn of products. By the time we get some non-seo actual reviews of the model A1000, it's out of stock and you can only buy A1000b and A2000, both made from different components. The market can't work as intended under these circumstances, because there's no way for the consumer to make an informed decision.
Consumers signal their preference for quality all the time. By buying the pricier stuff. But sometimes, somehow, there's no option anymore to buy X stuff - try buying a desktop CPU without Intel ME or AMD PSP for example. They just put it in every one of the CPUs at one point and that was that. People are not going to not buy newer CPUs.
It works in some areas and not in others. I buy iPhones because I get 10 years out of them. Same for MacBooks.
We just need a kitchenware company that takes the quality mantle and seriously maintains it over the course of 40 years. I bet it’s a niche that would actually work if someone tried it. You just have to keep the MBAs out of the company somehow.
The newest iPhone you could have bought in 2012 was an iPhone 5, which was 32-bit and doesn't support anything newer than iOS 10. You'd basically not be able to run any apps from the last three or four years. (And apps from before then may stop working if they depend on servers that have been shut down, under the assumption that everyone who cares has updated.)
I totally support your mission. I'm writing this on an 8-year-old Mac that I hope to eke out a full decade from. I just don't think iPhones (or Macs, really -- mine already can't run the newest OS, and its Safari can't display WebP images that are popping up increasingly across the Web) are a good example.
> For any category of good you can think of there will be producers that make a high quality version of it. Consumers who care about that quality (according to however you’re measuring it) will make their decisions accordingly.
I've been a consumer my whole life, and I still struggle to "make my decisions accordingly" because it's so difficult to find trustworthy information about quality, especially the qualities that matter to me. It can take an exhaustingly long time to gather this information, there are no shortcuts, and price and quality are often only loosely correlated.
Worse, after putting in the effort, I frequently find that those high-quality products and their makers disappear from the market, being outcompeted by junk.
Nobody makes high quality cassette tape mechanisms. It doesn't make sense to make ten of a custom cassette tape mechanism, only at least tens of thousands, so, they don't. But the market for thousands of these mechanisms is for the cheapest possible not good quality. So you simply can't buy good quality.
It was possible in the 1980s, at great expense, for the humble cassette tape to sound pretty good, the Nakamichi Dragon is the most famous high end tape deck.
But you can't do that today. There are a handful of Chinese manufacturers, spitting out variations on the same basic cheapest possible "eh, it's good enough" mechanism and that's the entire market.
A more modern example would be dashcams. The vast majority of products on the market are using the same sensors and the same SoCs, and the image quality difference is practically negligible between <$100 units and $400 ones. A dashcam with the image quality of even a GoPro doesn't exist, no matter how much money you are willing to spend.
Why does nobody mass produce a high quality version of this outdated technology that only myself and a small collection of enthusiasts care about? Has the free market failed yet again?
I will produce one in my garrage for a price. I know good preamps can be bought off the shelf. I'm not sure about the heads, so I'll have to do some research, if I have to make the head cost goes up because I need to buy tools I don't have. Some for the other parts, some I can make already with tools I have, some I can buy quality, others I'll need to charge enough to pay for tools.
I saw an interesting schematic to use a cut off casette-tape head to read the magnetic stripes on credit cards.
I wonder if the reverse could be done-- using the heads that are still (likely) in production for use in card readers, then using some DSP magic to reconstruct a decent audio product?
The original comment offered no such exclusions. If we want to say only that the free market will provide whatever it wants and we can like it or lump it suddenly that's not very attractive is it?
The complaint is that one could manufacture those more expensive high quality products at a larger quantity and, through scaling effects, one would achieve a lower price, which would make them accessible to larger segments of the market. I suppose that would be the market "working". Instead you have manufacturers churning out tons of cheap shit that breaks quickly. I guess most customers don't know how quickly different household appliances break, so they also can't compare that together with price. They have to assume that the more expensive appliances are also higher quality, but how can you judge that as a non-expert?
Household appliances are textbook examples of adoption s-curves, and in different phases, different rules apply for the market. Especially in the last phase of the s-curve, those manufacturers are hurt the most which build lasting products, because their own past customers, usually the best source for new purchases from their brand, don't buy from them any more because the need is still met by the still working product. So they either go bankrupt or get bought by one of the manufacturers that put in planned obsolescence and got tons of money from that, or they change their strategy before that happens.
because their own past customers, usually the best source for new purchases from their brand, don't buy from them any more because the need is still met by the still working product
Doesn't this neglect word of mouth? If you ask someone on HN, they will tell you to buy your vacuum cleaners and dishwashers from Miele and your washers and dryers from Speed Queen, budget permitting.
To the extent that scales to the world at large, the quality manufacturers will take business away from their competitors who don't get recommended as often.
> The complaint is that one could manufacture those more expensive high quality products at a larger quantity and, through scaling effects, one would achieve a lower price, which would make them accessible to larger segments of the market.
That complaint is immature and entirely self-interested. It’s almost always beneficial (except when there’s production shortages) to have a preference that is shared by large segments of the market. It’s not the systems fault if few people share your preferences.
That's a bit rich for you to write -> this thread is addressing a practical problem with consumer goods, and your post is a theoretical, spherical car in a vacuum description of how ideal market should work, and falls apart in the real world.
If the model worked perfectly, we would never have problems with slave labour in supply chains because ~0% of consumers are willing to buy them. The fact that we do, indicated that consumers are not able to enforce their preferences, for example because companies lie with no consequences. And if they can lie about slave labour, then they can lie about anything else.
> this thread is addressing a practical problem with consumer goods
The problem of selecting for quality is exactly what I am talking about, and it is very simple to accomplish. I do it myself routinely, so I know that it takes a bit more than 0 effort, but it is a very simple problem to manage, and anybody can do it. The actual immature complaint is that not enough people have the same preferences as you do. Which you just have to get over, and accept that you live on a planet with 7 billion other people, and a lot of them (no matter what they say), actually don’t care about a little bit of slave labor in the supply chain of their new TV.
> lot of them (no matter what they say), actually don’t care about a little bit of slave labor in the supply chain of their new TV
So we can't trust what consumers say they want, but we can trust what you say they wan't?
What is the basis for this extraordinary claim?
So far your argument reads a lot like 'market is infalliable, if it doeant serve your needs, its your fault. And even if you find it ever fails, it's your, the consumers fault too. No flaw in the system is possible'
> So we can't trust what consumers say they want, but we can trust what you say they wan't?
I’m not saying they want anything. I’m saying that what they want is revealed by their choices and not how they might answer any particular question when prompted. In economics this is called a revealed preference.
You don’t have information unless you seek to find it. The information is available and if you choose not to seek it then you have nobody but yourself to blame.
The market is not working, we just have the tools to realize how badly it's broken.