4 ms·

Trend so far has been: lots of very bad but cheap products made by machines with as little use of materials as possible (we keep getting better at determining w

by ashark 10y ago

Trend so far has been: lots of very bad but cheap products made by machines with as little use of materials as possible (we keep getting better at determining what the smallest amount is, so everything keeps getting worse!), with some variety in price and quality but all basically crap, and at the far opposite end much better but very expensive goods, often with at least some human involvement, if not wholly handmade. Economies of scale and competition don't kick in enough to reduce the prices on the top end much, and the potential middle of well-made and designed with good materials, but by machines and cutting some corners, is a no-man's land where there's no profit to be had. If there's anyone serving the midrange they're selling a brand and image mostly, not providing a much better product than the low end, and just collecting more profit. There are exceptions, but the world I see as served by capitalism is one of cheap, frustrating crap that keeps optimizing toward even worse quality, and overpriced (overpriced compared to an imagined world where the magic of market efficiency were brought to bear on it) nice things, and little in between. So much for choice. So I don't see anyone deciding to pay 10x what the crap costs (no economies of scale kicking in or it'd be 3-4x, in a perfect world, but hey) and 1/3 what luxury goods cost for handmade mid-range. They'll bump up and have real quality plus the public image and ego-boost that goes with it, or have 10x as much crap-tier stuff instead. This is in part because people want more stuff, all other thing being equal, and in part because no-one's got the time to figure out how to evaluate quality in more than a small fraction of what they buy (this is why the mid-range is a no-man's land—your market is budget conscious but discerning, educated consumers, which is to say, you're screwed). The consequence is that without regulation setting a highish floor on how awful products can be, we get the deep bathtub shaped graph of supply on the Y and Price/quality on the X, necessarily. There's no room for semi-affordable goods with a human touch. That's just how it is. :-/ Also, nitpick: per Graeber, barter is where you go forward from money when money is temporarily not working, not something that you return to from money, since it didn't, in any meaningful way, represent a step on the way to money.

tboyd47 10y ago
It could be the lack of a mid-range is more of a consequence of people not having any expendable income after rent, bills, health care, child care, etc., than an essential feature of capitalism. If I had a bigger budget for personal items, I would pay $60 or more for a really nice, durable, comfortable pair of jeans, as opposed to just going to Walmart and buying the same crappy pair for $19.99 every month or so. Same goes for most things I buy, like cars, furniture, food, etc. But somehow, my rent, bills, health care costs, food costs, etc. just keep getting higher while my monthly income remains roughly constant. So I keep buying trash. Also, the ever-rising high-end of the market gets lifted up partially by easy access to credit. If fewer people had access to credit cards, maybe those high-end products would gravitate more towards the mid-range as well.
- ashark 10y ago
  I really think it's the education issue. To be able to buy confidently in the mid-range without regulatory protections ensuring that things cannot be under mid-range (talking quality-wise) you have to know a lot. To do that for a substantial fraction of what you buy you have to practically be an expert at buying, with lots of knowledge and adept at spotting scammers. Ain't no-one got time for that (unless that actually is their job). The quality bathtub graph falls out of that. Not enough confident mid-range buyers to pay 10x the crap price, so you never get to a scale where you can (and/or are forced to by competition) drop to 4-5x the crap price (multipliers pulled from thin air, obviously, and are just representative of some real values). [EDIT] in fact, to take your example, you may need to know at least a little about jeans to be sure the $60 jeans will last at least 3x as long as the $20 ones, and with more knowledge and time shopping you might be able to find a $40 pair that'd last even longer than the $60 ones. The fact that the $60 pair might still be crap is the real problem.
- dublinben 10y ago
  You may be exaggerating, but if you really are buying $20 jeans every month I think you've fallen into the trap of cheap boots that Vimes described. A decent pair of jeans may cost several times more, but will last you for years.
  - Arizhel 10y ago
    It's weird; I buy $30 Lee jeans from Kohls these days and they easily last a year or more. Clothing is not something you have to spend a lot of money on to get something that lasts a reasonable length of time, unless you're really being penny-wise-pound-foolish by buying the very cheapest thing you can get just to save 10%, or you're extremely hard on them.
    - tboyd47 10y ago
      Thanks, I'll check out Kohl's next time. Honestly clothes shopping is not something I put a lot of thought into.
petra 10y ago
Why is there a need for human touch for high-quality products ? Machines can make perfectly fine products, and if they fail, you usually see it right after purchase while the warranty is on. The more annoying issue is of shitty design, sometime to save a few cents(shitty motherboard capacitors, shitty earphone hinge), sometimes intentionally - like toyota seeing some model getting to a 300K-1M miles lifetime - and changing a chain to make it 100K, i think. >> no-one's got the time to figure out how to evaluate quality in more than a small fraction of what they buy Why should that be hard ? why can't i go to some e-commerce site, and see a reliable evaluation of the lifetime of a product ? of the quality of the main parameters ? With some option to comparison shop on those ?
- ashark 10y ago
  You have to know which parameters are meaningful, any tricks that could be used in presenting them, the degree to which the person/entity reporting them can trusted for accuracy, anything that's changed about any of that stuff since the last time you checked, and probably more I'm forgetting about. Being even halfway informed about a majority of the products one might purchase is a time-consuming PITA that too often results in the discovery of the bathtub quality graph and the realization that all you can afford is cheap crap and more expensive but barely better rip-off crap, because that's all that exists short of the ZOMGWTF high end (or, possibly, becoming way more informed and spending even more time shopping for quality used products). If you do find someone serving up quality mid-priced stuff, they'll probably be disproportionally expensive for what they are (if not as high as the luxury market, assuming there is one for that product) for reasons of low scale and the tiny market of informed consumers providing less support for competition. It's not that no-one ever becomes an informed consumer of any product—it's that so few do that it's hard to sustain oneself selling real quality to bargain-seeking informed consumers, and when a company manages to they have trouble scaling to a point that they can lower prices and capture more market share. There's also less room for competition to survive, so there goes another price-lowering mechanism. And good luck getting distribution when retailers make a better margin selling faux-quality at the same price. It's not that you can't ever possibly succeed doing that, it's that it tends to be much harder, resulting in the observed crap/ripoff/luxury (luxury category not always existing for all products) categories of so many goods in practice. Incidentally, agreed about good machine-made things being possible. Maybe small scale manufacturing/fabrication will get really cheap and break us out of this mess. As it is, they don't usually design the robots to make good stuff (if you can point me to machine-made knotted wool rugs that'll last 100 years at a substantial discount from the hand-knotted variety, ideally without my having to become a rug expert to verify that they really are similarly durable, please do)
tmaly 10y ago
The point I was trying to make is there are no easy answers here in terms of what happens to large portions of the population that will be unemployed due to robots.

by ashark 10y ago

tboyd47 10y ago

It could be the lack of a mid-range is more of a consequence of people not having any expendable income after rent, bills, health care, child care, etc., than an essential feature of capitalism. If I had a bigger budget for personal items, I would pay $60 or more for a really nice, durable, comfortable pair of jeans, as opposed to just going to Walmart and buying the same crappy pair for $19.99 every month or so. Same goes for most things I buy, like cars, furniture, food, etc. But somehow, my rent, bills, health care costs, food costs, etc. just keep getting higher while my monthly income remains roughly constant. So I keep buying trash. Also, the ever-rising high-end of the market gets lifted up partially by easy access to credit. If fewer people had access to credit cards, maybe those high-end products would gravitate more towards the mid-range as well.

ashark 10y ago
I really think it's the education issue. To be able to buy confidently in the mid-range without regulatory protections ensuring that things cannot be under mid-range (talking quality-wise) you have to know a lot. To do that for a substantial fraction of what you buy you have to practically be an expert at buying, with lots of knowledge and adept at spotting scammers. Ain't no-one got time for that (unless that actually is their job). The quality bathtub graph falls out of that. Not enough confident mid-range buyers to pay 10x the crap price, so you never get to a scale where you can (and/or are forced to by competition) drop to 4-5x the crap price (multipliers pulled from thin air, obviously, and are just representative of some real values). [EDIT] in fact, to take your example, you may need to know at least a little about jeans to be sure the $60 jeans will last at least 3x as long as the $20 ones, and with more knowledge and time shopping you might be able to find a $40 pair that'd last even longer than the $60 ones. The fact that the $60 pair might still be crap is the real problem.
dublinben 10y ago
You may be exaggerating, but if you really are buying $20 jeans every month I think you've fallen into the trap of cheap boots that Vimes described. A decent pair of jeans may cost several times more, but will last you for years.
- Arizhel 10y ago
  It's weird; I buy $30 Lee jeans from Kohls these days and they easily last a year or more. Clothing is not something you have to spend a lot of money on to get something that lasts a reasonable length of time, unless you're really being penny-wise-pound-foolish by buying the very cheapest thing you can get just to save 10%, or you're extremely hard on them.
  - tboyd47 10y ago
    Thanks, I'll check out Kohl's next time. Honestly clothes shopping is not something I put a lot of thought into.

petra 10y ago

Why is there a need for human touch for high-quality products ? Machines can make perfectly fine products, and if they fail, you usually see it right after purchase while the warranty is on. The more annoying issue is of shitty design, sometime to save a few cents(shitty motherboard capacitors, shitty earphone hinge), sometimes intentionally - like toyota seeing some model getting to a 300K-1M miles lifetime - and changing a chain to make it 100K, i think. >> no-one's got the time to figure out how to evaluate quality in more than a small fraction of what they buy Why should that be hard ? why can't i go to some e-commerce site, and see a reliable evaluation of the lifetime of a product ? of the quality of the main parameters ? With some option to comparison shop on those ?

ashark 10y ago
You have to know which parameters are meaningful, any tricks that could be used in presenting them, the degree to which the person/entity reporting them can trusted for accuracy, anything that's changed about any of that stuff since the last time you checked, and probably more I'm forgetting about. Being even halfway informed about a majority of the products one might purchase is a time-consuming PITA that too often results in the discovery of the bathtub quality graph and the realization that all you can afford is cheap crap and more expensive but barely better rip-off crap, because that's all that exists short of the ZOMGWTF high end (or, possibly, becoming way more informed and spending even more time shopping for quality used products). If you do find someone serving up quality mid-priced stuff, they'll probably be disproportionally expensive for what they are (if not as high as the luxury market, assuming there is one for that product) for reasons of low scale and the tiny market of informed consumers providing less support for competition. It's not that no-one ever becomes an informed consumer of any product—it's that so few do that it's hard to sustain oneself selling real quality to bargain-seeking informed consumers, and when a company manages to they have trouble scaling to a point that they can lower prices and capture more market share. There's also less room for competition to survive, so there goes another price-lowering mechanism. And good luck getting distribution when retailers make a better margin selling faux-quality at the same price. It's not that you can't ever possibly succeed doing that, it's that it tends to be much harder, resulting in the observed crap/ripoff/luxury (luxury category not always existing for all products) categories of so many goods in practice. Incidentally, agreed about good machine-made things being possible. Maybe small scale manufacturing/fabrication will get really cheap and break us out of this mess. As it is, they don't usually design the robots to make good stuff (if you can point me to machine-made knotted wool rugs that'll last 100 years at a substantial discount from the hand-knotted variety, ideally without my having to become a rug expert to verify that they really are similarly durable, please do)

tmaly 10y ago

The point I was trying to make is there are no easy answers here in terms of what happens to large portions of the population that will be unemployed due to robots.