I’ve thought this, too, and like you I don’t have a compelling explanation. It’s true that the middle class is dwindling, but even the poor today have more _stu

I’ve thought this, too, and like you I don’t have a compelling explanation. It’s true that the middle class is dwindling, but even the poor today have more _stuff_ than the middle class used to. But it is, as you say, mostly crap. I’m not sure what you mean by consumer min-maxing, but perhaps this — one thing I’ve thought is that the amount and variety of crap you own in this culture is more important than the quality. And not from a utility perspective, rather because our dominant entertainment reinforces it. It’s a given that you must own a dishwasher, so you get a cheap one — yet it’s literally worse than hand-washing dishes, and needs to be replaced every 5 years. You can’t own one good kitchen knife, you must get a wooden knife block like the chefs have, even if all seven knives are crap. Many of the cheap tools you buy at Harbor Freight will literally break the first time you use them as intended. This is all told a shocking waste of human effort — every scrap of resource and moment of time spent creating this crap is wasted, burned forever. When often just making something 20% better will leave it “good enough.”