A Tale of Two Zippers

It's not that simple.

While I don't preclude that is a possible outcome, if you read the entire article you see that the fact that smooth zippers are more expensive means they can only be used on more expensive items, even though they don't give any practical increase in quality in terms of reliability.

If those smooth zippers were as cheap to produce as the ones with bumps, then it's possible (likely even? - after all, producers always want to differentiate their good in some way) the decreased cost of production would be invested in adding features that actually do something. One defensible possibility is "mass customization" type production, which relies on each piece being deliberately different in some way. I raise that possibility because most would consider that type of work to be "better" than manually threading zippers, and there could be more people employed.

Clearly there are a lot of things that could happen if both forms of zippers were as cheap to produce. My point is that it is difficult to say for sure the worker would be on the street with no job.

[1] It's more likely that the worker is actually female: Chinese factories generally prefer to hire women. It is only comparatively recently that the ratio pf production line workers has approached 50/50, and as recently as 2006 there were 14 men for every 100 women working on production lines in China. See http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c8948f1e-2653-11e3-8ef6-00144...

What I came away with was first, the science of plant automation is far, far more advanced than computer science :-) Second, they've eliminated an incredible about of manual labor already.

Using factory automation as a model, it's interesting to think how software could do the same thing to the marketplace.

I agree with @nl, as long as the worker is there voluntarily, I don't see a problem with a market existing for sweating the small details. The upstream market competes by optimizing their BOM, so if the zipper isn't worth the cost, it will phase out.

To argue that it shouldn't be worth the cost because the job seems to boring for you is odd. There are many people who would be very happy to have such a job. If and when there is a future where there does not exist a large number of people would be overqualified for such a job, let me know.

In fact, this shows how precise the signaling is. In any other economic system, you'd get one type of zippers (or even a single type of car, or house) because "that's good be enough for everyone."

But in this system, price signaling is so precise that it even allows for distinguishing between preferences in zipper designs, all the way from the buyer to the manufacturer on the other side of the world, who adjusts accordingly.

It's annoying that so much of our species' output is channeled towards activities that improve precisely nobody's lives.

But that's like, your opinion, man. The fact is that the people are spending more on smooth zippers, because they care about it. Who's to say their lives haven't been improved?

What you're arguing is that the system should optimize for the opinions of experts (such as engineers) rather than the opinions of the laypeople who actually buy the products. That has nothing to do with "bluntness".

How exactly do you get all the tabs on the rod? Should the tab-forming machine put them on rods before transport to the press? Now you have to deal with rods full of tabs and keep the press fed, plus machine jams etc.

Look at how they're moving materials around the factory. A bin full of this, a bin full of that. Dump part A into hopper B.