Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're missing the fact that the Phoebus cartel fined members that sold lightbulbs lasting longer than 1,000 hours. Aftr reaching a stable equilibrium, it's not surprising that 1,000 hours remained the industry standard. It drove sales! [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-04/cheeri...
The reason for this, as I understand it, is that it's super easy to make a lightbulb that lasts 30 years. But there are two main trade-offs that make it bad for consumers: 1. Stronger filaments that last longer will be a lot less efficient, so the consumer ends up using a lot more electricity. 2. The filament doesn't burn per-say, but actually evaporates. This is why it'll eventually break. But where does the evapora…
Ultimately which scenario makes the most sense: that these businesses went through the time and effort to set up this testing organization out of a desire to ensure they all made better products for consumers, or out of a realization that they could all stabilize their revenues if they all sold products that would need to be replaced on a regular basis?
This also strikes me as an area where consumer choice can be particularly effective: most of the attributes of a lightbulb aside from energy consumption are pretty tangible to the end user, and since they are fairly inexpensive and replaceable, the buyer is more able to evaluate them side by side than many other things. It makes total sense to me that the manufacturers would see this as a problem, and choose to limit consumer choice instead of competing to make better products.