The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

I'm not interested in rehashing the team game of "capitalism vs communism vs whatever" for the millionth time here, and nobody but you brought up the latter, so you might safely conclude nobody else is, either.

Do you think you can take off your team hat and have a discussion about what we were talking about? Hint: it was capitalism (specifically late stage capitalism). Try responding on the topic without any distractions (like mentioning the other team as you might consider it).

After all, sports teams don't get better by pointing fingers at all the other teams, they get better by looking inward and finding what they should change. Here's an example:

> What’s insidious about [the term late-stage capitalism] is that it tricks you into believing we can’t make things better

The term absolutely doesn't do that, because it's 2 words, one meaning capitalism, the other meaning "a later stage of". You're free to suggest ways to motivate companies to stop enshitifying things for profit within the confines of late-stage capitalism, without resorting to one of your dreaded ideologies. But you'll have to actually do that. So let's look inward: how can we fix that?

There is a philosophy that value (including reality) is subjective and that all that matters is making people act. That's quite explicitly the philosophy of Marx. It's in strong contrast to the "philosophical bedrock of western civilization", which is the search for objective truth and objective reality. Whatever one thinks of Marx's idea that objective reality is a middle class fiction, I don't think people would agree that those ideas are associated with the elite of Western civilization. Quite the opposite.

I think what you're ultimately referring to is the use of ordinal utility functions by economists. It's not clear how to write equations in economics where each person's preferences are accurately expressed in well-behaved value-agnostic units. You could try using money, but not everyone values having a lot of money. And even if they did, which currency? Dollars? Euros? Gold? Bitcoin?

Because utility functions are hard to get right theoretically, Paul Samuelson proposed trying to measure them empirically by revealed preference. There are lots of things wrong with this from an academic perspective and it's reasonable to have concerns about the long-term effects if this is adopted for entire economies. But it didn't start until 1938 and it's certainly not a philosophical bedrock of Western civilization. More like a desperate hack.

> we can't measure feelings

We have several ways of measuring feelings, and we use them regularly. But you can't build a utility theory based literally on current feelings. Otherwise opium would have nearly infinite objective value. You want to use something that integrates over time, like life satisfaction. Or something that measures the current feeling, change in feeling, and integral over feeling like a PID controller. But even if you could get the measurements right, doing all the measurements for all 8.2 billion people in real time would be impossible right now. So it's not clear what the right theory is.

Declining product quality was even one of the major complaints luddites had over factory looms, it wasn't just that they were being replaced with lesser skilled workers and their wages cut, but the quality of fabric from the factory looms they built just got worse and worse over time so they couldn't even claim their loss of wages was worth having better clothes, they got worse wages and worse clothes.

Everyone likes to hem and haw over free market supposedly fixing such problems, but completely ignores the huge amount of friction in moving markets that require massive tons of capital to even challenge to the smallest degree. And even if you get the overall established market to change practices for a small time span it is only through essentially open war with one another as the companies battle it out; and as soon as there is either a clear dominating winner, or a few of the larger companies essentially decide peace is better and stop truly challenging each other for dominance, everything goes right back to reducing quality and increasing profit margins. The big companies know being at perpetual war in the market, which is what would be best for consumers in providing the best prices and products, makes their position less stable and leaves them vulnerable to new challengers, and instead tend to default towards unspoken collusion with other big established companies in order to not rock the boat. It makes the companies more stable and profitable, but is worse for consumers, and gets even worse for consumers when those companies start looking at other ways to entrench their position through politics and law.

Say you buy a smartphone, and you want it to last for 7 years. If you buy the model from 2025, the manufacturer commits to supporting it until 2032 (it already exists). Now if you buy the 2025 model in 2029, it will still last until 2032, so in 2029 it actually makes sense to not buy the model from 2025. But I would say that it's pretty great that the manufacturer commits to supporting the devices for 7 years.

Planned obsolescence suggests that the company has been actively investing resources into it. "This lightbulb lasts for 4 years, have our engineers find a way to make it die after 1 year" is the typical example of that.

Now of course, as a customer, you can buy the 2025 model, and throw it away in 2026 to buy the new model.

Incidentally, this is the exact strategy that VC and Private Equity use. They know how the game is played.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification