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The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

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Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#561

Post by brendoelfrendo »

WalterBright wrote: post #557
nicoburns wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by "socialism" you mean the majority of economic activity being state-run, then probably not. If by "socialism" you mean things like worker-owned corporations, strong anti-competition laws, high levels of consumer regulation, then absolutely.

If worker-owned collectives produce superior products, why aren't they everywhere? It's not illegal to form one.

Because capital doesn't like to fund them. Being worker-owned limits the potential upside for investors so a collective or co-op needs to be able to bootstrap itself to success, at which point capital will just fund a competitor that allows them to extract their desired rents.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#562

Post by nicoburns »

WalterBright wrote: post #557
nicoburns wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by "socialism" you mean the majority of economic activity being state-run, then probably not. If by "socialism" you mean things like worker-owned corporations, strong anti-competition laws, high levels of consumer regulation, then absolutely.

If worker-owned collectives produce superior products, why aren't they everywhere? It's not illegal to form one.

Because our economic structure doesn't reward superior products, it rewards cheaper products. So such organisations get outcompeted.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#563

Post by fragmede »

shakna wrote: post #245
simianparrot wrote: post #149

Airplane tickets used to cost a lot more for economy class, even adjusted for inflation and fees. To get the equivalent service and quality today you simply have to pay more, you just have the choice of paying very little for very low quality because there’s more flights and more planes. https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/even-with-fees-the-miracle-of... Same can be said for most electronics and even clothes. I’m not say…

> Airplane tickets used to cost a lot more for economy class, even adjusted for inflation and fees. To get the equivalent service and quality today you simply have to pay more, you just have the choice of paying very little for very low quality because there’s more flights and more planes. I don't think you actually can get the same quality, today. Even if you are paying more. The spacing of seats has changed. [0] Yo…

http://jsx.com is a tiny carrier flying out of only a handful of cities in the US, but it's basically a quarter step towards during private. They have their own terminals and all of their planes are smaller but the seats themselves are bigger.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#565

Post by fragmede »

specialist wrote: post #491
atoav wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a media-lab at a art university and both HDMI and USB-C is flaming garbage. What you want is a digital video standard that simply pushes an A/V stream over the wire and negotiates the acceptable resolution on the fly. What you get is something that does too much, doesn't work half the time and does things nobody cares about. Last time I plugged in an HDMI source and the darn "smart" television showed the image…

I feel ya. The inability to diagnose cables drives me nuts. Some kind of reportable POST (power-on, self test) should be the norm. On both ends. Grrr...

If that's a problem you repeatedly run into professionally, you want something like https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1721377-REG/vanco_hd4... for hdmi or something like https://a.co/d/igcKyM2 for usb-c

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#566

Post by imtringued »

an0malous wrote: post #439
jonplackett wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t this all just Late Stage Calitalsm? I don’t think it’s ‘efficiency’ in the same way spaceX is run. Yeah they cut costs, but they got better quality results. With clothes / appliances etc we have reduced quality at our expense - while the companies doing it make more money than ever.

Yes, capitalism requires perpetual growth. When the opportunities for growth through innovation dry up, businesses resort to cutting costs which usually involves cutting quality and hoping most consumers won’t notice. 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

This is correct. Capitalism requires perpetual growth because capitalist logic does not apply in saturated markets with excess capital.

Anyone who believes in capitalism must by necessity believe thatcapital produces part capital and part consumer goods and that the rate of capital production must exceed the rate of capital depreciation. But in the face of stagnating population growth this logic must by necessity result in excess capital, threatening investor profit, to which they respond with drastic anti consumer measures.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#567

Post by xp84 »

boomlinde wrote: post #533
xp84 wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If your product or service has an unacceptable quality, demand will decrease and you will lose money I challenge that assumption. If whole markets are dominated by companies who have downgraded quality to the minimum, then customers have no choice but to keep buying from you or someone else doing the same thing. If they don’t buy from you because of their most recent bad experience, someone else (who bought their j…

I don't agree that this is a challenge my assumption. You are talking about the lack of information and of alternatives; factors in how the demand for poor quality products can exist. That naturally affects where the balance point is, but I don't think that rebuts or even addresses my fundamental assumption. In my view there is such a balance point regardless of how the demand has come to exist. A market without perf…

Let me be clear, I didn’t mean I disagree with the rest of your comment in general or to disprove you somehow with my comment. Even with perfect information though most people have to purchase crap, because good stuff is so rare and expensive (though not all expensive stuff is even any good, most actually good stuff is expensive).

It’s interesting when you think of clothes vs appliances though. I don’t think anyone wants to replace their washer every 5 years for fashion, but it’s nearly required. You’re right with clothes though, fashion is geared to promote discarding. I wonder though, wasn’t fashion also a thing in the 1940s? Yet then, clothes still lasted longer.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#568

Post by fragmede »

WalterBright wrote: post #540
hliyan wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's how I see it: in the absence of growth in market share or cost-reducing innovation, the only remaining strategy for profit maximization is the delivering of progressively lower quality products for progressively higher prices. This obviously destroys the brand over time, but brands can be recycled/reinvented. A purely rational and self-interested (i.e. unencumbered by moral sentiment or empathy) economic agent…

It boils down to what people are willing to pay for. How many of us go to buy something on Amazon, and buy the cheapest one? And if your product isn't the cheapest one, what are you going to do about it?

Buy the Dyson version at 4x the price, avoid thinking about the money and concentrate on the fact that it's not crap (yet). We can expect the Dyson brand to go through the same quality arc in twenty years, but for now, I'm happy with the times I have splurged for their products.

The problem is naked capitalism doesn't have a meaningful reward function for quality products. If I buy a product and am happy with it in three years, or I buy a product and it's trash and unsuitable for its purpose, the company still already has my money. I have to care enough about the purchase to spend time and effort into writing a review online about the product, and the brand, which will go into the circular filing cabinet. For a $20 thermometer, I'm not even going to bother.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#569

Post by lotsofpulp »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #502
nehal3m wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a great insight. Also, from a personal perspective, one of the problems I regularly experience as a consumer of goods is that it is very difficult for me to judge quality, meaning I can explicitly not intuit value. For example, two years ago I bought 3 identical pairs of Levi’s jeans at considerable cost. Granted, they’re all I wear, but given that I follow the washing instructions and don’t put undue…

lol jeans. Just got into selvedge denim, go buy from a company like brave star denim, and don’t buy anything less than 15 oz. I can find a literal 21 oz unrippable insane heavy weight selvedge denim pants for less than 200, and it’ll be made in America of Japanese materials. Most Americans are simply stupid when they buy clothes. They don’t do research and they make extremely suboptimal purchases by trusting big bran…

Jeans at old navy or costco or next are $20 to $30. And I can wash them on “normal” cycle every time I wear them, and dry them on normal and never have to worry about taking care of them.

They still last me at least a couple years. And I don’t have to trust that the manufacturer made them well enough to last 7+ years for me to break even.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#570

Post by PaulHoule »

This was a big theme in the 1970s, one book that captures that Zeitgiest is this

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/145212225-by-marvin-harr...

and there were a lot of books offering answers such as

https://www.amazon.com/Quality-Free-Certain-Becomes-Business...

There are two theories of quality: (1) quality is conformance to a specification and (2) quality is conformance to customer requirements.

The answer to type (1) quality is to reduce variance. One response to type (1) quality is to say something like "you can't get good help today", e.g. blame the worker, which has elements such as "they come to the factory drunk somedays", "they are smoking pot all the time", "they don't care". Crosby says management should take responsibility because management hires the workers, trains the workers, supervises the workers, designs the work process, fires the workers, etc.

There's a dark side to type (1) quality thinking in that reducing variance lets you reduce the mean. For instance, a metal pail needs a certain thickness of metal on the bottom, if you go under a threshold the bottom fails. Because of variance you can't make a pail with exactly that thickness, you have to be several standard deviations above the threshold. Get that variation down and you can reduce the mean, use less metal. (Saves money at the factory, costs less to ship, less global warming, etc.) Now you have a system with less reserve, if a new source of variation shows up you are making crap pails again.

Thinking about type (2) quality involves a conversation with customers to understand what their requirements are. The Toyota Corolla and Cadillac Escalade are both excellent vehicles from the perspective of customers who have different values. If customers aren't being heard, you have problems in the type (2) department -- in Doctorow's "enshittification" scenario the voice of neither end users nor advertisers or vendors are being heard. In cases such as Meta, even ordinary shareholders are unheard and the inevitable consequence of that is "it sucks." See also

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

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