Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, no one would ever make products intentionally worse as part of creeping modernism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel No one would ever, for economic reasons, plan (or just allow) for the lifespan of their products to decrease. http://resource.co/article/lifetimes-household-appliances-be... Technology is always getting better! The old timers who almost universally report this phenomenon just don't kn…
And if I read your comment I'm led to believe there is a mass conspiracy by every single manufacturer on earth to deliberately make their products worse. If you make a product, you MUST be trying to make it worse so you can sell more, right? Isn't that exactly what you saying here. After all, if any single manufacturer does this, then all of them must, because they are all obviously in collusion. The world isn't big…
No, that's not what I'm saying. "Every single manufacturer" does not need to coordinate for this kind of problem to exist. Otherwise, it the numerous instances of this kind of collusion which have actually been outed, over the years, would not have been possible.
All that's necessary is is insufficient competition in a particular sector. We see this increasingly in the industrialized, Western world, where just a few megacorps handle almost all of the business, much more so than in the past. I would attribute this to largely to less free markets, which reduces competitive forces that would normally prevent this sort of thing. Large corporations are often allowed to buy influence, dictate legislation, that create barriers to entry in the very markets where one sees this kind of dysfunction. Less cynically, one can also look to industries with rising capital costs, e.g. if it takes super expensive R&D to compete in a market you might see just a few large firms.
Once there are just a few firms in a particular sector, it's tempting to form a cartel. But it's not necessary to explicitly collude in order to be less responsive to competitive forces, or even to communicate.
If you read the OP's article you may have noticed that the author points out the diminishing number of firms in the appliance business.
>> The world isn't big enough for two things to be true at the same time.
No a particular market sector isn't big enough for these two things to be true at the same time. One "honest"/driven competitor will largely rout out such bad behavior, which I think is a more proper statement of your core insight here. So the question we should be asking ourselves is, why can't one good competitor enter the marketplace for washing machines in today's climate, e.g. a significant market share selling 30-year washing machines, since that's clearly possible?