A Defense of Planned Obsolescence

Chapters:
00:00 The Impossibility of Free-Market Cartels
04:43 Defending Planned Obsolescence
06:30 On Perceived Obsolescence

Social media:

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[ctgslayer]

Tankies when you tell them that Soviet tanks in WWII were made to abysmal quality standards because the average lifespan of that tank was like sub-500 miles:

[samuraibat]

- Mad Scientist
- Economist
- Twitter shitposter
- And now tailor + homesteader
Ladies and gentlemen, he does it all.

[newthirx]

A good example are roman roads. There are a lot of people who fawn over them, seemingly everlasting, but they don't tell you that they were like 4 times as expensive to make as pavement. That's not even taking into account the fact that they are bumpy, and a flat lab road would offer terrible traction with wheels. This kind of thinking is what's wrong with the world I think

[IntotheAgora]

Interesting. I had never taken this idea into consideration before. The concept of “planned obsolescence” implies that there’s some static inherent quality a good can objectively be. From a praxeological point of view, if a consumer wants to buy a “deliberately cheaper” lightbulb because they prefer the lower cost over higher quality, what’s to say this is objectively a bad thing? However, I do think that Austro-libertarians can still validly critique planned obsolescence in modernity because of how disconnected from market signals companies actually are from genuine consumer demand

[MrCher]

With light bulbs you are also trading durability for consumption. A low temperature redish light bulb will last for ever. But it will consume much more energy for the light it produces than a 1000 hours light bulb. Energy costs you money, and changing your bulb each 1000 hours is cheaper than the electricity bill that you will get from trying to illuminate your room using low temperature light bulbs.

[SomeGuy-tykr]

Also, with "perceived" obsolescence, you just create a market for second hand products, either directly from the consumer selling off the old for the new, or from resellers buying up/acquiring the "obsolete" product and selling them elsewhere (like overseas, looking at you, Goodwill)

[derrickjohnson]

I have a belt can’t remember the name of brand but it’s a pattern rather than holes you can use to tighten it, it’s last far longer than the standard cheap ones that break & I have to buy again and again it costs more but it’s worth it to me. I’m willing to pay more for the quality so I might buy the longer lasting bulbs

[ChucksSEADnDEAD]

I know it's just an example but in engineering the cost and ease of production is a factor. In fact there's charts plotting the toughness of materials with other factors in the X axis such as weight or cost. Sometimes steel is strong and cheap but too heavy so high grade aluminum is used instead, if weight is not a factor you go for low cost.
It's often said that physics is maths but constrained by reality, engineering is physics constrained by budget.

[RealQuarlie]

2:40 "it doesn’t create Monopolies"

-> continues to explain how it created more of a monolopy

Also on the part of "producing lower quality products benefits everyone" only applies when the price actually gets cheaper and by a reasonable amount of actually benefitting the consumer. Yes, it can be argued, that consumers could switch Producers, though that already assumes totally rational behavior in humams over branding, therefore not being wholely correct. It would also only apply if the profits actually become lower by this at the end, due to the decreased Quality still providing a lot of money saving. The one benefitting here, would only be the producer, while decreasing quality for consumers. Even considering consumers who switched producers, they would clearly overall have a loss in this, as the other producer (which they before didn't use), is gonna be one, that was also worse than the original one they had.

Also, the entire final part is just tiring and dismissive of the actual argument, acting like a sort of "gotcha, you bought it yourself, so bear the consequences", instead of going over the fact that capitalism still promotes the purposeful deprication of older devices to bring you to get newer ones. Forced updates that literally did nothing but make your old phone slower are a of great example... You can't argue "you decided to buy it" when it was an action done AFTER your purchase. The only available options are:

- keep the update, but your phone will be much worse than it was supposed to be and when you bought it.

- don't update (if even possible) but lose out on essential features it should've had (not even talking about specifically additions, but even initial uses)

- buy a completly new phone.

In each scenario, the consumer loses and for the producer, either nothing happens, they have to not put up updates anymore (saving money) or just straightup get money from you having to re-buy a phone...

What you seem to misunderstand here, is the difference between normal obsolescence and planned obsolescence...
Yes, cheaper products will generally be cheaper if quality, and the same for higher quality and therefore higher prices. This is expected and obviously gonna be a thing. The issue comes in planned obsolescence, in which a producer for example lowers quality to cut on cost, but doesn’t lower (or doesn't lower to a justifiable degree), making it a loss for the average consumer...
The difference of released phones and your clothings example, is that the producer later doesn't come and just cut off random parts off them... especially with technology, it does. (Another great example is seen in the video game industry, in which the producers changed how the games work and made it so you either now had to pay more or bear with the new limitations)

On the topic of your clothings that you repaired, another similar thing to planned obsolescence can be observed for the example of smartphones, and that being the ability to repair it, with the most common thing being the battery. Basically all phones are made to make it so you can't replace the battery. Simply because it's extremely efficent for profits. When the battery gets bad over time, you are basically forced to get a completly new one, Despite just one Part of it being broken. The company always wins in this, while the consumer always loses. The only way to turn this into a win for the consumers, is by making it mandatory for producers to not literally glue the battery onto the circuitry of the phone, making it replaceable. Sure, you can have the argument that the producers will just raise the initial costs, but that is still preferred over forcing consumers into buying new phones all the time... It actually gives the consumers the freedom to choose between replacing or buying a new one. Also just in general, do you really wanna say this is worse than having it be not replaceable? What if Trousers were originally made, so you could never fix broken patches, but were a bit cheaper for that. Would you really argue that making it so they are fixable is a bad thing?

[eccod]

Hard hitting and well paced

I also try to keep my electronics and clothes around until they are broken beyond repair, thanks for sharing

[Arbiter]

I'd like to recommend the Technology Connections video about the Phoebus Cartel because it does a good job of going over the technical reasons why the lifespan of lightbulbs settled on by the cartel was a positive for consumers.

[thedonut]

so your point isn’t so much that “planned obsolescence is good” as much as that it’s caused by government intervention?

[FridgemaxxedHybridoreanL-wirg]

I do not know if you are aware of this, but in this video and in your natural monopolies one, you are mostly right *but* for one thing. The background you are talking about.
Price gouging can and *does* happen. But this is only with *unnatural* monopolies. The kicker is that if you have a monopoly on violence, you can get subsidies, rebates, trust laws that only really apply to you, barriers to entry that stop competition, you can get taxes to back you, thus being a warchest. The entire banking system of America collectively warchested in 2007-8. But there are many companies, such as Coles and Woolworths, that sell chickens that cost them 1 dollar from the farmer, for 8 - 12 dollars. Furthermore, a lot of these companies have higher returns on equity than even the best bank performances. This happens every so often, and there's many things that indicate the unnatural monopolies of the world are absurd in their price gouging (almost no products are less than several hundred percent markups). It is like Chinese shoes that are resold (made for 50 cents, sold for 30 dollars). Any notion that the value is legitimate or created by making it more convenient to get the chicken or the shoes is absurd. You do not need 11 dollars more than a farmer does for literally growing and breeding chickens and what not, nor do you need contracts where tehy can only sell chickens to you, and so on, if you don't plan to and don't want to enforce monopolies, gouging and so on. The truth is, most of the biggest companies have lobbied for huge amounts of laws and huge amounts of things that make gouging and planned obsolescene of a *bad* kind, extremely common. Yes, obsolescence isn't always bad, and it should always be something you're *allowed* to do, if it's explicitly what you're informed you're buying (to do so otherwise would be invalidating the consent of the trade). But the problem is that in the modern day, with all our regulation, our government and what not, it absolutely is possible, it absolutely is doable. It absolutely is something that can be afforded. Many of these companies pay zero tax due to trusts and where they are filed and many extremely disingenuous laws, in spite of making record profits. Many of them will predatorily fix their price to destroy others. But the funny thing is, they really don't need to. Managing to achieve their prices after having borne all the unfair costs and barriers to entry for smaller companies and guys, without being completely immoral and engaging in genuine slavery and things, is borderline impossible. They even have non-compete agreements, and as you've made clear inyour patent videos, they can literally make it illegal to use an idea to do it better than them. Maybe you go on to say something like this in your video(s), but i don't know. it feels a bit disingenuous to talk about price fixing, planned obsolescence and waht not, only to say it's ''not possible'' without making it explicitly clear you *only* mean in an *anarchist* world. It feels weirder to say planned obsolescence is moral and good when you're not making it explicitly clear it would only be good in a world where companies like Samsung and Apple are *collapsed* and *bankrupted* due to *non-competitive practices and extremely dependent systems*.

Oh wow, literally the next sentence you said explicitly if and only if it's maintained by aggressive cartels. (thereabouts).
Lmao. Nevermind.

[arcioko]

this video is good because it tells newcomers that you shouldn't be taken seriously with just the title

[alexanderg]

Everything is a trade-off. Features, convenience of repair or replacement, products vs services. And central to all - is time preference

[DarthAwar]

Sealed in Phone Batteries, Limited OS Updates we are lucky if a phone lasts 3 to 5 year's normally at a Equal or Higher price too laptops with similar performance and Specs when laptop's themselves last for 10 to 15+ years?

[epsilon]

Paraphrasing: "these socialist critics value quality as an engineering would not as an economist would"



So many physics-minded pharisees think they figured out economics when they cant ever get rid of their dogma of matter cannot be created and applying it to money/value too

[KumoKrieger]

Y'know, since became a libertarian years ago I never revisited planned obsolescence. Thanks for putting this into an easily digestible perspective

[daniellassander]

What planned obsolescence does is lets us use less resources.

I always go to mobile phones as an example, most people change their mobile phone every 2.7 years, so lets just round it to 3 years.

If we only use an object for 3 years why should we spend more money and more resources on creating a mobile phone that will last for 30 years? It will still only be used for 3 years. This make mobile phones cheaper as they can use less expensive components that will only last for 3 years, instead of buying expensive components that will last for 30 years.

Everything is built to fail, bridges, roads, buildings, street signs, shoes, cars etc etc, and it doesnt take a genius to figure out why. Because the world is constantly changing, people move and abandon buildings because no one wants to move there so they cant sell it, so its left to decay on its own instead of spending money to demolish it. We could make shoes that wont fail in your lifetime, but you wouldnt want to wear them. A 3-4 inch thick steel-plate instead of a rubber sole, really heavy shoes and they have almost no grip but they would last for the duration of your life. I mean you would never use them anyway as they would be almost useless.

[DarthAwar]

Aluminium is used because it deforms to absorb damage for safety not just costs Carbon fibre lasts until it just snaps meaning much more force is transferred to the Occupants, Also Steel is heavier and rusts but is cheaper than aluminium so that example is just purely false!