Summary
It’s become a bit of a platitude to state that products were manufactured better in ‘the olden days’, but as [The Meandrous Engineer] covers in a recent video essay, the truth is a lot more greyscale and nuanced than something so trite. The very short version is that it is the dominant culture of a nation in which products are manufactured that determines how many shortcuts and potential product life-shortening decisions are made. This same culture works its way down into company culture, including the engagement of the so-called C-suite with the engineers and folk who keep the now mostly automated manufacturing lines running, as well as vice-versa. Old-school die-cast models and incandescent light bulbs saw their own series of manufacturing shortcuts, including a pre-World War 2 scandal about the artificial limiting of the lifespan of lightbulbs so that customers would buy more of them. This foreshadows what happened as soon as plastics and computer-aided design and manufacturing came on the scene. Post-WW2, people like W. Edwards Deming were welcome guests in Japan and other rebuilding nations, introducing the Lean method of manufacturing which was at the time not deemed desirable in a post-war USA. For Japan, South Korea and other nations in the region this meant a boom in manufacturing, with a quality level that would ultimately trounce that of their Western equivalents. The argument here is that Japan’s culture of efficiency, of respect for materials and loyalty both to one’s company and its workers is why this method produces much better results, with better working conditions than in nations with a different culture. This is exemplified by e.g. former Nintendo president [Satoru Iwata] taking a 50% pay cut in 2014 rather than lay off any people. Although plastics and automated manufacturing with CAD/CAM catch a lot of flak, ultimately it’s about how these tools are used. Cheaper manufacturing and more versatile materials have made life much cheaper and more convenient for many of us, while also allowing for us hobbyists to make projects that would otherwise be impossible, including sending off a KiCad project plus BOM and 3D model for an enclosure to print, extrude or mill to have it produced for effectively peanuts. If we do want to counteract this penny pinching by certain companies, we need to do more than just voting with our wallets. We also need to understand how these products are made, whether a certain choice like plating a car’s lug nut to make it seem better than it is good or bad. Here the right to repair movement has a lot in common, as it pushes a modicum of responsibility on to the customer to understanding fairly low-level details about a product, rather than to be just a consumer who is happy to e-waste when it breaks and buy a new gadget or appliance. I wish people would stop spouting this misinformation about the lifespan of lightbulbs! An incandescent can either burn at a higher brightness (and more efficiently) for a short time, or dimly for far longer. The agreement between manufacturers was to agree a common standard that had a balance between efficient and bright vs inefficient and dim.
scandal about the artificial limiting of the lifespan of lightbulbs so that customers would buy more of them It was more a response towards different manufacturers cheating the customers with bulbs that were less efficient, or simply lying about their longevity and passing bad bulbs with the good bulbs because quality control was poor. Getting a longer life out of the bulb also made the color temperature lower. The selling point of the tungsten filament bulb was that it was brighter, whiter, and cost less to run. To make it last longer, you had to compromise on those very points. Back then light bulbs were expensive, and so was electricity, and the new tungsten bulbs were competing with cheaper older tech like carbon filament lights or even gas lighting so the Phoebus cartel did not have a monopoly on lighting options. Why? The problem with cheating is called a “lemon market”: when the customers no longer trust the product, they pick the cheapest one to limit the damage and that rewards the cheaters. It becomes a race to the bottom, so the cartel solved that race by picking a standard. If they hadn’t and left well enough alone, eventually the government would have butted in and mandated the same thing: increase brightness and efficiency, cut the running time as a compromise. This story is often told with a narrative of “capitalism bad” because it’s easy to spin it that way if you don’t look too closely at the technical, economic, and social factors that were actually at play. This story is often told with a narrative of “capitalism bad” because it’s easy to spin it that way if you don’t look too closely at the technical, economic, and social factors that were actually at play. Ahem. Yeah. The US American model of capitalism/employement is.. special. Foremost, because it’s all about competition and max profits, people are second. Which ultimately leads to a downwards spiral until there’s only one competitor left who then dictactes price (and perhaps continues to produce low quality). The so-called shark tank, in which big fish eat the small fish until they’re eaten themselves. Running a fine business that just runs “okay”, serves a purpose to local community and doesn’t need to expand is something mindblowing, apparently. (I’m mentioning the US because it tries to export culture and business culture to the world. Many international businesses see it as a role model, unfortunately.) Survivorship bias. Junk products have always existed (AFAIK – I’ve read stories from the late 1970s about cheap and absolute garbage VCRs that barely had their necessary components working, let alone worked as a whole. Similar stories with TVs. All that stuff was thrown away long ago and no specimen survived – unless maybe in an attic somewhere… who knows… I cannot prove anything before that and I can barely prove what I just wrote) Its not just survivorship bias. Old TVs and VCRs were designed to be serviceable, They were expensive, but repairable. Then we started shifting towards disposable tech. Actually, older CRTs used radioactive materials, for example thorium in tube emitter so they were DESIGNED to last for a short period and increase sales. I read an article a long time ago about a product (I forgot what it was, I think a kitchen machine) that over it’s manufacturing lifetime was optimized so much that it had lost 70% of it’s weight and about halved the component count in about 30 years of production, meaning that the original was almost guaranteed to last a lifetime, and the last iteration failed once in a lifetime for half of the owners. At a lower cost to people, to the environment, and with better functionality. But people still preferred the old ones, but would not pay the price for it.