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Comment by pm90 | Hacker News Reader

I'm only slightly surprised that a comment full of anecdote without a shred of actual scientific evidence is the top comment in this story.

MBA's have optimized everything... which is great! We don't need to spend incredible amounts on labor. We don't need to buy incredibly large homes. Make work more efficient... its the only way to compete with low cost emerging economic markets. Specialization and efficiencies are the only way to remain competitive.

From my perspective, the only real structural damage has been done by the success of concentrated moneyed interests in regulatory capture. We need to tax these efficient corporations and individuals fairly, and use those tax dollars to invest in universal healthcare, environmental protection and education.

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They've optimized for the wrong things-- short-term profit while making the products crappy. For example almost all of the household appliances I've purchased in the past 7 years have failed because of poor design and inferior plastic parts. My expensive oven doesn't have enough insulation around the electronic control and its failed from heat, etc etc.

More anecdotes. While you complain about your Owen, the efficient supply chains built across nations has enabled keeping costs low enough for Americans with stagnating wages to afford a reasonable standard of living.

You can cry anecdotes all you want, but planned obselesence is a highly observed and we'll documented phenomenon. A very cursory Google search will tell you as much.

I wonder if the reason wages are stagnating is that the "efficiency" is a result of skimming off the top, and removing much of the value added by removing people from the process. Maybe appliances failing as soon as the warranty expires introduces market externalities that someone will dearly pay for some day...

Or maybe we are paying for it today! Have you ever heard of the [broken window fallacy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window)? Basically, someone may claim that breaking windows increases spending on window repairs, which is a net benefit to the economy. This, of course, ignores what could have been bought had the window not been broken to begin with.

I don't really believe in planned obsolescence if it isn't enforced by electronics. In the 20th century it was common to use metal for things that we use plastics nowadays. Metal is expensive but lasts longer, plastic is cheap but it breaks easily. If you want to provide a cheap product then metal is out of the question. The end result is that we have too many crappy products but that doesn't mean they have been engineered to fail.

One of the big efficiencies they've found though, is that no one prices externalities properly.

By damaging the rest of society in ways that they're not directly accounted for, they find new ways to profit. Many have stayed competitive by costing the human race more that they provide in the long term in many cases.

Who is "they" here? Executives with MBA's? Middle managers? If so, this is true but only in aggregate. If you see private corporations strip mining the environment and society for profits, the Government and regulations are meant to be a check on that.

Then maybe we should focus on fixing the wage stagnation problem, and not kicking the can.

I mean, YES, of course we should. That’s what I’m arguing for. Tax wealth better, use the generated revenue to improve people’s lives in scientifically proven ways (Ie provide healthcare, poverty assistance, more funding for education). Let’s accept that our world has changed, but let’s use the benefits of that efficiency by building a more equitable and just society.

But we won’t. Most societies that become too successful suffer a similar fate. They become too polarized, and destroy the very foundations of what them great.

I do hope the US is different. Most of humanity has lived under authoritarian rule. For a brief period of time it seemed like a democracy could be the most powerful country in the world. But that’s fast unraveling...

Are you suggesting that scientific evidence for product shrinkage or for an increase in the money supply can't be found, and so my arguments have to be anecdotal?

> increase in the money supply

There is scientific evidence for this, yes.

> scientific evidence for product shrinkage

No. The term "product shrinkage" itself is undefined, or poorly defined. You're saying the digitization of services has rendered unnecessary a lot of material needs. Counterpoint: it has enabled commercial transactions on an unbelievable scale, enabling smaller industries to reach wider audiences.

Just because you mix in a fact with an anecdote doesn't make the whole argument better :)

The research referred to in the article is my evidence for what I called 'product shrinkage' and what the article calls 'reduced material needs', namely:

He had found substantial evidence not only that Americans were consuming fewer resources per capita but also that they were consuming less in total of some of the most important building blocks of an economy: things such as steel, copper, fertilizer, timber, and paper. Total annual U.S. consumption of all of these had been increasing rapidly prior to 1970. But since then, consumption had reached a peak and then declined.

The rolodex and the ice cream were just examples to ground the idea. I'm sure there's more to the story than spreadsheet-wielding MBAs, but I think it's reasonable to claim (and evidence can be provided for): 1) Spreadsheets have been used for two generations (VisiCalc, 1979) 2) MBAs are trained to optimize things like capital and labor costs, including the price and quantity of materials used in the products and services they manage.

“Optimizing” so you’re labeling is lying about how much you food your selling is not optimization, it’s fraud.

Making products as low quality as possible is simply destroying your brand. It’s not actually optimizing for efficiency or anything but how effectively you can trade brand loyalty for some quick cash.

Sure, it’s easier to try and cheat your customers than actually improve efficiency and our compete your competitors. But, that’s a long term losing strategy.

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