"X are spending more money to Y worse Z" is really the distillation of life under capitalism.
It’s a major part of why we have anti-trust law, because the country knew where it would all go.
If you look at the top 10 companies by market cap every decade, you'll see the churn in them. The lineup in 1910:
• United States Steel Corporation • Standard Oil Company • American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) • Union Pacific Railroad / Pennsylvania Railroad • International Mercantile Marine Co. • American Tobacco Company • U.S. Rubber Co. • Central Leather Company • Amalgamated Copper Mining Company
And today:
1. Nvidia – ~$4.57 trillion 2. Apple Inc. (AAPL) – ~$4.04 trillion 3. Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL / GOOG) – ~$3.79 trillion 4. Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) – ~$3.63 trillion 5. Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) – ~$2.70 trillion 6. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC / 2330.TW) – ~$2.14 trillion 7. Meta Platforms Inc. (META) – ~$1.81 trillion 8. Broadcom Inc. (AVGO) – ~$1.57 trillion 9. Tesla Inc. (TSLA) – ~$1.40 trillion 10. Eli Lilly and Co. (LLY) – ~$1.18 trillion
US Steel - down because of deindustrialization, but it's still big
Standard Oil - broken up almost immediately by antitrust law
AT&T - also split by antitrust lawsuit, but then bought back the split companies and it's big again
Union Pacific - lost the top position because BN (from BNSF) bought more railroads than them, but it's still the second. It's also kind of hard to grow if you have to build rail tracks... in US.
Pennsylvania Railroad - failed to compete with interstate highways built in 30s and jet airlines starting from 60s when their main revenue was declining industrial heavy freight.
International Mercantile Marine Co. - might be a valid example
American Tobacco Company - broken by antitrust laws
U.S. Rubber Co. - I don't think they were that big in 1910. There were a lot of competitors.
Central Leather Company - ran out of leather and the investors liquidated the company to buy oil and gas shares instead
Amalgamated Copper Mining Company - ran out of copper.
https://www.charts.fyi/market-cap-evolution
What happened to Sears? IBM? etc.
The idea that giant companies grow to take over the world doesn't fit the data.
Musk showed that to be wrong.
Over 30 years ago my family spent an _extra_ $1000 (in ~1993 dollars) on a computer system to upgrade from a 15" CRT to a 17" and increase the RAM from 16MB to 32MB.
Yes, the device I'm currently using is worse than the equivalent model was 10 years ago. Thanks, capitalism.
And if I go further into history, I loved my phone with physical querty keyboard (nokia). There is no such thing on the market now, but I would love physical keyboard again.
> There is no such thing on the market now
Good news, the ~12-year-old BlackBerry Q20 is back, and shipping, [0] with an updated motherboard. It's a real product, not vaporware; I have two. It has a headphone jack, a small form-factor, removable micro-SD card slot, and a battery that takes little more than a guitar pick and #0 Philips screwdriver to replace.
Parts are cheap as hell as well, with a new screen costing under $25USD, and replacement keyboards under $30.
There's multiple clean sheet designs [1,2] of similar devices as well.
Though I expect them to be treated like fun little runabout cars: made for (typically young) people that can't justify the cost, leaving nobody to buy them, who then bemoan their discontinuation... due to poor sales
[0] https://zinwa.com/product/q25-full-device/
https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_e70-review-96.php
https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_e90-1857.php
https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_5730_xpressmusic-review-385.php
But on phones, the base model Pixel phones (6 inch) are a pretty good size balance IMO. I would not go bigger than that but it's probably very dependent on things like hand size. And I honestly don't want a physical keyboard on a phone now because swipe/gesture typing is so much better than pressing tiny buttons, even if they had physical feedback.
It is increasingly less and less mine at every iteration. I owned every bit of my dad's 386.
Go look at the goods people got in countries that didn't practice capitalism. They were worse in almost every way, more expensive if you could get them and often the things people wanted were completely unavailable because there was no market incentive informing production.
In my experience, this sort of comment is usually followed up by some personal preference of the commenter. Great. I don't want the same thing, so I guess something has to mediate the resource allocation and effort of society towards providing that want/need at a certain quality/price.. and guess how we do that?
I don't think you can look at any authoritarian regime and make assumptions about how an economic system performs. The autocratic features tend to cause society to break down.
For an actual anarchist production model, look no further than Open Source. It's built by people who self organize, to solve problems that are real (and often to make silly, inefficient things). It's often (but not always) motivated by something other than profit. It's people who believe in a credo organizing themselves around that credo and building the tools to sustain that credo.
But imagine if open source was behind an autocrat, there's no way it'd be nearly as rich or flourishing.
Maybe not the best argument to anyone responding from their Linux computers, as Torvalds is generally viewed as Benevolent Dictator For Life.
I'd look for more examples, but using Wikipedia for any sourcing feels too on-the-nose, considering Jimmy Wales seems to be in a similar BDFL position
> something has to mediate the resource allocation and effort of society towards providing that want/need at a certain quality/price
Yeah, exactly, not "squeezing every last bit of value out of a product to appease the shareholders", see "enshittification".
No they are not. They were simple and people were poor so were forced for fix them for eternity, don't use them and absolutely not abuse them. Nobody gave a fuck about their craft in USSR. Everything was made from cheaply and from scraps.
Few things that might've survived (and I don't see _anything_ in my parents or in-laws homes) are literally prime example suvivorship bias.
This. Freedom of choice is the simplest way to describe the advantage of capitalism (free markets) over socialism. Obviously, markets don't solve everything, but the US certainly is not some anarcho-capitalist's libertarian fantasy.
I guess the lived memory of socialism's failures has passed and experience is the best teacher.
But they absolutely simultaneously resulted in lower quality goods in many areas.
As an example, people used to buy hand crafted furniture after buying an home, and it lasted them a lifetime because it was made with such high quality material and with such craftsmanship. It was also very expensive, which motivated keeping it for so long and passing it on to future generations.
Today the furniture we buy is much less expensive as a percentage of income but the quality is crap and you may end up needing to replace it once the finish has worn off because refinishing would be as expensive as buying another crap quality piece of furniture.
The same goes for clothing and many other goods.
It’s not that nobody makes any high quality goods anymore, but they are several times the price and are very low volume because of the cheap crappy alternatives.
But that's not a problem and is likely a good thing. eg it lets you move more often which reduces your commute.
Though none of my Ikea furniture has ever failed and most of it is ~15 years old.
You can still move if furniture was more expensive and higher quality. You'd be able to sell what you have and buy new or used wherever you move. Most furniture is very consumable now so you just throw it away and buy new. You can't restore old furniture so the used market is full of stuff nobody really wants if they have the choice.
But it's so heavy!
> You can't restore old furniture so the used market is full of stuff nobody really wants if they have the choice.
My last mover actually did repair half of my furniture because he had a bunch of spare Ikea parts.
> but they are several times the price and are very low volume because of the cheap crappy alternatives
So high quality goods were expensive and still are expensive.
Not sure what your point is.
In most cases refinishing won't even be an option. Veneered plywood is bad enough but MDF doesn't even have that and some cheap end tables and interior doors are literally just a sheet of veneer affixed to cardboard ribs.
Not that I'm complaining. Those end tables are seriously impressive pieces of engineering given what they're made of and can had for barely more than pocket change.
And what we have in the US right now is not a free market, nor a well regulated and efficient one. You can call it crony capitalism, if you want, but when banks are bailed out to the tune of $Ts, Federal deficit spending is responsible for "positive" economic growth, and speculative companies are shoved into the indexes that make up what savings the working class has, it barely makes the cut.
Plenty of more "socialist" places with with free healthcare and rule of law, are more market capitalist. Enshitification happens where it is allowed to, because it is allowed to.