by Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds
Quality, quality of life, and well-being are not easily quantified, so they are ignored.
I often write about the Tyranny of Price, the rarely examined assumption that lower prices are all that matters.
Thanks to the Tyranny of Price, the quality of many goods has plummeted. Obsolescence is either planned or the result of inferior components that fail, crippling the entire product. As correspondent Mark G. has observed, the poor quality we now accept as a global standard wasn’t available at any price in the 1960s– such poor quality goods were simply not manufactured and sold.
There is another even more pernicious consequence of the Tyranny of Price: globalization, which makes two promises to participants: 1) lower prices everywhere and 2) manufacturing work that will raise millions of poor people in developing economies out of poverty.