I've frequently gotten mad at knee-jerk liberal reactions against capitalism since the most recent economic crisis. The obvious flaws in capitalism revealed by the crisis are a good case for more government oversight. But they do not condemn capitalism as an overall concept.
A lot of The Secret Peace is devoted to showing how free trade and globalization have accomplished the miraculous in the last few decades: lifting millions of people out of poverty. Communist governments could not do this. China could not do this, for example, until it started allowing some free enterprise. We have a lot of evidence about this. Capitalism works.
So, in that respect, I completely agree with the broad point made by Arthur Brooks in this adorable animated video: free enterprise is a good system. So it's unfortunate that, like the knee-jerk liberals who want to paint capitalism with a broad brush of evil, he is emblematic of the Ron Swansons on the right who would do the same thing to government. They argue that since government has obvious flaws (chief among them being that it costs a lot of money, and can be wasteful), it must all be bad.
Why can no one on the right or left simply convey the truth that our system consists of a split partnership of government and business, and always will? America is, say, 70% business and 30% government, and it's perfectly necessary to debate if it should be 80%/20% instead, or 60%/40%. But why does everyone have to pontificate as if it will ever be 100%/0% or even 95%/5%?
Brooks's video makes such broad points that they easily resonate and seem correct in our hearts while we're watching. That's because they mostly ARE correct - on a broad, conceptual level. But in practice, and if you look at the details, there are some big "plot holes" he glosses over.
Let's look at the video step-by-step. His first trite example, of Muffin the dog, has the plot hole of NOT ENDING. He misses a step. We never learn its lesson: why shouldn't we eat the dog? He simply says because "its immoral." But there's a reason it's immoral, and it has to do with social conventions and our emotions due to Muffin being a "member of the family". Moral arguments can have logic, and this one does, he just doesn't mention it.
And it kind of disproves his point ... his point here being that sometimes logic has trouble winning over people who are arguing emotionally. It's a totally valid point. But he uses a bad example, since there are morally logical reasons not to eat Muffin. (Perhaps next time, to avoid this problem altogether, the family won't name their pets after delicious foods.)
His next, similar, point is that you shouldn't argue using anecdotal evidence. Sure, good point. Although it's not as if this video is instead leaning on lots of statistics.
He then compares the US to Greece, which is problematic. Michael Lewis writes some great stuff in Boomerang about how messed up and unique Greek culture is and how its corruption contributed to their crisis. America isn't that similar.
It's also disappointing how Brooks offhandedly mentions that "government just grows and grows" in a tone implying that it's obvious that this is a bad thing. But he hasn't yet shown that.
He next makes the case that money doesn't buy happiness and instead "earned success" is the best way to make us happy. He's right; recent studies show this. But he makes it sound like that's the ONLY way to create ANY happiness, which is not true. Being helped with your success is not worse than having no success at all. And at any rate, there are ways to help that COMBINE with hard work, not replace it, to pay off: does the college student who receives a scholarship not have to work hard for good grades?
He calls the welfare state "shoving marshmallows into people's mouths", as if the benefits it provides are extra confectionery treats - added money going to people who would otherwise be fine if they just tried a little harder. What he doesn't acknowledge is that many of those people ARE trying their hardest.
A leading theory in conservative thought says that handing out money to people will disincentivize them to work and make them lazy. Again, this is taking something that has a kernel of truth - since I'm sure that does happen with some people - and extrapolating it to all cases. Government programs should try to identify and focus on those in need who could not get help in any other way. Granted, this is a challenge, but it can work.
This is easier to see in Brooks's school metaphor. Here, Brooks is correct that people who don't try hard don't deserve good grades handed to them. But he assumes that the only reason a student would ever get a bad grade is that they didn't try hard enough. It's like The Secret of grading. In Brooks's school, no one has learning disabilities. No one has dyslexia. No one has no time to study because they're working two extra jobs or taking care of their grandmother.
In real schools, some people are at a disadvantage, and the government provides them extra help. (In this metaphor, the government actually represents the government, assuming this is a public school.) Help isn't provided by just adjusting their grades up - the equivalent of handing them money they didn't earn. Instead, they are helped by placing them in special classes where they get more attention, or providing tutors, or focusing on different types of learning, or providing lunch so they can focus on studying instead of wondering where there next meal is coming from.
The same holds true of the "welfare state". The goal of the government isn't to hand money to people who don't deserve it. This probably happens sometimes as a negative externality, sure, although I doubt the consequences are as bad as Brooks paints them. But there are millions of real people who are disadvantaged in some way and need help to get to a point at which their own hard work will even be effective.
We have hundreds of years of evidence that the free enterprise system works - it works as an overall concept, and it works better than any other system. But in practice, it always has loopholes, cracks in its edifice, people it overlooks. The job of good government is to close those loopholes.
Monday, July 16, 2012
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Why a computer only lasts three years
I recently read The Chairs are Where the People Go, which is a fun collection of essays by Misha Glouberman, with Sheila Heti. The book is just a low-key collection of Misha's idosyncratic observations on people and cities and society. This short essay stood out for me as presenting a small, but important point we often overlook:
Why a computer only lasts three yearsReprinted with permission.
People complain about how in our modern world things aren't built to last. So when you buy a phone, for instance, it breaks after two or three years and you have to buy another one, and the same with a computer, whereas it used to be that you could buy a typewriter or a telephone and it lasted for decades.
I see this as a pretty benign consequence of progress. The typewriter that lasted for fifty years wasn't built in a world where the machines we type on become a hundred times more powerful every three years. Would it really be so awesome if the DOS-based 8086 IBM PC that you bought in 1983 still functioned today? Presumably it would have cost twice as much to make that machine last that long. Now, for less than a week's salary for the average person, you can buy a machine that can access all the information in the world while copying a movie and storing more text than is contained in a floor of a university library. So you can buy this machine that does all these incredible things, knowing that in three years a machine will come along that does all those things and more, even more incredibly.
This built-in obsolescence doesn't come out of malevolence. It comes out of the breakneck speed of progress. We get so insanely much for our money. These machines are such incredibly great deals. And the return on the money accelerates so fast. There's no sense in the manufacturer spending extra money to make this year's machine durable enough to compete with the machines that will be around in three years.
Monday, May 21, 2012
Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature
Last month I read Steven Pinker's latest book, the ambitious 700-page The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, and it instantly became one of my favorite non-fiction books I've ever read. (It wins for most pages marked of any of my books … see photo.)
It's also one of the books most similar to mine - with the main difference being Pinker's focus on declining violence, which is the focus of just one of my 11 chapters. Essentially, it's a super-expanded version of The Secret Peace's chapter seven.
Pinker is able to go into a lot more detail, and while The Secret Peace focuses on current events, he delves deep into history to make his point that we are living in a less violent world. To me, the most compelling parts of the book were Pinker's colorful depictions of just how awful the past was. For example, he vividly writes that our ancestors "were infested with lice and parasites and lived above cellars heaped with their own feces. Food was bland, monotonous, and intermittent. Health care consisted of the doctor's saw and the dentist's pliers. Both sexes labored from sunrise to sundown, whereupon they were plunged into darkness." Any atrocity you can think of happening today, you can bet that it happened in the past as well, but worse, and more frequently, and with no one batting an eye.
This goes against many peoples' assumptions. In one survey that Pinker did himself, they presented people with sets of two time periods and asked them which they thought had higher rates of violence. In each case everyone thought the modern cultures were more violent, by a factor of 1.1 to 4.6. In reality, the earlier cases were actually more violent, by a factor of 1.6 to more than 30. For example, people guessed that 20th-century England was 14 percent more violent than 14th-century England, even though it was actually 95 percent less violent.
The horror of waterboarding, as bad as it is, doesn't hold a candle to medieval torture. The violence of boxing doesn't compare to the game of nailing a cat to a tree and trying to be the first to kill it with your head (yes, this was real.) Remember when wars used to have names like the "Thirty Years' War" and the "Eighty Years' War"? People in the past believed in the legitimacy and honor of war in a way we no longer do. In the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, wars broke out between European countries at a rate of about three new wars a year.
Pinker describes how the "shocking truth is that until recently [20th century] most people didn't think there was anything particularly wrong with genocide, as long as it didn't happen to them." He discusses the common medieval practice of enacting vengeance on someone by cutting their nose off, which is the source of our charming phrase, "to cut off your nose to spite your face." He talks about customs such as "slavery, serfdom, breaking on the wheel, disemboweling, bearbaiting, cat-burning, heretic-burning, witch-drowning, thief-hanging, public executions, the display of rotting corpses on gibbets, dueling, debtors' prisons, flogging, keelhauling, and other practices that passed from unexceptionable to controversial to immoral to unthinkable to not-thought-about."
At one point, Pinker shows a chart of the rate of battle deaths since the late 1940s (so, starting after WWII ended.) Our current decade enjoys an astoundingly low rate of worldwide battle deaths: 0.5 per 100,000 per year. This is lower than the homicide rate of most countries. In absolute numbers, annual battle deaths have fallen by more than 90 percent, from around half a million per year in the late 1940s to around thirty thousand a year today (and with a much larger population now, too.) He also talks about how effective peacekeeping is: studies have shown that the presence of peacekeepers reduces the risk of recidivism into another war by 80 percent. All other measures of violence have also declined: did you know that the rate of rape in the U.S. has declined by 80 percent just since 1973? (Actually, it was probably more, since women are more willing to report rape in recent years and it is now more often recognized as a serious crime.) Or that 24 countries have now banned not just child abuse, but even spanking altogether? We as a global culture have become so offended by violence that I even read an article recently about the possibility of banning football.
The past was a terrible, terrible place, and by comparison, today looks downright peaceful.
It's also one of the books most similar to mine - with the main difference being Pinker's focus on declining violence, which is the focus of just one of my 11 chapters. Essentially, it's a super-expanded version of The Secret Peace's chapter seven.
Pinker is able to go into a lot more detail, and while The Secret Peace focuses on current events, he delves deep into history to make his point that we are living in a less violent world. To me, the most compelling parts of the book were Pinker's colorful depictions of just how awful the past was. For example, he vividly writes that our ancestors "were infested with lice and parasites and lived above cellars heaped with their own feces. Food was bland, monotonous, and intermittent. Health care consisted of the doctor's saw and the dentist's pliers. Both sexes labored from sunrise to sundown, whereupon they were plunged into darkness." Any atrocity you can think of happening today, you can bet that it happened in the past as well, but worse, and more frequently, and with no one batting an eye.
This goes against many peoples' assumptions. In one survey that Pinker did himself, they presented people with sets of two time periods and asked them which they thought had higher rates of violence. In each case everyone thought the modern cultures were more violent, by a factor of 1.1 to 4.6. In reality, the earlier cases were actually more violent, by a factor of 1.6 to more than 30. For example, people guessed that 20th-century England was 14 percent more violent than 14th-century England, even though it was actually 95 percent less violent.
The horror of waterboarding, as bad as it is, doesn't hold a candle to medieval torture. The violence of boxing doesn't compare to the game of nailing a cat to a tree and trying to be the first to kill it with your head (yes, this was real.) Remember when wars used to have names like the "Thirty Years' War" and the "Eighty Years' War"? People in the past believed in the legitimacy and honor of war in a way we no longer do. In the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, wars broke out between European countries at a rate of about three new wars a year.
Pinker describes how the "shocking truth is that until recently [20th century] most people didn't think there was anything particularly wrong with genocide, as long as it didn't happen to them." He discusses the common medieval practice of enacting vengeance on someone by cutting their nose off, which is the source of our charming phrase, "to cut off your nose to spite your face." He talks about customs such as "slavery, serfdom, breaking on the wheel, disemboweling, bearbaiting, cat-burning, heretic-burning, witch-drowning, thief-hanging, public executions, the display of rotting corpses on gibbets, dueling, debtors' prisons, flogging, keelhauling, and other practices that passed from unexceptionable to controversial to immoral to unthinkable to not-thought-about."
At one point, Pinker shows a chart of the rate of battle deaths since the late 1940s (so, starting after WWII ended.) Our current decade enjoys an astoundingly low rate of worldwide battle deaths: 0.5 per 100,000 per year. This is lower than the homicide rate of most countries. In absolute numbers, annual battle deaths have fallen by more than 90 percent, from around half a million per year in the late 1940s to around thirty thousand a year today (and with a much larger population now, too.) He also talks about how effective peacekeeping is: studies have shown that the presence of peacekeepers reduces the risk of recidivism into another war by 80 percent. All other measures of violence have also declined: did you know that the rate of rape in the U.S. has declined by 80 percent just since 1973? (Actually, it was probably more, since women are more willing to report rape in recent years and it is now more often recognized as a serious crime.) Or that 24 countries have now banned not just child abuse, but even spanking altogether? We as a global culture have become so offended by violence that I even read an article recently about the possibility of banning football.
The past was a terrible, terrible place, and by comparison, today looks downright peaceful.
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Getting better, one step at a time
Take a look at this great ad from Image Comics, one in a series featuring quotes from their creators. This one shows writer/artist Natalie Nourigat saying "There's always a better way to do things. You keep your eyes and ears open, never assume that you know it all, and you just keep improving."
This type of thinking - a work ethic and desire to improve one's work - is not only personally inspiring, it's also what's driving the Secret Peace. Everyone keeps improving.
At the individual level, each person is inspired to improve out of self-interest, but the accumulation of all those bits of self-interest translates into huge gains at the level of society. Of course, self-interest can refer to A) the desire to get a better income, or more praise, or ways to impress a mate, but also B) the innate desire to be better and challenge oneself.
Cynics will say that not everyone shares Natalie's work ethic. And they're right. There are certainly millions of people who are lazy. There are millions of people who don't like their jobs. There are millions of people who get along just fine doing what they're doing and don't feel motivated to challenge themselves. But I bet the proportion of people who are lazy or unmotivated is much smaller than our worst assumptions lead us to believe. Of course, there are also millions of people who don't have the time or energy or resources to go above and beyond because just getting by is exhausting.
But I don't think those people are a negative drain on society; rather, they're just sort of neutral. They're still contributing, but maybe not at Natalie's pace of productivity. The more important thing to realize is how few people are actively trying to be worse at their jobs - surely a small number. If the vast majority of people are either eagerly pushing forward or neutral, civilization in aggregate moves forward. This is why productivity keeps increasing and rarely regresses. So, not everyone needs to work quite as hard as Natalie.
This work ethic has always existed, but progress is happening much faster nowadays due to improved communications technology and information storage. Because of it, Natalie can easily share what she learns and inspire others. In fact, she does this, posting on her blog guides, sketches, updates, and even samples of influences. Did you know YouTube is filled with artists who have recorded themselves working as videos so others can watch and learn from the process? (Like this great one from Sara Pichelli.) Other artists post step-by-step tutorials as well, such as this one by Kat Laurange.
When I was in school for art, we didn't have any of this. (Not to mention Meetups, such as the Central Park Sketch Meetup, of course.) It is so much easier for a novice to get started with art nowadays, and get free training. Some of them will turn into great artists, whereas in the past they would never had had the opportunity (only a select few people ever got into drawing schools or got to be an artist's apprentice).
It's only a small percentage of people that need to be instructing or pushing the envelope at any given time, but that knowledge adds up faster since it's now all easily available. Anything Natalie learns - which pen works best, how to compose a page, how to schedule her day - she passes along and other people can pick up. And of course, bad information gets shared as well, but the cream eventually always rises to the top. Now think about how that's true in every field, not just art. Anyone innovating and teaching helps to drag all the rest of us along, constantly building a smarter, more advanced civilization.
At the individual level, each person is inspired to improve out of self-interest, but the accumulation of all those bits of self-interest translates into huge gains at the level of society. Of course, self-interest can refer to A) the desire to get a better income, or more praise, or ways to impress a mate, but also B) the innate desire to be better and challenge oneself.
Cynics will say that not everyone shares Natalie's work ethic. And they're right. There are certainly millions of people who are lazy. There are millions of people who don't like their jobs. There are millions of people who get along just fine doing what they're doing and don't feel motivated to challenge themselves. But I bet the proportion of people who are lazy or unmotivated is much smaller than our worst assumptions lead us to believe. Of course, there are also millions of people who don't have the time or energy or resources to go above and beyond because just getting by is exhausting.
But I don't think those people are a negative drain on society; rather, they're just sort of neutral. They're still contributing, but maybe not at Natalie's pace of productivity. The more important thing to realize is how few people are actively trying to be worse at their jobs - surely a small number. If the vast majority of people are either eagerly pushing forward or neutral, civilization in aggregate moves forward. This is why productivity keeps increasing and rarely regresses. So, not everyone needs to work quite as hard as Natalie.
This work ethic has always existed, but progress is happening much faster nowadays due to improved communications technology and information storage. Because of it, Natalie can easily share what she learns and inspire others. In fact, she does this, posting on her blog guides, sketches, updates, and even samples of influences. Did you know YouTube is filled with artists who have recorded themselves working as videos so others can watch and learn from the process? (Like this great one from Sara Pichelli.) Other artists post step-by-step tutorials as well, such as this one by Kat Laurange.
When I was in school for art, we didn't have any of this. (Not to mention Meetups, such as the Central Park Sketch Meetup, of course.) It is so much easier for a novice to get started with art nowadays, and get free training. Some of them will turn into great artists, whereas in the past they would never had had the opportunity (only a select few people ever got into drawing schools or got to be an artist's apprentice).
It's only a small percentage of people that need to be instructing or pushing the envelope at any given time, but that knowledge adds up faster since it's now all easily available. Anything Natalie learns - which pen works best, how to compose a page, how to schedule her day - she passes along and other people can pick up. And of course, bad information gets shared as well, but the cream eventually always rises to the top. Now think about how that's true in every field, not just art. Anyone innovating and teaching helps to drag all the rest of us along, constantly building a smarter, more advanced civilization.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Happiness is a warm gun - to fewer people
Great article in The New Yorker about America's gun culture, and almost in passing it mentions some superb statistics:
- The bad news first: The U.S. is still the country with the highest rate of gun ownership in the world. Second place is Yemen, so that tells you the kind of company we keep. And they have half the rate. However, there is good news:
- In 1973, there were guns in roughly 1 in 2 U.S. households; by 2010 that had dropped to 1 in 3 households.
- In 1980, nearly 1 in 3 Americans owned a gun; by 2010 that had dropped to 1 in 5.
- "One reason that gun ownership is declining, nationwide, might be that high-school shooting clubs and rifle ranges at summer camps are no longer common."
Monday, April 23, 2012
Is bullying a crisis or a myth?
I haven't seen the movie Bully yet, but I've read plenty about it, including this article in last week's The Week. I love the format of The Week, which summarizes all media stories from each week. In this article, it presents opposing viewpoints about the issue.
So, in the first paragraph, it mentions USA Today's claim (and the movie's) that there is a bullying "epidemic" going on. It also describes a Reuters article that agrees with that dire assessment and goes further by describing the terrors of cyber-bullying as well.
The next paragraph describes the counter-point to that claim, from The Wall Street Journal. "This 'bullying crisis' is largely a myth … kids today are 'safer and better-behaved than they were when I was growing up in the 1970s and ’80s.' Adolescent mortality, accidents, sex, and drug use are all down from their levels of a few decades ago. Acceptance of homosexuality is up, and the percentage of students who reported 'being afraid of attack or harm at school' has declined from 12 percent in 1995 to 4 percent in 2009."
The final paragraph provides a counter-point to the counter-point, bringing it back around to the original claim, with high-school student Katy Butler writing in TheDailyBeast.com that she was bullied a lot. She says 43 percent of teens say they've been bullied. Mike Huckabee agrees with her, too.
So, is Bullying a crisis or a myth? Well, why are those the only two options? Can it be neither? It's a real problem, of course, and not a myth. But "crisis" is an overblown term, since it's probably always been a problem and has most likely even gotten better recently. (And Katy Butler's touching testimony is mostly useless as evidence since it is only one anecdote.) I wish there was an easier way for the media to convey, "Hey, this is a problem and we should pay attention to it, but that doesn't necessarily mean the world is ending." Instead we get the default black-or-white views, with no sensible middle ground setting.
It's obvious bullying has always existed. But perhaps the reason we are just noticing bullying as a problem now is that our standards for violence keep changing - what we are willing to tolerate keeps decreasing. This is what Steven Pinker shows in his excellent The Better Angels of Our Nature. Basically, the same amount of bullying in the past would not have been upsetting to us.
PS. In other teen news, rates of teenage pregnancy, births, and abortions in the U.S. have fallen to their lowest level in nearly 40 years. The number of teen girls getting pregnant dropped 42% from its peak in 1990; teen births declined 35% since 1991; and teen abortions declined 59% from their peak in 1988. Also, the percentage of children experiencing unwanted exposure to online pornography declined from 34% in 2005 to 23% in 2010. So, maybe the kids are alright.
Source: The Futurist, May-June 2012.
So, in the first paragraph, it mentions USA Today's claim (and the movie's) that there is a bullying "epidemic" going on. It also describes a Reuters article that agrees with that dire assessment and goes further by describing the terrors of cyber-bullying as well.
The next paragraph describes the counter-point to that claim, from The Wall Street Journal. "This 'bullying crisis' is largely a myth … kids today are 'safer and better-behaved than they were when I was growing up in the 1970s and ’80s.' Adolescent mortality, accidents, sex, and drug use are all down from their levels of a few decades ago. Acceptance of homosexuality is up, and the percentage of students who reported 'being afraid of attack or harm at school' has declined from 12 percent in 1995 to 4 percent in 2009."
The final paragraph provides a counter-point to the counter-point, bringing it back around to the original claim, with high-school student Katy Butler writing in TheDailyBeast.com that she was bullied a lot. She says 43 percent of teens say they've been bullied. Mike Huckabee agrees with her, too.
So, is Bullying a crisis or a myth? Well, why are those the only two options? Can it be neither? It's a real problem, of course, and not a myth. But "crisis" is an overblown term, since it's probably always been a problem and has most likely even gotten better recently. (And Katy Butler's touching testimony is mostly useless as evidence since it is only one anecdote.) I wish there was an easier way for the media to convey, "Hey, this is a problem and we should pay attention to it, but that doesn't necessarily mean the world is ending." Instead we get the default black-or-white views, with no sensible middle ground setting.
It's obvious bullying has always existed. But perhaps the reason we are just noticing bullying as a problem now is that our standards for violence keep changing - what we are willing to tolerate keeps decreasing. This is what Steven Pinker shows in his excellent The Better Angels of Our Nature. Basically, the same amount of bullying in the past would not have been upsetting to us.
PS. In other teen news, rates of teenage pregnancy, births, and abortions in the U.S. have fallen to their lowest level in nearly 40 years. The number of teen girls getting pregnant dropped 42% from its peak in 1990; teen births declined 35% since 1991; and teen abortions declined 59% from their peak in 1988. Also, the percentage of children experiencing unwanted exposure to online pornography declined from 34% in 2005 to 23% in 2010. So, maybe the kids are alright.
Source: The Futurist, May-June 2012.
Saturday, April 7, 2012
Smoothies reveal: Things work better now
My wife Rachel got this smoothie maker as a gift. (Yum!) It's hard to read in my fuzzy phone photo, but the company's name is Back to Basics and their tagline is "Back to Things that Work."
The smoothie machine does work well, but why wouldn't it? Their slogan irks me. I don't know why we tend to think otherwise, but things work much better now than they ever did. There are several reasons for this. One is the increase in government regulations over products. You can argue that this sometimes leads to more expensive products, since extra work needs to be put in to ensure they meet standards, but the result is that products much more often meet the standards. This is really important in cases where safety is an issue.
Another reason things work better now is the whole concept behind the Secret Peace - compounding information. It's in every company's best interest to make their products better, and the longer a certain product has been around, the more it has been improved. And as one company improves a product, its competitors often have to make the same improvements in order to keep up and remain competitive. New features are often introduced at luxury prices before economies of scale and increases in efficiency make them cheaper and they become standard.
Cars are a great example of this. Think how many features cars have now by default that would have been considered luxuries a few decades ago - CD players, automatic locks, air bags, and tons more. Even windshield wipers and seat belts were not a given, if you go back far enough. I don't drive ever since I moved to NYC, so in the rare cases when I get in a car, it seems there's often some new feature I hadn't heard about. Car people probably take these for granted, but I am amazed at the fact that the car seat warms up, for example. That just strikes me as absurdly futuristic. Or even unlocking the doors remotely. Back in my day we used keys - remember those?
Another reason for today's improved products is the ability for the market to make better decisions because of the availability of online reviews. Bad products can't fool us for long, and they all eventually get weeded out. Paul Adams, in his great book Grouped, describes this: "Online, people are overwhelmingly positive about businesses. One reason for this is in the last 50 years, product quality has dramatically increased. Today, most products meet basic manufacturing quality codes, and they work for a long time." (p. 141)
The next time you use any product, think back to if it would have worked better a few years or decades ago. If Windows is giving you a headache, think, "Was my Commodore 64 better?" If plugging your iPod into your car stereo is on the fritz, think, "Was it better when I had a cd player in the trunk?" (Yes, I had this.) And if you have to wait an extra ten minutes at the laundromat because one of the washers is broken, ask yourself, "Would I prefer washing my shirts down in the river?"
Things work better NOW, Back to Basics.
The smoothie machine does work well, but why wouldn't it? Their slogan irks me. I don't know why we tend to think otherwise, but things work much better now than they ever did. There are several reasons for this. One is the increase in government regulations over products. You can argue that this sometimes leads to more expensive products, since extra work needs to be put in to ensure they meet standards, but the result is that products much more often meet the standards. This is really important in cases where safety is an issue.
Another reason things work better now is the whole concept behind the Secret Peace - compounding information. It's in every company's best interest to make their products better, and the longer a certain product has been around, the more it has been improved. And as one company improves a product, its competitors often have to make the same improvements in order to keep up and remain competitive. New features are often introduced at luxury prices before economies of scale and increases in efficiency make them cheaper and they become standard.
Cars are a great example of this. Think how many features cars have now by default that would have been considered luxuries a few decades ago - CD players, automatic locks, air bags, and tons more. Even windshield wipers and seat belts were not a given, if you go back far enough. I don't drive ever since I moved to NYC, so in the rare cases when I get in a car, it seems there's often some new feature I hadn't heard about. Car people probably take these for granted, but I am amazed at the fact that the car seat warms up, for example. That just strikes me as absurdly futuristic. Or even unlocking the doors remotely. Back in my day we used keys - remember those?
Another reason for today's improved products is the ability for the market to make better decisions because of the availability of online reviews. Bad products can't fool us for long, and they all eventually get weeded out. Paul Adams, in his great book Grouped, describes this: "Online, people are overwhelmingly positive about businesses. One reason for this is in the last 50 years, product quality has dramatically increased. Today, most products meet basic manufacturing quality codes, and they work for a long time." (p. 141)
The next time you use any product, think back to if it would have worked better a few years or decades ago. If Windows is giving you a headache, think, "Was my Commodore 64 better?" If plugging your iPod into your car stereo is on the fritz, think, "Was it better when I had a cd player in the trunk?" (Yes, I had this.) And if you have to wait an extra ten minutes at the laundromat because one of the washers is broken, ask yourself, "Would I prefer washing my shirts down in the river?"
Things work better NOW, Back to Basics.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)