A part of me thinks that our weariness of spending "more" on architecture and beauty in cities is the same kind of weird frugality people experience with day to day goods.
My grandparents will endlessly complain about the lack of good quality products on the market (knives, power tools, clothing) but at the same time refuse to engage in locally-made albeit more expensive merchants.
Making buildings pretty may cost more (although, from my own understanding sourcing local tradespeople and using local materials ends up significantly cheaper over time) but the ROI is significantly better, both culturally and financially (pretty buildings age better, they become more appreciated over time in both financial and cultural value).
So is it the same with house goods? Are we just unwilling to accept that knives haven't got worse, it's just that we have mass-produced medium-quality low opportunity cost products that we can keep chucking out the window and complaining about? I rambled on, I totally agree that the efficiency of good/pretty architecture is completely understated.
Your grandparents' complaining isn't entirely pointless - sure, you can get a quality product from local merchants, but the price is disproportionately higher.
The thing they're actually missing is a mass-produced product that brings the cost down because of scale but at the same time is still designed with quality in mind. It's not that the best available knives got worse, the average $50 ones did.
It works for buildings too - whatever is the currently popular architectural style is typically what's is easiest to get. If everyone is getting pretty buildings, we can all get them without having to spend (much) more money.
In both cases, there is often a lack of genuine quality/value over the cheaper options anymore, too. Many higher priced tools and architectural options are now the cheap stuff with a better grade of finish and a higher price tag.
I built a campervan in between jobs and I take pride in bragging about the quality of my build design, especially because I installed much higher quality materials and systems for around 1/3 the cost of a manufactured RV.
For example, all rough wood framing is solid wood, all cabinetry is built from solid baltic birch plywood (zero OSB, zero MDF), stainless steel fasteners throughout, multiple layers of rigid insulation for through-winter occupancy, all cushions made with 1000d cordura, plumbed with PEX with Flair-it fittings, propane heat system, solar,etc.
My van is much lighter than RVs as a result, I don't need tandem wheels as most van RV builds do.
The most luxury of luxuriest RVs can't duplicate that. The overhead of hired labor and the coalescing of "we just do it this way" thinking among the RV trade results in a poor typical product.
Sounds like an awesome build! It's amazing how flimsy most of them are, even the ones you pay top dollar for. A friend and his wife were doing some major renovations to their house and bought a "luxury" 5th wheel camper to park onsite and live in during the renovation. At some point their heater failed and in the course of pulling it out and fixing it, we were totally blown away by the cheese grade construction of the thing! I'd always thought it was a "cheap campers" thing, but everything was particle board and plastic, except the road frame.
It's definitely true. Just as China has a reputation for making cheap goods, when China will make goods to whatever quality is paid for, up to and including world class craftsmanship. It's just the shop you bought it from wanted to sell at a lower price, so they paid for the cheap option.
Ironically, with the way production scales, if more people were willing/able to go for the high quality products, they'd probably wind up being somewhat cheaper than they are now.
Different case when we are talking deliberately exclusive luxury products, but for general purpose items like "a really good quality knife" we absolutely could be turning them out in vast numbers.
I think that has happened to some extent. Compare a 2008 smartphone to a 2023 one at like price point (or even cheaper); the 2008 one is a pretty fragile flimsy thing by comparison, generally (likely not even water resistant). Of course, smartphones benefited from _massive_ scale.
> Ironically, with the way production scales, if more people were willing/able to go for the high quality products, they'd probably wind up being somewhat cheaper than they are now.
It could be the result of people spending less time in public spaces - people often just go outside, drive a car to somewhere, get inside. So they care less about public spaces being pleasant.
> My grandparents will endlessly complain about the lack of good quality products on the market (knives, power tools, clothing) but at the same time refuse to engage in locally-made albeit more expensive merchants.
The core of that problem is that this is a self-reinforcing destructive loop, and it's not just for tools but for everything these days. Cheap imports, especially from China, grabbed the masses that were just interested in price, and large chain stores grabbed the masses that didn't want to spend hours driving around small specialist stores. The remaining people were not enough to support the few stores that did still sell quality products, so they closed down, so even more people went for cheap large-chain stuff because they couldn't expect that they'd be able to find what they need reliably at a small, local store. A lot of formerly popular brands (here in Germany, most infamously AEG, Telefunken and Grundig) ended up going bankrupt and now also sell relabeled cheap Chinese stuff.
And now, the revolution is eating its children, as the deluge of scam products and dropshippers on Amazon shows.
> My grandparents will endlessly complain about the lack of good quality products on the market (knives, power tools, clothing) but at the same time refuse to engage in locally-made albeit more expensive merchants.
Not to say that they don't have valid complaints, but some of this is definitely selection bias. People don't complain about the things that have gotten better. For example, today, it's not rare for a car to last 10 years without serious issues. There are a bunch of car owners who have driven cars to 1 million+ miles and these aren't some specialty car, but rather the run-of-the-mill cars coming off of factory lines.
There's lots of good knives out there at price points that many people can afford. I personally own a Global 3 knife set (chef, paring, utility) that meets 99% of my cutting needs and cost $130. I've had them for 9 years and I expect them to last at least another 10 years. $130 is expensive, but not over a 20-30 year period. Same thing with my pots and pans (all-clad) which I expect to last me another 20-30 years, if not the rest of my life.
My iPhone is 3 years old. It has been dropped more times than I can count, but still looks new. The glass on it is simply better quality than what existed before. No, it won't last a lifetime, but it will last an acceptable amount of time for something that gets as much use as it does.
And with the internet, quality goods are more accessible than ever. With a few clicks, I have buy pens and paper from Japan, cooking-ware from France and Panama hats from Cuenca, even if I live in a small town in the middle of nowhere.
That said, my biggest complaint is with appliances. Good appliances exist (e.g. Miele, Speed Queen), but in general, there's little correlation between price and quality. You can buy an LG fridge for $1500 or for $4500, but they use the same crappy compressor, so the more expensive one won't last any longer (and in fact will probably break sooner because it has more features on it that can break).
The market for heirloom quality products has always been tiny, and ever will be. But the availability of "good enough" products has never been better than it is today. You just have to put in more effort to find them since 95% of advice found online is shill.
The reason it's increasingly hard to find "good enough" in today's retail marketplace because 90% of us emphasize cost and convenience over fine design or workmanship. In past decades, if you wanted a solid product, you shopped at a bricks retailer you knew well (Sears, Macy's, Land's End) and you trusted their buyers to stock only good stuff. But today 90% of us shop online at retailers who stock mostly cheap disposable products because they're half the cost of "good enough" (and 1/10 the cost of heirloom), and because they can be delivered to to our door quickly and effortlessly. That's where double sigma (97%) of the supplier bell curve now. Unsurprisingly it takes a lot more effort for us to unearth the 3% that isn't ephemera, given we have to do the digging without retailers we trust.
What are you arguing? What's unfree about the section of the knives market relevant to the example? The government isn't forcing/incentivizing them to buy the cheaper products. Economic considerations are.
The average consumer lacks the knowledge and skill to objectively assess the quality of a knife, the seller is aware of that and manipulates them through advertising.
Is a democratic election free if everyone voted freely, but was under the influence of widespread propaganda?
If they weren't able to objectively assess the quality, they surely wouldn't be complaining, would they? But you mean pre-sale assessment, and that's again not an issue of skill because this is a repeat game. They are well aware by now that they're being manipulated but still price wins over quality.
I'm not going to argue the political metaphor because I feel the parallels there are too far apart to be a useful comparison.
This is predicated on viable options being present and available to consumers. In a lot of cases, for a lot of products, the options offered are a curated selection by the dominant forces, packaged up to appear different, but offering fundamentally very little actual difference.
In this scenario, you can not “vote with your wallet”.
I want a building with the pretty overhang. A dishwasher is $600 on Amazon. A pretty overhang on an existing building is priceless... you can't add it after-market. It always looks strange
My 1920s house has no dishwasher, but is pretty. I added a dishwasher for a few hundred dollars. When I redid the molding in our house (took it all off, repainted, repaired, and put it back on), I took my mouldings to the wood store just for fun to see how much it would cost. The dishwasher was cheaper. Not even because it's that great moulding, but because they just don't make it like that anymore.
My grandparents will endlessly complain about the lack of good quality products on the market (knives, power tools, clothing) but at the same time refuse to engage in locally-made albeit more expensive merchants.
Making buildings pretty may cost more (although, from my own understanding sourcing local tradespeople and using local materials ends up significantly cheaper over time) but the ROI is significantly better, both culturally and financially (pretty buildings age better, they become more appreciated over time in both financial and cultural value).
So is it the same with house goods? Are we just unwilling to accept that knives haven't got worse, it's just that we have mass-produced medium-quality low opportunity cost products that we can keep chucking out the window and complaining about? I rambled on, I totally agree that the efficiency of good/pretty architecture is completely understated.