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Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

Not an economist, but I suspect that if you could convince the mainstream to only buy very high quality, durable goods that this would naturally drive them to buy locally (at least in the long-industrialized first world).

However it would also naturally drive them to buy fewer things less frequently, which is anathema to capitalism in general. And indeed it would tend to slow innovation since a faster cycle gives new businesses more opportunity to replace an incumbent!

Note that this argument applies to software as well, although the "cost" to us is cognitive rather than economic.

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> Not an economist, but I suspect that if you could convince the mainstream to only buy very high quality, durable goods that this would naturally drive them to buy locally (at least in the long-industrialized first world).

Not necessarily. Such an effort would also have to go hand-in-hand with convincing local producers to make the very high quality goods you want people to buy.

I'm an American, but if I want high-quality, I tend to get Japanese stuff, since their culture seems to value quality more. American business culture seems to be more about cutting corners and settling for barely good enough in the name of short term profit.

I'd be careful with buying "Japanese" stuff, many companies are aware of this consumer strategy and fabricate japanese name brand products elsewhere.

Also, plenty made in the usa products are of high quality.

For US products, it depends on where it's made and what it is. Most American-branded stuff is made elsewhere (China usually), so that's not really "American". For stuff actually made in the USA, a lot of times it is high quality; if the company were going for lowest cost, they wouldn't make it in the US to begin with. However, this isn't so true of cars still. American cars have gotten better, but they're still not as good as Japanese cars for the most part (Ford is probably the best of the bunch though, Chrysler is probably the worst). But then you have to consider what they're competing against: Japanese and European cars, which are both places with high labor rates and excellent engineering. If your choice was between an American car from GM or Ford, or a Chinese car from Cherry or an Indian car from Tata, obviously the American car is the best choice. So it's all relative.

As for "Japanese" stuff, that's true: there's a bunch of Japanese-branded stuff that's made in China, and it's definitely not of the quality of Japanese-made stuff of yesteryear.

> As for "Japanese" stuff, that's true: there's a bunch of Japanese-branded stuff that's made in China, and it's definitely not of the quality of Japanese-made stuff of yesteryear.

There are also problems with literal counterfeit Japanese products. One example I'm familiar with is Hakko soldering stations; it's apparently not to hard to find Chinese kock-offs who duplicated the case, packaging, and branding but otherwise use a substandard design with substandard components.

Interestingly, I just got a Hakko FX-888D last year, so I did a little googling to see what you were talking about, and sure enough, there's apparently a bunch of fakes being sold.

However, the people who posted about fakes all seemed to be saying the same thing: they bought it (usually on Ebay) from a seller in China.

Well, what do you expect?

Yes, if you buy something name-brand from a seller in China, who sends it directly to you from China, you can expect it to be a counterfeit.

I can get behind the philosophy of buying more expensive high quality goods, the only problem is that its very hard to find them. Many brands have decided to sell cheap goods for a large pricetag as status symbols, or have caved to pressure and reduced quality while not lowering prices in an grab for short term profit. Sometimes it takes much less cognitive effort to buy the cheapest thing even if it is of poor quality, at least your not getting ripped off.

> if you could convince the mainstream to only buy very high quality, durable goods...

Hmm, most of the mainstream are barely scraping along as it is, asking them to multiply their spend by a factor of 10 won't work unless their own fortunes also improve by a similar factor.

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