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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

But they're cheaper, by something like 75% (and even more when you take energy efficiency into account). [1]

For people who move every few years, whose requirements change (from solo to 4-person family), and so on, the current situation is pretty ideal.

Spend less money, change models more frequently to fit your changing needs, and often it's even cheaper to buy a new one than to get it fixed -- which for consumers is amazing! (Because repair costs certainly aren't getting cheaper.)

Of course, the negative externalities on the environment are pretty clear and potentially horrific. As well as what it means for cultural values where more and more things are disposable.

But that's the answer, that's why they don't last 50 years -- because consumers actually prefer something that lasts only a few years at 25% of the price.

[1] http://www.aei.org/publication/the-good-old-days-are-now-tod...

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Less expensive can be desirable. And perhaps the market could even find an equilibrium where some people would pay a bit more for appliances to be capital goods with longevity and serviceability and others would prefer the cell phone model.

But instead, when a consumer good becomes less expensive, our federal reserve overlords increase inflation to make sure most everybody is still being "encouraged" to work full time. This is their explicit policy! So we end up with the downsides of cost optimization (cheapness), but not the benefit (actually saving money).

Household appliances have become much cheaper (inflation-adjusted and also in terms of hours worked to buy them) in the last 50 years so people are actually saving money. I don't see how you tie any Federal reserve/Central banks policy to the longevity of products.

Indeed, if products were getting cheaper in absolute terms (via deflation) not just in relative terms (inflation-adjusted, as is the situation now) this would not lead to people buying high quality products which last because the expectation would be that they would be cheaper to replace in future.

This is so I don't see why people ignore. I bet you can go buy high end appliances that will last 50 years. But would anyone want to be using it in 50 years?

> But would anyone want to be using it in 50 years?

I would happily use a washing machine, dishwasher or fridge that is 50 years old. The only tech advances related to those gadgets that would concern me are CFCs in the refrigerant.

Which in and of itself is not a problem until the refrigerator finally needs to be disposed of.

Eh. When I moved from an apartment with a ~30 year old dishwasher to one with a new one, I was pretty startled by how much cleaner it got my dishes when I didn't pre-rinse them as much as I used to have to.

Newer fridges have drastically better energy efficiency. It literally takes less resources to make and throw away 5 fridges over these 50 years than to produce the electricity that this old monster wastes uselessly over the same time.

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