If build quality and price go up, you can revert to an economy where you would fix your broken appliance once or twice before you replacing it.
But what's the incentive for the manufacturers?
If followed up, this could end up the same as with lead-free soldering. There weren't good incentives for manufacturers to remove lead from soldering until the EU passed the RoHS directive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Subst...) and, subsequently, laws were introduced to implement it throughout the EU.
Possibly reducing the companies' environmental footprint on the world.
Instead of cheap devices being scrapped every two years and sent to the landfill, consumers could instead hold on to the companies' products for much much longer. If products have comparatively more time and quality parts, the cost will indeed go up--both for manufacturing and retail price.
My grandmother had the same bread mixer the whole time I was growing up. And I know she had it long before I was born. It was built to last and she took care of it. My mother, on the other hand, went through at least six different plastic, Made in China bread mixers over the course of my childhood.
Where's the corporate responsibility for all the waste that is generated by crappy products?
If you were KitchenAid or another brand, wouldn't you want to set yourself apart from the others as a company who cares about the environment by making products that will last for years to come and acknowledging that in advertising? Products that can also be repaired if there is an issue, as opposed to chucked aside for a new one because of their lack of value?
I'd consider such a company the "Whole Foods" of appliances. Citizens who share similar conservation values will likely pay more for that product, just as those who opt for solar/wind energy over coal.
One way of doing it would be to charge companies up-front for the cost of handling the waste for the eventual disposal of the product. That directly disincetivizes companies from make it poorly, pile it high, sell it cheap business models.
After all, they built the widget! The vast logistical network of freight, retailers, consumers, and waste disposal services merely transported the widget to a landfill.
But there are difficulties with this viewpoint. How does the disposal obligation work in horizontally-integrated industries (e.g. car manufacturing)? How does it work with globalization (import taxes?)? Is there any viable way to account for the waste (core samples into landfills?) or will the cost be a guess subject to lobbyists?
One approach might be to require the manufacturer or importer to rent space in a network of landfills by tonnage. Call it "waste disposal insurance".
EDIT: A random idea would incorporate a blockchain containing transactions identifying the serial numbers of the products or components. That way, assemblages could be formally shown to be composed of properly insured components, even requiring the final serial number to be the hash of its components. The tokens could be traded between manufacturers and landfills directly, closing the loop on the product lifecycle. Compliance audits would simply compare sales records to the public chain.
On the landfill side, tokens operate as space reservations by tonnage, and can be efficiently traded to balance loads without requiring products to be taken to specific landfills.
So yeah, you're completely right. If people didn't own their own hardware, if it was owned by the company and leased, we'd likely see more incentive to make sure they lasted.
Then again, companies discovered that you can lease something to someone and then charge them full price if/when they break it, so maybe not.
I once work on an embedded computer where we decided that the user would wear out one USB port before it would reach our longevity goals. We put two USB ports on it to get over that limit. The alternative was a maintenance schedule to replace the port. Either meat our longevity goals, but only one was also repairable.
They get to continue to sell their products. Internalizing externalities and all that jazz.
To add, It doesn't seem like we could go on indefinitely with ephemeral product cycles consuming increasing amounts of natural resources considering the increasing purchasing power of emerging economies.
There are both environmental and quality of life issues with the way our culture has evolved recently, particularly around advancing consumer technologies, which aren't (directly) financial in nature but are definitely things we could change for the better. Meanwhile, the increases in money moving around on paper are mostly in the direction of manufacturers taking advantage of consumers one way or another, and I don't have a problem with damaging that effect in favour of the others.
In other words, if making things more durable results in people working fewer hours, then we need to know whether that results in negative income repercussions for workers.
A rudimentary example:
1x disposable widget took .5hrs to mfg. market price =$10 and lasts 1yr. CO = $10/yr
1x durable widget takes .6 hrs to mfg. market price =$50 and lasts 10 yrs. CO = $5/yr
And you extrapolate that...
So, yes, your costs go down over time, but so do your wages, so the deflation has to be measured so that earnings don't go down quicker than cost of living/cost of goods and services. Commensurate.
In terms of real productivity, a durable widget that has a 20% overhead to manufacture but lasts 10x as long is far more useful, and in terms of quality of life, people needing to spend fewer hours of their lives doing mundane work is a desirable goal in itself.
In the long term, it seems likely that either people will find new ways to make a living, just as they did on countless past occasions when technology rendered a particular vocation obsolete, or we will move towards a different economic arrangement where people don't have to work full-time to earn a decent living, or quite possibly we will see some sort of hybrid with aspects of both newer types of work and reduced working hours.
The shrinking of the number of models and manufactures relative to the size of the market is already to blame for this. Maybe there would be more designers because now when you put out a product it needs to work for a long time, not until you can just tweak next years model?
Not so for rent, food etc. as far as I know.
Purchasing power for subsistence goods would't go up due to the malthusian trap.
The same way you have induced demand from wider roads to have more cars.
Productivity has risen in manufacturing, tech, and automation. This provides a moderate wage increase in those jobs, but a sharp drop in employment as well. Meanwhile, you also get a similar competitive wage increase in essential service industries (health care, education, construction), but because those sectors have experienced no increase in productivity, this is reflected in the price others pay for those goods, not in the employment figures for them. The drop in employment in high-productivity sectors then forces laid off workers into marginal service-sector employment.
Because of Simpson's Paradox [1], this results in flat or declining wage statistics across the whole economy, but the statistics obscure a lot of detail. Nurses, therapists, teachers, et al are doing okay; they're not going to get rich, and the rising cost of housing in some metro areas means that if they don't already own their house they may need to move far away, but their relative wages are keeping pace. Same with the few remaining union jobs: unionized longshoremen at the Port of Oakland make mid six-figures, as much as a software engineer at a startup. But employment in those fields is dropping, because of productivity increases, and everyone who is displaced out of them needs to find employment in the undifferentiated service sector, usually at much lower wages. And the people who actually provide the automation support that's driving this productivity growth are making out like bandits: that's where you see all the new millionaires being minted.
This'll continue until either society breaks down and goes to war or a bunch of new industries spring up and absorb all the new workers, who then differentiate their skillsets and bargain for higher pay. Both of these happened last time this occurred, in the early 1900s; the world wars were the springboard that drove adoption of new technologies like automobiles and airplanes. We see some possible beginnings of this with things like ridesharing and delivery startups, but it seems unlikely these are the big industries of the 21st century. More likely, they're transient uses for large crowds of unemployed people, and the real 21st century industries will be the micromarket: individual entrepreneurs that are each specialized in reaching & designing for a small group of customers, using home manufacturing & automated shipping tools that are in their infancy now.
Mass-produced electronics and other consumer goods is much, much cheaper; you get more of that with your wages.
https://www.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/blogs/lookout/fed-officia...
As far as I can know, food prices in America have gone down a little bit in the long term in comparison to general price index; 1982 food price index was 100 and now it is 90. Where I live (north Europe), the price drop has been more substantial.
The biggest health problem that poor people face in the U.S. is obesity.
But even if food is not problem, the real issues are housing and health care costs.
As our purchasing power has decreased and inflation has increased, we've also invented a lot more expensive stuff to spend our fewer and fewer dollars on.
As said, real estate prices have gone up. But in early 1970's, Americans used 20 % of their inćome on food. Now it's somewhere around 6-7 %. So, for this most basic of commodities, the purchasing power has increased substantially.
It is remarkable how the prices of maybe three out of four items has doubled in the last four years.
Maybe the market has simply bifurcated.