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> afford used Chrysler cars

> In the 40s-60s stuff was built to last.

On the surface, I assign this to nostalgia and maybe survival bias;

Automobiles alone provide an example where, in the the 80s, Japanese manufacturers began dumping automobiles in the the U.S. market (and making cheap quality products in the U.S. in the 90s) where the base model could last 2-3x as many miles as the prior domestics (GM, Chryslers).

I also make this statement with a 25 year old refrigerator, washer, and dryer) and a 16 year old luxury import automobile with 180k miles on the original clutch (that I bought used) and have spent very little on preventative maintenance on.

*Side anecdote on cars and unwise subscription to brand loyalty. A 1989 Mazda (made in Japan) that I bought used in 2005, had more security (key encoding, immobilizer) features than two friend's 10+ year newer Chryslers that were stolen in ~2010

Survivorship bias and security through obscurity.

A 1989 Mazda is old enough to not have anything worth stealing (ie. airbags) and with few cars still running no one has bothered to even try and crack the immobilizer. Your friends' late model Chryslers probably have $3000-$6000 worth of airbags alone.

I do wonder how this all shakes out now that many brands are selling out as glorified drop-shippers of increasingly poor quality products.

When brand is meaningless what other signals will consumers use to filter? Will we all need test machinery to vet every purchase?

Brands have been meaningless for a long time. Open an applicance made by Whirlpool, Amana, Kitchen-Aid, Jenn-Air or Maytag and you'll find nearly identical internal components. They are all owned by Whirlpool. Yet this has no effect on people swearing by or swearing at any one brand.

Buying a car, you can try to shop by brand but surveys by Edmunds and Consumer Reports have the car companies trading places frequently year over year. Even perennial favorites Lexus and Toyota have model/year combinations that perform worse than other brands.

I'm not even sure that drop-shippers are hocking lower quality items. The items are so similar to name brand kit that I'm pretty sure they're using the same supply chains to source a lot of that stuff.

> On the surface, I assign this to nostalgia and maybe survival bias

There's some aspect of truth to it in some industries (though not cars, as you say). Kind of. So a washing machine that you buy now probably won't last as long as a washing machine that you bought in 1980 (though it will be cheaper to run). The catch is that the purchase price is, in real terms, _much_ lower. And you can actually buy washing machines that last a long time today, but most people simply aren't willing to spend thousands on one.

The modern machine costs a few hundred euro and if the drum goes, well, that's the end, buy another one. You can get one with a replaceable drum for maybe 1500 euro, but you're probably not going to, realistically.

> And you can actually buy washing machines that last a long time today, but most people simply aren't willing to spend thousands on one.

i don't believe that. A company selling washing machines have incentive to make one that breaks _just_ after the warranty expires, so as to enable more sales. It can't be both true that the consumer saves money, and the company maximizing profit. One of the have to suffer - and it's usually the consumer.

There's not much brand loyalty for washing machines, so the manufacturers are probably not going to see a second scale. Of course they will cheap out on parts if they can (as long as the parts will last just longer than the warranty), so that doesn't make much difference in practice. But you can buy from a company that offers a longer warranty if the longevity is worth it to you.

You can buy a Speed Queen washing machine today, they're supposed to be comparable in quality to their commercial products. A front load washer will set you back about two grand though.

Higher end Miele machines have a very good reputation on this, as do some BSG machines (again on the high end). Honestly, given the pricing, Miele probably still wins by selling you a 1500 euro machine that might last 30 years, vs a 300 euro Indesit that would be lucky to make it to 10 years.

It's not rocket science; to make a reliable maintainable washing machine, you need to make one where all important parts are feasibly replaceable. In particular, if a machine has replaceable drum bearings, that's a good sign.

Appliances are a bit of a pickle, because with energy efficiency alone you can save so much money on running costs by upgrading.

In fact, you can save so much energy that at least one utility I've had over the years has a program to pay people to replace appliances, because it turns out that's cheaper than new power generation and transmission.

Meh... Products today have shorter life spans because we figured out how to build them that way, while being far cheaper and no less (often more) reliable for the intended lifetime.

It’s just basic mathematics: when reliability depends on hundreds of parts, their individual failure rates are amplified. You need either extremely tight tolerances (today), or design with so much excess that it raises mean time to failure far beyond your intended minimum.

This makes me think about some of the reviews I read for a book that came up in an article I read back in the end of May

https://www.amazon.com/Unheavenly-City-Nature-Future-Crisis/...

Search them for future and time and you'll hit upon the main thesis quickly, eg:

    Banfield carefully defined class membership, not in terms of income status,
    such as government statistical poverty levels, but in terms of orientation toward the future, or time preference.

I can't say I ever heard such an idea so clearly stated before. I still haven't dug into the argument too much to know one way or another or be able to offer much in way of a critique, but it's caught my eye and attention enough to make it a reading TODO.

I haven't read the book either, but from reading the reviews it seems like the thesis is that your wealth is a function of your time orientation - whether you prefer to plan short term or long term.

If that's the case, I disagree strongly. It seems like a post-hoc conclusion; if you are wealthy, you can afford to plan for the long term; if you are poor, often you can only orient your behavior towards immediate needs and survival. Poor people know that its better to save for a house than pay rent to a landlord - they're not stupid. But your kid has a cavity that need filling, the rent you are paying is due, and god help you if you have an unexpected expense like your car breaks down.

Does the author account for decades of wage suppression that prevents all from sharing in the nation's wealth? The systematic erosion of labor rights? The (I'm assuming the author's American) carceral state that makes people unhireable and takes away some of their most productive years for earning and saving? In the case of the Black community, does he account for the generational effects of centuries of stolen labor? The list goes on.

Poverty is a cycle[1] and is worthy of serious study and consideration. Paternalistic victim blaming has no place. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_of_poverty

The time-orientation theory reminds me of the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...

The follow up studies on this are also quite interesting, especially the one with the "unreliable tester". There are many factors that go into individuals' decision making processes, and trust is a big one.

My dad always bought used cars. He avoided chrysler. It's not like their used cars are somehow the only cheap ones.

These days I'd say the highest quality cars are definitely not the most expensive. At least in the US where it seems like the biggest luxury brands require the most maintenance and depreciate the fastest. If you want to lose the least money by depreciation, buy an unimpressive used toyota.

For that matter I can't really think of anywhere significant that the little parable applies. The way to get rich is to spend like you're poor, and save your income.

> Now? Its all disposable

Part of me also thinks that this Nostalgia is related to maintenance ideology.

Ie, it's not that Washers, Dryers, TVs, Cars never went bad, but they had repairable parts and were worth the money to have repaired.

This is not unrelated to ongoing maintenance at a house; Derelict houses (and popular poverty highlight - hookworm related Septic maintenance) are maintenance items that still need to be done; having these maintained creates jobs; but are derelict.

Modern appliances and cars are highly repairable. I've repaired many of my own appliances and vehicles to significant savings. The difference is that labor is expensive. Fixing things takes problem solving skills that are generally highly valuable on the market. Especially when you couple those skills with a little bit of specialized knowledge.

>As a very real example, my family was not very well off growing up. My parents could typically only afford used Chrysler cars. The result was invariably getting stuck with vehicles that quite frankly were at least as expensive as the competition after repair costs and extra insurance.

As someone who used to flip $200-$2k cars and still drives those kind of cars I feel very, very comfortable saying that the difference between a Carvan and a Sienna is more or less "pay as you go" vs "lump sum up front". The difference is that the guy with the Sienna never says anything bad about it because they have all this up front money tied up in it and would feel stupid bad mouthing it.