Hacker News Reader

Comment by manachar | Hacker News Reader

There's something amazing/odd/horrifying about a world where it is generally no longer cheaper to do anything yourself.

I love to bake and cook. I can do so fairly frugally.

A supermarket frozen pie is still gonna be cheaper than anything I can make, especially if I count my time.

It's a benefit and goal of the modern global industrialized supply chain, but I cannot help feel that making me work a full time job to buy cheap things means we don't put enough economic value on people making things themselves.

Then again, I like not having to mine my own lithium, copper, etc. to get a computer.

View on HN

> There's something amazing/odd/horrifying about a world where it is generally no longer cheaper to do anything yourself.

How? It’s pretty much the point and purpose of civilisation, to say nothing of industrialisation.

> we don't put enough economic value on people making things themselves.

The invisible hand is a middle finger. Always has been.

> > There's something amazing/odd/horrifying about a world where it is generally no longer cheaper to do anything yourself.

> How? It’s pretty much the point and purpose of civilisation, to say nothing of industrialisation.

Civilization isn't necessary for this to be true. It is even true in small scale societies. You can observe this whenever they get cutoff from each other: they end up technologically regressing. It is more expensive to do everything themselves, so they end up losing access to technologies.

The world where this was last true was when the common ancestor of us and neanderthals were still around.

really, it's about division of labor, aka "allow someone to become much, much better at making chairs than you, a non-chairmaker, will ever be."

When you get so good at making something that it takes you 0.1-0.5 of the time it takes someone less experienced/skilled, the cost of your labor becomes an diminishingly small part of the overall cost. That makes it ever more difficult for the unskilled person to ever be able to make it "cheaper", even if they consider their time to be free.

I agree with almost everything you have above except "a supermarket frozen pie is still gonna be cheaper than anything I can make." I'd say youd buy the same pie at a store (or at least not at most stores). The ingredients list might be the same, but somehow the gloppy, starched-gel filling in a mushy crust you can buy from Kroger is (hopefully) pretty far from any pie you'd make by hand yourself.

There is a middle ground between doing it yourself and buying industrialized food. In Italy, people really value food produced locally. There is even a slogan for it "kilometro zero", which means "buy food close to the source".

No wonder food tastes way better in Italy than in the US (in general), for example.

It’s not a bad thing by to make something yourself even if it costs more. The joy of making it is valuable. As well as the knowledge that your are a little more self-reliant.

Assembly lines and clever optimizations to workflow improve the efficiency of a factory somewhat over DIY. Machinery and automation makes a lot of things much cheaper through reducing labor at the cost of consuming non-renewable resources. Global supply chains waste even more resources to take advantage of underpriced labor from disadvantaged people.

If there was a real accounting of the externalities, the sweet spot for efficiency would involve a lot more numerous, smaller producers of goods that don't require big investments in highly specialized equipment. It would be reasonable to have a couple chairs made by a regional furniture maker if not for the cheapness of burning oil to send things around the world.

I certainly enjoy the perks of living in a post-agrarian society. I too love to cook (and garden) a bit, particularly so when I know that I have options for feeding myself that don't start with tending the fields all day.

It's a matter of quality. That frozen cake pales in comparison to something truly self-made. If I do some bread from basic ingredients (flour, sour dough, water), the result more often than not is great (after some experimenting) and costs maybe half of a n equally nice commercial product. Plus I spent my time in my kitchen and not out there shopping.

I mean, division of labor has been a thing since we started organizing in tribes, and maybe even before then (families?).

DIY starts making sense again if there are really high taxes or regulations or if money is scarce (i.e. a recession, money being just a method to organize labor efficiently and that breaks down during a liquidity crisis).

I think what you're worried about is the death of ownership and how people are increasingly starting to either sell their information or rent the things they need.

Being able to buy things for cheaper from elsewhere is just specialization and it's one of the first things that brought humans from the store age to more modern civilization.

> it's one of the first things that brought humans from the store age to more modern civilization.

This still has to happen, since we are now entirely in the store age ;-)

(nice typo)

If you can't costume certain food ingredients, it's likely you'll have to pay extra for a pie that meets your requirements, or bake it yourself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com