Care does scale and the human race is evidence of that. It is centralisation that doesn't scale well.
The article had a very specific circumstance it built upon - how much human time time it takes to help kids.
This doesn’t scale, in the context of the article.
Your statement would translate into a point on economics and organization, than individual care.
This still obscures the fact that many critical functions don’t scale.
I would add that these tend to be under resourced in favor of things that do scale.
In that case i'll ask for a clarificaiton on the link. From the article it seemed quite a clear cut case about activity types that dont scale.
Outsourcing the responsibility doesn't mean it scale, which seems contradicted by what you are saying. People learning that things matter and that they are responsible, doesn't change this does it?
I am only really suggesting that scalable care schemes might be those that help people to support those they already have a connection with, and that organisation/coordination be managed on that level.
> In any given moment, you can only really care deeply and individually for one person
Yes, but there are many moments in a day / one's life, and care is needed and appreciated at various levels of "deepness". Further, how much care (and what type) is needed depends enormously on what society has managed to scale with the right organizational patterns etc.
So in the end the question is: how much of this type of exclusive (and scarce) caring capacity does society really need? Mathematically, there are 8 billion exemplars of the species roaming the planet and 1:1 caring takes care (pun) of the 4 billion.
We do have cultural institutions to do much of this work. Parents care for kids. Adults care for aging parents. Romantic partnerships exist so that people can reciprocally care for each other. Still, we have to fill in the gaps for kids without parents, seniors without kids, and sick people. The demand for therapy and sex work proves that people will pay a lot of money to be cared for, even when they don't need it to survive.
> So in the end the question is: how much of this type of exclusive (and scarce) caring capacity does society really need?
A lot, apparently.
Decentralizization is fine sometimes, but a single huge nail factory is going to beat thousands backyard forges in (average/95th percentile) quality and especially in prices.
Backyard forges are OK if you have few hundred million people, most of them in farming, with most families living in a house with a a single room. But you cannot build New York on without large factories.
Many products have increased in quality due to factors unrelated to centralised production: new scientific research, intensive r&d, internal standardisation efforts - but centralised production tends instead to produce demonstrable reductions in individual quality. We're living in an age of unprecedented consumer waste due to this phenomenon. Planned obsolescence is a relatively recent term (& while it may not be real in terms of being intentional it's definitely true in terms of increases in obsolescence-rates).
That’s ridiculous. Many people just prefer to pay for cheap nails because they are good enough for the application, and that’s a good thing because this option did not previously exist. But the high end still exists and is higher quality than ever.
Capitalism has problems, but providing low complexity commodity improvements at scale and quality is not one of them.
Nails was one of the examples cited by the gp, which I found funny since there is one famous example of nails being lower quality by definition as a result of centralisation. That example isn't the case for all nails (nor for all the gps examples), but it is still an excellent, if isolated, example: cut nails. Most carpentry nails you buy today are wire nails. I don't know if it's possible to buy cut nails today from any large factories, but broadly speaking, manufacture of cut nails does not scale. The switch to wire was a detail of the manufacturing processes, not of consumer demand (nor quality assurance). Cut nails are still considered superior today.
If you look at antique diagrams of nails available for purchase, you'll see 20 or 30 varieties, all with very distinctly different designs. Those designs have converged on a single design for all applications, not because it's a better design, but purely because it's a design that scales for manufacture. Flaws in the design are compensated for via material choice & worker skill.
There's likely thousands of such cases in industry.
This an empirical argument about nails. Are you just saying that to emphasize your confidence?
> cut nails
I just googled and there are literally dozens of brands of this product.
Even so this preference appears to be a niche opinion of artisan woodworkers, not a failure mode of furniture and construction.
> The switch to wire was a detail of the manufacturing processes, not of consumer demand
Yes it is. They wanted to pay less for nails and the cheaper manufacturing served that need. If it mattered they would pay more.
> but purely because it's a design that scales for manufacture.
In other words, people like to reminisce about hand made goods. But when it comes to paying for them, they usually prefer the ones that work well at a fraction of the cost.
You can’t claim that intricate items with fine details are not manufacturable at scale (see the iPhone?). So your cause and effect are backwards. Manufacturing did not dictate old methods became less prevelant. Consumers did.
And once again, your claim that higher quality ones don’t exist is wrong too. I guarantee we can find a supplier of many varieties of decorative nails. They are just more expensive.
A nested HN thread is likely not the best place to go into great detail on the precise practicalities of trade work, & I know I can't expect any given commenter to become an expert in a possibly niche topic just to engage in discussion, but this level of dismissiveness is a little difficult to reckon with. Nobody is buying nails for their "decorative" qualities - they get embedded in materials. They're not a visual feature.
> but this level of dismissiveness is a little difficult to reckon with
Let me summarize the key economic points that I feel have been dismissed: - any kind of nail you want, you can buy right now. - You can also buy nails of higher quality than anything that’s existed in preindustrial time - popularity of which kind of nail is driven by demand
i also think that ultimately no single system is best and that regular renegotiation about the amount of central vs decentral is key (something we should help people be better at)
We produce way more corn in the US today than we could without a centralized industry, but we do so by subsidizing the hell out of an industry that is driven only by how much volume of corn is produced. Nutritional quality of the food produced is ignored, damage to the land is ignored, damage to the broader environment is ignored, etc.
We grow a small amount of corn on our land. We absolutely don't have as high or consistent yields as an industrial farm, but we also don't spray any poisons on the land and if the soil health was being negatively impacted we would know it pretty darn fast. Rain water from the corn patch runs down into the pond our cows drink from, another reason we wouldn't use poisons on the land. All of these are considerations one will likely make at a smaller scale that just won't happen with a centralized system driven by one or two primary goals (currently that's just money).