but centralization is in many ways the thing that is needed to scale all sorts of other things.
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
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).
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)