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> Consider architecture (bland), clothing (low durability), food (fast food, frozen food, worse nutrition, bland taste) etc etc. Sure, people happily buy all this stuff, it works. But I can't help but feel our stuff is a lot worse than it used to be. I bet I'm not alone.

For every intricate handcrafted cathedral or mansion, there were millions of one room huts with leaky roofs. A change of clothes used to be an investment along the lines of what an expensive phone or even a car is for us today, so most people only had one or two changes of clothes, and not in very good condition. Food used to take up most of a person's wages and a bad harvest could cause immediate starvation for large numbers of people. Also, most people a diet consisting almost entirely of grains.

So, yea, if you are imagining some kind of past where you happened to be an aristocrat, you could live in a beautifully handcrafted house, wear only hand-tailored clothes, and eat heirloom vegetables for every meal. But if you're imagining yourself as an aristocrat, then you can live pretty well with that status in the modern era too.

> architecture (bland)

This one isn't from automation. There are a lot of compounding reasons, but one primary one for the lack of ornamentation on modern buildings is the use of caulk to speed up the building process (which itself is still generally done by hand), eliminating many of the layered weather-sealing structural elements from previous building styles.

> But I can't help but feel our stuff is a lot worse than it used to be.

You can still get stuff that's "as good as it used to be" (or rather, as good as the small percentage of items that survived over decades). You're just going to be paying the same kind of prices for that quality, e.g. $500 for a KitchenAid stand mixer or $7000 for a Miele oven.

According to some quick research (grain of salt, used ChatGPT deep research) KitchenAid stand mixers cost over $3000 (inflation adjusted) when released in 1919, and perhaps $1500 (inflation adjusted) in the 1970s, so they too are cheaper than ever at $500 today!

They are also shittier, but that's not the direct consequence of automation - that's a consequence of the market optimizing away quality over time as much as it possibly can. Happens with or without automation.

It's also often impossible to get high-quality goods at any price (or at least cheaper than it would take to contract a factory to make a small batch of a custom product, and then pay for QA, which I guess is possible... if you're a billionaire), and it's impossible for most people to even verify they're getting quality for price - both of these are, again, consequences of how competition works over time in the market economy, and happen with or without automation.

Fair point about architecture: It's not fundamentally about automation, it's about efficiency (which automation typically supports). If you want to do more with the same amount of people (or the same with less people), quite often, something's gonna give.

Getting stuff as good as it used to be can be pretty tricky. I'd have to do a 30 minute drive to buy bread that's actually baked by a trained baker. Most of the bread bakeries carry is made industrially.

The thing is: If things get cheaper, the consumers usually don't benefit primarily from that.

For one, the company that reduces production costs will do what they can to keep the difference. If competition drives prices down and consumers actually end up needing less money, watch the salaries shrink (effectively), because to a degree they are tied to the cost of living.

I'm not sure I'm getting this right, but I think it's worth considering.

Another thing to consider here is that lower quality goods will get thrown out more, which is going to create a lot of waste, especially when done at scale.

But conversely higher quality goods may take more energy and material to produce. It's actually not obvious how this maths out! You'd have to look at it empirically.

I could not disagree more. Our "stuff" is so much better than it was before. Would you choose to drive a 1982 Chrysler La Baron versus a 2025 Toyota Prius? A 2025 Prius is objectively a better car than any car in existence in the 1980s. Clothes last longer and are made more efficiently than in the 1990s which places less burden on the environment. Technology? Two devices replace a dozen 1970's devices (stereo, record player, phone, ...). Cookware is made more efficiently out of better materials. You don't need forever chemical teflon to have a non-stick pan these days.

Do you have any insight on which kind of clothes last longer today? I thought that the rush to "fast fashion" and the shrinking budget for clothing had actually led to the opposite effect [1]. I'd also say that kitchen appliances and home entertainment devices (stereo, record player...) were often kept for decades while today's mobile phones, tablets, streamers, projectors, multi-room entertainment systems etc. are thrown out after 5-10 years because they broke down, their software does not get any updates any more or they don't support the latest and greatest standards any more.

[1] https://theamag.com/9238/fashion/how-the-quality-of-clothing...

I don’t know of any clothes made to higher standards today other than boutique items made to the standards of 50 years ago.

Two devices thrown out every two years, meanwhile the 70s devices are still running today.

The new nonstick cookware is the same old technology we had prior to the cost-saving move to aluminum.

Cars have benefited from engineering gains to be sure.

Can't help but go off on another tangent here, because I hate modern cars with a degree of passion. My car is 17 years old and still works fine with yearly service. It doesn't patronise me, track me or provide terrible UX because some corporate marketing person had a questionable vision.

But I attribute that to enshittification. Car technology surely improved. It's just that, to me, the downsides that were introduced outweigh the advantages of newer technology.

> But I can't help but feel our stuff is a lot worse than it used to be.

You are probably wrong though, and you have to consider the benefits of lower cost items in terms of increased availability to the world's poor as well as what saving that money does to allow someone to deploy that money to improve other areas of their life.

There is almost certainly a better version of everything available to you at a cheaper price than 50 years ago, and a much cheaper version at a much cheaper price that is almost or about as good that billions of new people now have access to.