On the contrary, I think it's frustratingly hard for the rich to find products with reliable quality. There are some brands where you pay more, and you get high reliability, like Miele for vacuum cleaners. But what car brand do you think rich owners don't have a litany of complaints about? What brand of blenders don't have junky plastic parts that break too easily? Do you think there's a streaming service or an email provider that doesn't annoy rich customers with obnoxious login redirects and broken features? Do you think rich people's clothes don't pop seams annoyingly fast? Instead, I think what's interesting is the absence of opportunities to exchange money for quality. I suspect that's because, fundamentally, quality proves itself over time, and it's relatively quite expensive for a company to provide (at a loss) extra quality that isn't perceived by the purchaser (and thus they won't pay enough for it), solely as an investment in future reputation, trusting that the perception of quality will catch up eventually. It's simply an easier thing to successfully communicate "look, the new car we're selling has cool-looking gull wing doors!" than to successfully communicate "the car we've been selling for 20+ years has been proving itself reliable" because there's such an ad-hoc, rotating cast of reviewers and commentators.
This seems correct to me. There's classes of things where you can pay more to get better outcomes, which are generally things that maybe aren't factory made. Like, for example, food. I can keep getting more adjectives added to my beef until it's $400 a lb or higher. ("Grass fed, grass finished, massaged by endangered elves on the edge of an Hawaiian volcano from April to September..")
I won't say there is *no* amount of money I can pay to get, for example, the exact home server that I want for my lab. But the amount I would have to pay is to buy the factory to produce it. So I guess technically Bryan is correct - you just aren't imagining HOW MUCH more you have to pay to get a high quality item. You have to buy the entire supply chain to insist on high quality capacitors.
But I don't think that's the soul of the argument. Maybe it is, though.
"To create a high quality apple pie, first you have to create a high quality universe."
I think there are concerns your model isn't including.
1: Not everyone optimizes for reliability as opposed to fashion/novelty. Rich people can afford to have their car fixed if something breaks, and drive their other cars in the mean time; reliability is typically a feature lower income people value most highly. On the other hand, a flashy car with over the top performance at the cost of maintenance are typical rich person purchases, as it flaunts their wealth while being unusual and drawing the attention they crave.
2: Clothing seams: this is again a question of what they are optimizing for. Women's clothing tends to be very low on the durability scale because women are more fashion conscious and cycle through clothing more quickly. The richer they are the faster they do so. A blouse that lasts 10 years is not desirable, because who wants to be wearing the same fashion for more than one year?
However, if one does care about longevity of clothing that absolutely can be accomplished with money. Bespoke tailored garments with double stitching is available, and even people who are not "rich" in the sense we normally think of but care about clothing will drop money on such items.
The theme of "people don't care about reliability and other features as much as we think" runs through most of this. I don't know a lot about the blender market, so it might be cheaper to just buy a new blender, but if one really wanted to have a blender without plastic parts one could hire a machine shop to make metal parts for the easily broken bits. It would cost a bit, but the rich could do it. Why would anyone bother though when a new blender is 100$ and can be delivered next day?
With email providers, I suspect a lot of people follow the same rule of "eh, good enough." Since good enough is zero price, most people don't, but some do build their own servers.
With streaming, I am not sure what services and features you are referring to, but a slightly more expensive but much higher quality option is to run your own network streaming server. We do that ourselves, and a few terabyte drives and buying tangible media later we can stream movies and shows from home, even when the internet cuts out for some reason. You don't get easy access to streaming only programming but we are not interested in most streaming junk so it works out.
There is also a kind of lifecycle to "brand equity." At first it's difficult to build up, it costs investment to build a good brand. Usually you need the ownership to have a strong personal and financial interests in long term quality and reputation.
Then there comes a point in the lifecycle, usually when the business is mature and huge, that management finds it can juice profits by depreciating brand equity. It takes awhile for consumers to recognize that they aren't getting the same value they used to. This is where most peoples complaints about "enshittificaiton" come from.
You see this in private equity of consumer brands a lot. Buy it with debt, juice margins by any means necessary, make excess money until the consumer catches on.
I think regulation of a minimum safety standard while leaving luxury to the market is an acceptable concept. The problem of regulation run amok reflects a poor application of the principle.
IMO Bryan’s argument would have been stronger still had he noted that prior to the Internet and social media age, one could defend the “asymmetric information” problem’s validity more strongly than you can today..
I.e. justifying more regulation in the past, but noting that the basis is largely gone.
Broadly, I agree that consumer protections are protecting consumers from themselves.
But in cases where consumers are indirectly exposed to the harmful product (e.g., lead paint in a hotel room, unsafe vehicle in an uber, cancer-causing cleaner used in a hotel room), the risks aren't necessarily visible and can be hard to avoid at any price point.
What's different about Oakland than any other American city of similar size? Isn't Oakland situated in one of the most desirable regions of the state, country, world?
On the contrary, I think it's frustratingly hard for the rich to find products with reliable quality. There are some brands where you pay more, and you get high reliability, like Miele for vacuum cleaners. But what car brand do you think rich owners don't have a litany of complaints about? What brand of blenders don't have junky plastic parts that break too easily? Do you think there's a streaming service or an email provider that doesn't annoy rich customers with obnoxious login redirects and broken features? Do you think rich people's clothes don't pop seams annoyingly fast? Instead, I think what's interesting is the absence of opportunities to exchange money for quality. I suspect that's because, fundamentally, quality proves itself over time, and it's relatively quite expensive for a company to provide (at a loss) extra quality that isn't perceived by the purchaser (and thus they won't pay enough for it), solely as an investment in future reputation, trusting that the perception of quality will catch up eventually. It's simply an easier thing to successfully communicate "look, the new car we're selling has cool-looking gull wing doors!" than to successfully communicate "the car we've been selling for 20+ years has been proving itself reliable" because there's such an ad-hoc, rotating cast of reviewers and commentators.
This seems correct to me. There's classes of things where you can pay more to get better outcomes, which are generally things that maybe aren't factory made. Like, for example, food. I can keep getting more adjectives added to my beef until it's $400 a lb or higher. ("Grass fed, grass finished, massaged by endangered elves on the edge of an Hawaiian volcano from April to September..")
I won't say there is *no* amount of money I can pay to get, for example, the exact home server that I want for my lab. But the amount I would have to pay is to buy the factory to produce it. So I guess technically Bryan is correct - you just aren't imagining HOW MUCH more you have to pay to get a high quality item. You have to buy the entire supply chain to insist on high quality capacitors.
But I don't think that's the soul of the argument. Maybe it is, though.
"To create a high quality apple pie, first you have to create a high quality universe."
I think there are concerns your model isn't including.
1: Not everyone optimizes for reliability as opposed to fashion/novelty. Rich people can afford to have their car fixed if something breaks, and drive their other cars in the mean time; reliability is typically a feature lower income people value most highly. On the other hand, a flashy car with over the top performance at the cost of maintenance are typical rich person purchases, as it flaunts their wealth while being unusual and drawing the attention they crave.
2: Clothing seams: this is again a question of what they are optimizing for. Women's clothing tends to be very low on the durability scale because women are more fashion conscious and cycle through clothing more quickly. The richer they are the faster they do so. A blouse that lasts 10 years is not desirable, because who wants to be wearing the same fashion for more than one year?
However, if one does care about longevity of clothing that absolutely can be accomplished with money. Bespoke tailored garments with double stitching is available, and even people who are not "rich" in the sense we normally think of but care about clothing will drop money on such items.
The theme of "people don't care about reliability and other features as much as we think" runs through most of this. I don't know a lot about the blender market, so it might be cheaper to just buy a new blender, but if one really wanted to have a blender without plastic parts one could hire a machine shop to make metal parts for the easily broken bits. It would cost a bit, but the rich could do it. Why would anyone bother though when a new blender is 100$ and can be delivered next day?
With email providers, I suspect a lot of people follow the same rule of "eh, good enough." Since good enough is zero price, most people don't, but some do build their own servers.
With streaming, I am not sure what services and features you are referring to, but a slightly more expensive but much higher quality option is to run your own network streaming server. We do that ourselves, and a few terabyte drives and buying tangible media later we can stream movies and shows from home, even when the internet cuts out for some reason. You don't get easy access to streaming only programming but we are not interested in most streaming junk so it works out.
There is also a kind of lifecycle to "brand equity." At first it's difficult to build up, it costs investment to build a good brand. Usually you need the ownership to have a strong personal and financial interests in long term quality and reputation.
Then there comes a point in the lifecycle, usually when the business is mature and huge, that management finds it can juice profits by depreciating brand equity. It takes awhile for consumers to recognize that they aren't getting the same value they used to. This is where most peoples complaints about "enshittificaiton" come from.
You see this in private equity of consumer brands a lot. Buy it with debt, juice margins by any means necessary, make excess money until the consumer catches on.
High cost of housing has a lot of this. Small cheap houses are illegal.
I think regulation of a minimum safety standard while leaving luxury to the market is an acceptable concept. The problem of regulation run amok reflects a poor application of the principle.
I too could live with minimal safety standards.
But minimal is frequently not what we get.
IMO Bryan’s argument would have been stronger still had he noted that prior to the Internet and social media age, one could defend the “asymmetric information” problem’s validity more strongly than you can today..
I.e. justifying more regulation in the past, but noting that the basis is largely gone.
Leftism politicizes constraints that are the cost of existence. Which is why they will never run out of complaints.
Broadly, I agree that consumer protections are protecting consumers from themselves.
But in cases where consumers are indirectly exposed to the harmful product (e.g., lead paint in a hotel room, unsafe vehicle in an uber, cancer-causing cleaner used in a hotel room), the risks aren't necessarily visible and can be hard to avoid at any price point.
I wondered why you picked on Oakland, so I asked AI to rank property crime rates and it really is the worst city in the US!
What's different about Oakland than any other American city of similar size? Isn't Oakland situated in one of the most desirable regions of the state, country, world?
Quite a bit:
Rank City Property crimes per 100,000 residents Reported incidents Population
1 Oakland, CA 7,230.3 31,455 435,042
2 Memphis, TN 6,899.0 42,305 613,207
3 St. Louis, MO 5,706.9 15,825 277,294
4 Tacoma, WA 5,603.6 12,551 223,980
5 Baton Rouge, LA 5,526.6 12,108 219,086