I just finished reading (well, listening to—that’s why I call these “semi-reviews”) Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door—Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy, by Wall Street Journal technology writer Christopher Mims.
"But there are things which should not be Taylorized; cooking, which can be a joy, with a delightful human and social element;"
Efficiency improvement is increasing apples-to-apples output with the fewer inputs, decreasing input to achieve the same output, or increasing quality of the output. I don't know you, but I have seen your menus and photos of meals that you have prepared. I doubt that you can buy prepared food at the grocer that approximates the quality of your own cooking. We should never forget that efficiency should always account for quality.
I need to read it again, but one takeaway I have from the housekeeping literature is that as technological devices emerged, *mother* worked longer hours. Instead of banking the savings of improved efficiency as leisure, she devised new tasks for herself and ways to improve the quality of the house. Cooking is a great example. Home cooking improved greatly in quality.
When we buy prepared food, we are banking improved technology as leisure, but perhaps at the expense of the quality of the food. But let's not underestimate the time and effort in learning high-level cooking skills, and the investment in equipment and supplies that are required.
Yeah. I probably do underestimate because I've done it and I like it! I recognize not everyone will see it that way, although I do think cooking is more "important" than a lot of other mundane household tasks.
This is a case in which modesty and humility lead to false impressions. You may not remember it, but everyone has a learning curve for cooking. Maybe it came easy for you. But there is time investment in learning that's easy to forget about when you are already skilled. So your time/quality matrixes are different than most. I am merely competent, but even that takes time and effort.
Back to the central issue, is saving a little money worth a lower quality product? It depends on how we value the goods and services in question. We might also pose the inverse question: what are examples of consumers spending more for higher quality instead of spending less for a somewhat inferior product? Complicating both of these questions is the partly subjective nature of quality.
Consider this perspective, too. What if we turn around the question for the consumer: “Is it worth eating twice-frozen fish to shave a little money off the price?” to one for the producer: “Is it worth making twice-frozen fish to boost the profits for me and my shareholders?” Suppose for example that the invisible hand of the market says I can wholesale my frozen fish sticks for $8 a pound. If I make them in the U.S. the high cost of labor and infrastructure will cost me $6 a pound. If I make them in a foreign country, cheap labor and infrastructure combined with inexpensive shipping will only cost me $4 a pound.
While recognizing that the “consumer is king,” I would like to see the producers share in the moral and ethical choices that you identify.
I would think so. But I suppose the counterargument is that a producer who does that will be outcompeted, and so in the end while it’s theoretically possible to resist it, in reality it isn’t really possible. But that’s my question, is that phenomenon itself a base reality or the result of policy/values/etc.?
This is most sensibly a consumer-sided question. What would be the sense of producing a product that people are not willing to buy? And how often can a producer sell their product through brute force?
"The twice-frozen fish is presented not as a choice, but as a fact, as unassailable as gravity."
I think the important reaction, as you hint at, is to question where the gravity is being suspended to make this make sense. Is it an actually grounded and sensible thing, or is it being artificially upheld by a web of poor policy decisions, perverse incentives, and short-sighted behavior that, like a certain famous coyote, will eventually lead us to fall into the canyon once we realized we've run too far over the cliff? That's what keeps me up at night.
What I’m noticing in our cheap consumer goods world is how everything looks the same. There’s so much of it but it’s all similar. That’s efficiency at work. It’s much easier to configure factories to make the same base and just add extras. So you get Oreos in 20 flavors or stacks of printed T-shirts or streaming shows that are so similar that you aren’t sure if you already watched them. We have more than we can ever consume but no one seems to be slowing down partly because this is what the great engine of the world runs on.
"But there are things which should not be Taylorized; cooking, which can be a joy, with a delightful human and social element;"
Efficiency improvement is increasing apples-to-apples output with the fewer inputs, decreasing input to achieve the same output, or increasing quality of the output. I don't know you, but I have seen your menus and photos of meals that you have prepared. I doubt that you can buy prepared food at the grocer that approximates the quality of your own cooking. We should never forget that efficiency should always account for quality.
Yes, good point (about how to understand efficiency, and maybe about my cooking)
Here is one book that prompted me to think differently about housekeeping:
https://archive.org/details/moreworkformothe0000unse
I need to read it again, but one takeaway I have from the housekeeping literature is that as technological devices emerged, *mother* worked longer hours. Instead of banking the savings of improved efficiency as leisure, she devised new tasks for herself and ways to improve the quality of the house. Cooking is a great example. Home cooking improved greatly in quality.
When we buy prepared food, we are banking improved technology as leisure, but perhaps at the expense of the quality of the food. But let's not underestimate the time and effort in learning high-level cooking skills, and the investment in equipment and supplies that are required.
Yeah. I probably do underestimate because I've done it and I like it! I recognize not everyone will see it that way, although I do think cooking is more "important" than a lot of other mundane household tasks.
This is a case in which modesty and humility lead to false impressions. You may not remember it, but everyone has a learning curve for cooking. Maybe it came easy for you. But there is time investment in learning that's easy to forget about when you are already skilled. So your time/quality matrixes are different than most. I am merely competent, but even that takes time and effort.
Back to the central issue, is saving a little money worth a lower quality product? It depends on how we value the goods and services in question. We might also pose the inverse question: what are examples of consumers spending more for higher quality instead of spending less for a somewhat inferior product? Complicating both of these questions is the partly subjective nature of quality.
Consider this perspective, too. What if we turn around the question for the consumer: “Is it worth eating twice-frozen fish to shave a little money off the price?” to one for the producer: “Is it worth making twice-frozen fish to boost the profits for me and my shareholders?” Suppose for example that the invisible hand of the market says I can wholesale my frozen fish sticks for $8 a pound. If I make them in the U.S. the high cost of labor and infrastructure will cost me $6 a pound. If I make them in a foreign country, cheap labor and infrastructure combined with inexpensive shipping will only cost me $4 a pound.
While recognizing that the “consumer is king,” I would like to see the producers share in the moral and ethical choices that you identify.
I would think so. But I suppose the counterargument is that a producer who does that will be outcompeted, and so in the end while it’s theoretically possible to resist it, in reality it isn’t really possible. But that’s my question, is that phenomenon itself a base reality or the result of policy/values/etc.?
This is most sensibly a consumer-sided question. What would be the sense of producing a product that people are not willing to buy? And how often can a producer sell their product through brute force?
"The twice-frozen fish is presented not as a choice, but as a fact, as unassailable as gravity."
I think the important reaction, as you hint at, is to question where the gravity is being suspended to make this make sense. Is it an actually grounded and sensible thing, or is it being artificially upheld by a web of poor policy decisions, perverse incentives, and short-sighted behavior that, like a certain famous coyote, will eventually lead us to fall into the canyon once we realized we've run too far over the cliff? That's what keeps me up at night.
Yeah, exactly. I find it too counterintuitive to think it makes sense in the absence of some…*something* somewhere in the chain.
What I’m noticing in our cheap consumer goods world is how everything looks the same. There’s so much of it but it’s all similar. That’s efficiency at work. It’s much easier to configure factories to make the same base and just add extras. So you get Oreos in 20 flavors or stacks of printed T-shirts or streaming shows that are so similar that you aren’t sure if you already watched them. We have more than we can ever consume but no one seems to be slowing down partly because this is what the great engine of the world runs on.
Its hard to grasp how much of a system is people until you've seen it from the inside.