How Cheap is Broken?

Statistics on the declining costs of consumer goods rarely take lifespan into account.

This is something I’ll come back to at some point in greater detail, but one pet peeve I’ve always had with certain folks who talk about how materially well-off we are—free traders, economic libertarians, etc.—is that they rarely look at how long a product lasts or how well made it is. (This is also overlooking a major environmental issue: a lot of prod…