This is an interesting observation and matches with my experience. I'd add:

1) There's a race to the bottom with services in terms of pricing. For example, NHS GPs have strict time limits within which to provide a particular service. These time limits have reduced over the years and so individual doctors are capable of providing a better service but are can't given the constraints. People rarely are willing to pay more for a service unless they know that the quality level will be higher. With services, it is not clear that a higher price will translate to higher quality.

2) Most services are not chosen based on quality. They are chosen based on perception, brand, reviews, pricing and a whole host of other things. Often the most profitable services are the ones who can manipulate these variables best rather than the ones who actually provide a great service. If there is a sole accountant who is fantastic at accounting but poor at marketing and review collection then they are going to struggle and may end up joining a firm who constrains their time such that can only provide the minimum viable service.

I agree totally agree on both points. I also think though there is an opacity element, If you can’t see/will know if these service providers did a good “quality” job corners are habitually cut.

E.g. if I have a new button that’s been sewn on a jacket, or have my house painted, I can easily see if the right button was used, or if spots were missed while painting. However if I take my car in for an oil change, I don’t really know if the right grade of oil and an OEM filter was used, nor do I really care to recheck my accountants work on my taxes (as long is it roughly pencils to what I expected).

I blame the extreme penetration of capitalism everywhere. We've created a culture where everyone thinks like a business and looks to do the minimal effort for the maximal compensation. If you don't do this, "you're dumb" (and, unfortunately, maybe there's some truth to this).

In a culture obsessed with looking for exploitation opportunities at every corner, what do we expect? Everyone is running so "lean" and "efficiently" that anything beyond the lowest cost options can hinder you. Are you getting ROI, or diminishing returns and if you are getting diminishing returns, then that's now viewed as waste and a poor path to choose.

Capitalism has been great at motivating people to innovate and create but the current state of capitalistic systems, I say, isn't healthy for humanity. We need to acknowledge this and fix perverse incentive structures across the board (that doesn't mean destroying the system, simply fixing it). Much of what you're seeing these days used to be used in arguments for capitalistic systems against socialist systems--what really seems to have happened is that we've just traded who we want to give power to. Instead of those who tower over government systems in an authoritarian manner in socialist systems, we seek business leadership who... tower over us in an authoritarian manner.

One reason the US had been so fantastic is that we had a government and economic system that forced capitalistic ideals to compete with socialistic ideals. We had government services inspired by socialist systems that kept capitalistic drivers from going off the rails into too competitive of states with social safety nets to protect us. Meanwhile, to avoid the stagnant systems you see in prior socialist systems, we had capitalism provide incentives to motivate people to work, to do better for themselves and improve their lives and therefor those around them. Now, we seem to have mostly swept away socialist ideals (competition in policy simply isn't there anymore), capitalistic policy has won, and we're witnessing what unconstrained capitalism looks like. It's less value creation and more wealth extraction.

If you're a capital holder, it looks pretty good. My investments that I simply threw money at have grown beyond belief--without any sort of effort on my behalf--it's astounding to think how much money I earned doing nothing. It's an interesting situation because I still work and get paid fairly well, but when I look at my investment portfolio I can't help but think I'm cheating because asset growth well beyond inflation just appear in my accounts, meanwhile, at my day job, everything has grown more and more demanding without equal compensation.

It's an interesting time and I hope we course correct this nonsense before I get too old.

Looked at another way, capitalism has commoditized services that were historically unobtainable by certain classes for all intents and purposes. So now you have mediocre servicing at prices everyone can afford. You can still get expert services if you can truly pay for it, and that hasn't changed.

Making something a "human right" doesn't make it immune to the rules of scarcity. Expert services are scarce, which is why they cost more, even in socialist/communist countries. Communism is, after all, just state-owned capitalism. :) People still get rich in communist countries, experts still get outsized reward, it's just that the opportunities to get rich are constrained to the bureaucrats, and the outsized reward will either come from the system or be facilitated by a black market.

People living in communist cultures also looked to do the minimal effort. Sometimes less than minimal if they could get away with it. Human nature.

The allure of communism boils down to the promise of getting something for nothing. Of course that never works out.

Well put.

Personal story: moved into a EU country and tried to import my car tax-free as personal property. Went to a customs agency because apparently you don't talk to customs directly, you go through one of those. They had me collect all sorts of documents, which took me months before it became evident that this type of car cannot be imported tax-free in the first place.

The stress from expecting people to take their responsibilities seriously has cost me many meaningful interpersonal relationships, not to mention innumerable brain cells. On the other hand, the work to achieve more self-sufficiency is alienating in its own right, and, depending on starting conditions, can twist a person into an unlikable mess.

It's vicious cycles all the way down.

Well put. When you become medium-level at all areas where you like tinkering, it’s hard not to get bitter about people who aren’t doing it correctly for you…

I agree with sentiment, and I discovered early on in my adult life :

Iedereen doet maar wat ( Dutch )

Loosely translated : Everybody just fucks around, wether it is car mechanics, doctors or laywers.

Would love to hear a more canonical term for the phenomenon.

edit: And if it is absolutely critical it is done right? Do it yourself.

Is this a common expression in Dutch or something you made up yourself?

doet maar wat is common.

Je doet maar wat ( You )

Ze doen maar wat ( They )

In the US it's usually called "half-assing it" or doing it half-assed.

It's closer in meaning to "no one really knows what they're doing". Half-assing implies lack of effort. This expression implies lack of insight or direction.

If you're spending that much time doing all those things then maybe truly expert help is just expensive rather than too expensive.

There is no doubt though that people do better work when supervised and knowing what questions to ask an expert helps sets expectations about what level of work you will settle for.

It's true with software, too. Unless you are a programmer, it's impossible to tell if your programmers are doing a good job.

Information asymmetry is a real problem, particularly when people are selling information.

Having lived in the UK and USA: Drs are the exact same.

This feels so true to me. I think this is the biggest reason that things feel so unfair to many average people. because the resources required to get good service in almost every meaningful endeavor are just totally unobtainable to people so you either make yourself an expert in everything or get screwed left and right.

This is starting to push me in the direction of off grid/ sustainable living just to minimize these dependencies

Building management, renovation and construction is such a wild west.

I understand good vocational training (for example certified plumbers) in a country pays itself back very much.