Long ago, the gameshow 'Wheel of Fortune' made players spend the money they won on selection of prizes instead of getting cash. Watching an old episode recently, I put the price of the refrigerator into an inflation calculator and was astonished by just how expensive it was, relatively speaking, back then. No doubt that was the MSRP and could be purchased for less at Sears, but it still was a shock to see how much more expensive such goods were back then. Ditto for exercise equipment. We've become so accustomed to even large appliances being relatively inexpensive that we tolerate them being mostly disposable instead of repairable.

Right—most of our stuff is so very much cheaper, especially relative to wages, than it was even in the 1980s, let alone earlier. Of course we aren't as interested in repairing our stuff, either DIY or paying to have it repaired.

This goes for food, too. Articles about food waste can be read as articles lamenting that food's so cheap it's not worth trying to recover all that waste.

I'm pretty far from a free-market superfan, but these two particular, perennial stories—"can you believe how much food waste there is?! What a tragedy!" and "nobody repairs anything anymore, what a shame"—amount to complaining that shit's way too cheap, to my eye. Neither's due to carelessness or wastefulness or laziness, really, but economy. Quintuple the prices on everything and watch food waste plummet and interest in repair skills achieve levels not seen in decades. But, like... I'd rather we not.

We could reorganize our entire economy, so that we could live in a world with $200/pair sneakers, $500/month rent, and free universal healthcare. This alternate world would likely be much less carbon-intensive, have a higher life expectancy, and vastly reduced rates of depression and anxiety; unfortunately, as it could reduce profit for shareholders, it could never happen under capitalism

Well, if you want to know what that world looks like, just go back 30 years in time (except for the universal healthcare, in the US).

Was it less carbon-intensive, with higher life expectancy and vastly reduced rates of depression and anxiety back then?

It is actually amazing jus how cheap the low end stuff is. Just look at pretty much anything.

Next step to think is that if they can make that for that price. What are we paying for when the price is 2x, 3x, 5x or more? Is the quality and longevity really similar or is there something shared...

> Nobody pays a cobbler $150 to re-sole their $50 sneakers—their $400 leather oxfords, maybe.

I paid a cobbler $90 to resole(and re-cork) my birkenstocks after 2.5 years. It's been 4 years since I've done it, and they aren't even close to where they were when he did it. I honestly just wish I'd done it sooner. He re-corked them as well, but some of that is now falling apart. Might have to go back.

uh, aren't birkenstocks cork sandals... so if you replace the cork and rubber soles, it's pretty much a new sandal? It's like the question: if you replace the handle of an axe one year and then axe head the next year, is it still the same axe?

No, the main part is the leather. Not all the cork was replaced either, it was just firmed up. Regardless, it's still lasted twice as long as a resole (and I didn't have to break them in) for half the price of new, and they're still going strong.

The Ship of Theseus is still the ship of Theseus. But also because no matter how many parts are replaced, the ship is still owned by Theseus.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

You always say, "I rehandled my axe" - to get a new axe head is to get a new axe; you don't "re-head" an axe. Pedantry aside, yes, the Ship of Theseus.

Additionally, every part of a corporation has to be a "profit center". Including the part that makes service manuals and service parts.

Long ago, I worked at General Motors. Every part travelled through so many departments, divisions and corporations that nothing could be thrown away. Even radios that cost about $20 to make ended up costing the customer about $500 no matter how it got to the customer (in the dash? as a replacement? as an upgrade?). Even the spare parts ended up sometimes costing more than the item that they went into. The rule of thumb was that every time an item changed hands, it was marked up 30%. By the 90s, the rule of thumb was that if you didn't sell that item more than 5 times per year, it was not "worth" keeping the part in inventory.

By the end of my time at GM, I ended up in a group that wrote repair manuals. We were constantly told that just to keep a part number in all of the computer systems and parts lists would cost the company $1500/year. That did not count the cost of keeping even 1 of those parts - just the part number.

> Nobody pays a cobbler $150 to re-sole their $50 sneakers

There are a few people who repair collectable sneakers. Those aren't $50 sneakers anymore, but more like $2k+ sneakers.

WSJ article: https://archive.ph/9Dkjs

> we have to make everyone materially poorer first.

that's false. We can also make repairs materially faster (more productive).

Just to illustrate the point with something extreme. If a worker could fix 100 fridges a day, they'd only have to charge like $5 labor.

This is a good point, and might actually be viable in some cases. Though I think most of those end up looking less like what we'd think of as repair and more like, I dunno, replacing the batteries in a remote control, or lightbulbs in a lamp. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but it's also probably not easy to engineer into a lot of products, especially without driving up the price significantly.

Countering with an adapted proverb: All working applicances are all alike, each broken applicance is broken in its own way.

This might be exaggerating a little bit, but I do think that repairing stuff is inherently more difficult to automate than production, and increased automation is the major way we've seen productivity gains in manufacturing other than offshoring to cheaper countries and shipping things over slowly but cheaply in bulk.

The proverb doesnt really address the point. Is your claim is that repairs cannot ever be sufficiently productive to be worth it?

I wouldn't claim "cannot ever" (and after all, to some extent repairs are worth it even under today's conditions), but I do believe repairwork is simply inherently more complex and difficult to automate.

Unlike in assembly, there's not just one happy assembly path that you need to handle – first you always need to diagnose the problem, and then depending on the problem take a variety of actions in order to fix/replace whatever you've identified as the faulty component.

Plus subsequently, even in the ideal case of a widget that's as easy to disassemble/repair as it was to originally assemble (which comes with its own set of trade-offs), any productivity gains in manufacturing that were based on parallelisation are difficult replicate when repairing just a single one-off component. E.g. reflow soldering allows you to efficiently solder large circuit boards with hundreds or more components in one go, but conversely subsequently replacing just a single one of those components therefore doesn't take one hundredth of the original assembly time.

> We stopped repairing stuff because stuff is cheap

However, OP's main example is the NYC metro system, which is decidedly not cheap. A similar problem occurred in SF: BART cars are being replaced with multi-$M cars full of electronics & are now having numerous breakdowns.

BART drivers used to reboot the old trains by flipping 4 sets of switches. Now the reset process has hundreds of steps, so most drivers just take the car offline & call for a mechanic. And there's far more failure modes to the new cars as well. Thus: the new cars are more expensive, more fragile, & harder to maintain. BART scored a perfect 'Reverse Better-Faster-Cheaper'.

How did this happen? Politics & payola. The new proposed cars were barely shown to the public, & only for UX/design feedback.

The tie-in's to capitalism that OP describes are apt too: very big companies tendered their bids for these new cars. Maintainability wasn't a key design feature. It's not just our economic system (capitalism) that isn't interested in maintainability- our political system isn't either. Decision makers who won't be in power to see the need for their shiny new acquisitions to be maintained, never seen to care that they will.

How do you build modern electronics for a 30-50 year lifespan? What parts do you use?

I happen to know that the Ford EEC-IV engine control module of the 1980s was designed for a 30-year lifespan. Which it delivered; many 1980s vehicles are still running with it. But newer electronics won't last that long. Line sizes are too small, and minor effects such as electromigration cause wear-out.

American metro system problems have nothing to do with Capitalism (TM), in fact several other capitalist countries, like Japan, manage robust metro systems just fine. America hasn't built metro en masse since the '40s and so local expertise on building and maintaining metro isn't there, increasing maintenance cost. In most countries with robust metro systems, cars and rail are standardized, leading to a robust market within the country for parts and a large pool of specialized labor able to debug and maintain these metro systems. In the US, every metro system is a one-off. This is exacerbated by the fractal-nature of local politics in the US which means that there's no general American standard for building rail/metros as each local government comes up with their own bespoke requirements.

BART is a perfect example of this. BART went with non-standard rail gauge and very long trains and stations. This makes it difficult and expensive for BART to buy new cars and fix problems.

Great post. Another point is that the DC metro system also uses a non-standard rail gauge: it's 1/4 inch smaller than standard US gauge for some dumb reason, so of course this makes it more expensive to buy cars. Getting new cars made only happens once a decade or so, and involves getting a big juicy contract, and a whole new assembly plant built in the US somewhere.

Here in Japan, the metro system is great. Trains are always on time, they don't break down (because they actually do maintenance!), there's constantly new construction too. On top of this, the train systems are all privately owned: different companies own the different lines. Even so, they all use the same payment method: a simple contactless debit card (suica or pasmo) that works at every station across the country (as well as in vending machines, restaurants, taxis, and countless other places). It's really amazing just how horrible metro systems in the US are compared to this; it's like going to another planet.

Generally, you'll find that these non-standard gauges for urban/light rail have good reasons, at least good for the time the decisions about them were made. The history of the TTC gauge used here in Toronto is a great example of that.

Hah, “fix”. Basics like food and electricity is already becoming way more expensive.

Don’t get how someone can write multiple paragraphs on this stuff and not mention “planned obsolesence”. Consumer capitalism is not a lifestyle but an economic system. Every household is supposed to have 1–2 cars, one lawnmower, one electric snow blower, one chainsaw, one of every this and that tool, and so on. And everyone is supposed to buy something new when these things break down. Not fundamentally because labor is expensive but fundamentally because consumer capitalism demands consumption.

In China it's a bit different (or maybe the same thing): The key component is stuff being not very affordable than one's salary. This is no longer true for many Chinese so we are losing the arts anyway. For example my father was never a professional carpenter but he made his own wedding furnitures including a double bed. He did probably know some carpentry from his early work in the factory/farm though.