[MarkPNeyer]

You are pointing directly at the philosophical bedrock of western civilization, something which most white collar elites implicitly believe but don't state outright. It shows up right away in the article:

> ... quality is an inherently subjective concept, as it depends on the preferences of each consumer.

For most of history, people believed the opposite. For thousands of years, people in every major civilization believed that there WAS an objective notion of quality (i.e. value). The idea that these things are purely subjective is a very recent concept in human history.

In the west, and places influenced by it - most elites come to believe that value is purely subjective. We talk, instead, about people's _preferences_ - but we can't measure feelings, just actions. "Some things are more valuable than others" is a very different belief from "people prefer some things over others". In a world that only recognizes what it can measure, the idea that value is subjective reduces to "people do some things and not other things", and _any_ action which can reliably be motivated - whether that's having babies or getting divorced, losing weight or watching porn, eating healthy or eating junk food - _all_ that our economy cares about is, "can you reliably produce that outcome at scale." This is all a natural consequence of the idea that value isn't real. People can't be wrong in what they want, and what they want is revealed in what they do. Therefore, literally all that matters is, can you motivate some kind of action - whatever that action is? If you can, you're 'adding value.' Motivating people to go out and commit crimes could itself, be valuable - if you were, say, the operator of a private prison. As long as your motivational technique isn't too direct and obvious, it's profitable for you. You're creating demand for business!

What would the world look like if value were _real_, we could sense it intuitively, but we could not measure it, and had persuaded ourselves it were entirely subjective? I think it would look exactly as it does now: a prevailing sense that quality is declining. We would observe drops in numerous large-scale metrics like "does humanity value life enough to create more humanity", while metrics like "time people spend doing measurable things" would go way up, along with a creeping sense that something was deeply wrong.

If value _were_ purely subjective, I would have expected that we'd have locked into some functioning propaganda loop by now. If value is purely subject, and there's no hardwired human nature to value some outcomes over others, What would be better for the economy than convincing everyone that EVERYTHING IS AWESOME all the time?

[nehal3m]

I think this is a great insight. Also, from a personal perspective, one of the problems I regularly experience as a consumer of goods is that it is very difficult for me to judge quality, meaning I can explicitly not intuit value. For example, two years ago I bought 3 identical pairs of Levi’s jeans at considerable cost. Granted, they’re all I wear, but given that I follow the washing instructions and don’t put undue stress on them I’d expect them to last 5 years. Two are busted already. I am looking for replacements and apparently buying from what I considered to be a reputable brand at a high price (which I foolishly believed to be an indicator of quality which it no longer is) is not a viable strategy anymore.

I am faced with a choice, do I join the problem and go for fast fashion crap or do I risk being burned again? Who do I believe when I’m researching quality? Google and Reddit have long since been astroturfed and small scale forums are dead.

[walterbell]

The search term BIFL (Buy It For Life) helps with some products. With ongoing supply chain, currency and trade variables, it's worth buying spares of proven products, which may later disappear from the market.

As for reputable brands, we may soon need version numbers for both products and companies, based on factors like supply chains, regulation, trade policy, corporate management, leadership or ownership (e.g. PE) changes. 2019 jeans from "Acme Corp v10" may be quite different from 2026 jeans from "Acme Corp v12".

[hedora]

The only solution I know of is just not buying stuff from brands Walmart (and, increasingly, Home Depot, amazon, etc) carries.

A new pair of Levi’s are $20 at walmart and $80 everywhere else (before recent inflation).

In theory, the $80 pair matches their previous quality, but in practice, they were forced to chase profitability with high-volume $20 jeans, so it’s all outsourced to the same overseas factories. The $80 pair are also crap being produced for sustenance wages, but with slightly thicker denim.

This is absolutely intentional, and is the cornerstone of modern retail in the US. Monopoly retailers drove prices below production wages or environmental impact, and their profit is driven by by the frequency with which stuff breaks and is replaced.

It all relies on information asymmetry. Look at the market for grifters discussion on HN yesterday. It talks about the economics of targeted advertising, but similar games are played by name brands. For instance most appliance manufacturers own many brands, and rotate which brand is garbage in a given year. That constantly tricks people into buying garbage from a “reputable” brand.

https://reclaimdemocracy.org/walmart-product-quality-durabil...

[Der_Einzige]

lol jeans. Just got into selvedge denim, go buy from a company like brave star denim, and don’t buy anything less than 15 oz.

I can find a literal 21 oz unrippable insane heavy weight selvedge denim pants for less than 200, and it’ll be made in America of Japanese materials.

Most Americans are simply stupid when they buy clothes. They don’t do research and they make extremely suboptimal purchases by trusting big brands.

Just checked: https://bravestarselvage.com/collections/heavyweight-selvage...

168 USD for jeans so strong and thick they feel like armor. You will never wear out of these jeans or rip them.

[gtowey]

It's not just being stupid, it's that the information space is overflowing with marketing and BS. It's a mammoth task to parse through it all and not be suckered in by a slick advertisement that says the product you're looking at has everything you want. Amazon is absolutely the worst for false advertising, garbage masquerading as top of the line. And the usual alternative, using Google to search for companies directly, has turned into a largely futile experience as their search results are absolutely terrible, showing almost only the "top" retailers which are the same purveyors of cheap crap.

I have spent a considerable amount of time researching better, more durable pants and this is the first time I've heard about this company. So thank you for that!

[trod1234]

The noise is so loud, you can't find any signal. Shannon's Limit has been reached.

Also, the knowledge needed to differentiate has been lost by many, and suppressed given the economic disadvantage of quality vs cheap in a money-printing economy.

Unless you have a fairly good knowledge of sewing, construction, chemicals/materials, you end up getting things that look the same but aren't the same.

With Jeans, most of the durability came from the weave with extra strength from rivets at the stress points in the fabric and the properly locked-off stitching, at the seams; which a lot of industrial machining can't duplicate at the same cost (that's why you get the unraveling with those stitches using 4 threads at once). Then there is the synthetic fibers that are mixed in for flexibility/comfort that become stressed or dissolve upon exposure to detergents, and the use of low-quality cotton thread, or full synthetics and sometimes just glue to bind the seams instead of nylon/silk (both extremely strong).

You won't find any company offering Jeans that last more than a year or so, and any fraying near the belt loops, or main seam lines is a sign of poor worksmanship. I've had Walmart jeans, both the offbrand, and triple price regular brand rip, belt loops break, seams show signs of unraveling within 20 minutes of first use (brand new).

[Der_Einzige]

>You won't find any company offering Jeans that last more than a year or so

I literally just linked to a pair of jeans that you will try and fail to kill over a lifetime of use for most people.

If you still need bigger, Naked and Famous make 32 oz and 40oz, but the heavy denim crowd has bought them all and it's hard to find them right now.

Trying to teach HN how to buy high quality clothes is like talking to a brick wall.

This is 25 oz from the same brand: https://bravestarselvage.com/collections/heavyweight-selvage...

Quoting their description: "Selvage denim of this weight and caliber are rare, expensive and very difficult to manufacture here in USA due to the sheer weight, thickness of the yarn and time factor involved in slowing down the production line.

Each sewing operation has to be considered and necessary adjustments need to be made to accommodate the weight. Our sewing operators are required to wear safety goggles during the sewing process due the frequent exploding needles which can be quite dangerous. Needless to say it's extremely time consuming due to the half speed at which the operations can be accomplished which makes it a very labor intensive production process. "

I'd like to see you kill that in a year, or 10.

I found some 22 oz from some Indonesian selvedge company for 124 USD: https://wingmandenim.com/product/zero-zeke-22oz/

Japanese materials.

You just don't know how to buy jeans.

[trod1234]

The link isn't something people buying work pants would buy.

22oz Selvedge has its issues, and under heavy use would last 4 or 5 years given societal constraints (i.e. you don't walk around in stinky clothes multiple days in a row).

At ~$124 + tariff, we're looking at significantly more for a five year period or a comparable minimum of $40/yr replacement.

Comparable products can be found with a replacement every year for that price, often better than that price, if one knows where to look. Its not just the material that is important, its the aggregate of many factors.

Most people don't buy quality for quality's sake.

The value of quality is derived by the benefit to human action, at least in a functioning market where no money-lenders without reserve have caused havoc; and when compared against similar alternative opportunities.

You generally don't buy work pants and care about the country of origin insofar as the functional quality remains the same.

You care about the effective use, and the cost in exchange. Demand isn't need, its the subset of need, who have the money and are willing to make the exchange and buy this over other comparable products at a specific price.

Given alternatives all things being equal with regard to effective use during a period of time, demand goes to the lower priced item or inferior good which serves the need at the lowest cost. (https://austrianeconomics.substack.com/p/the-subjective-theo...)

You don't seem to understand how economics works. I can understand the increased labor requirements, and the love of a craft, but it needs to make economic sense when you talk about buyers and sellers. Anything else is just branding/hype/marketing meant to mislead from the underlying important factors.

> You just don't know how to buy jeans.

I do, and in doing so it must make real economic sense (rationally), not following blindly to the mistakes of Keynes and other misleading variants or factors.

[lotsofpulp]

Jeans at old navy or costco or next are $20 to $30. And I can wash them on “normal” cycle every time I wear them, and dry them on normal and never have to worry about taking care of them.

They still last me at least a couple years. And I don’t have to trust that the manufacturer made them well enough to last 7+ years for me to break even.

[Der_Einzige]

Wearing unfashionable or ugly clothes will get you treated poorly by others, which leads to negative life outcomes. No one finds old navy or costco 20-30$ jeans fashionable.

You need to trust that the manufacturer didn't cheap out in ways that could negatively impact your health.

From https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/fashion-beauty/article/319092...

"Experts said Shein is not a unique case. Clothes from many large clothing brands like Lululemon, Old Navy, and REI have been found to contain toxic chemicals."

Selvedge Denim from made in america/japan brands (i.e. brave star, gustin, naked and famous, iron heart, etc) is made using 1940s machines/techniques using (usually) 100% cotton denim. No toxic chemicals.

My jeans are better than yours.

[hilux]

Check out shopgoodwill.com. I get everything there.

Most clothes are incredible value, and even with a few duds in the mix, it's way better (for my wallet, and the environment) than buying new at retail.

[rixed]

There is only one reliable way to tell that a product can stand the test of time: how old is it already?

You can't buy anything second hand, but jeans you can.

[lotsofpulp]

Buy the cheapest version that works for your needs. Or lower your expectations.

For example, I buy at Costco first, and if that doesn’t work, I seek higher quality. But I also don’t expect clothes to last many, many years.

[Forgeties79]

I’ve always viewed it as less a discussion about any sort of real defined “quality metric” and more companies asking “what is the least amount of time, money, and effort we can put in before people stop buying it?”

Even more simply put: what is the worst version of the product that people are willing to buy?

[xp84]

Yes! And because all competitors besides niche artisanal players are simultaneously playing that same exact game (or in many cases, there are 10 brands all made by 3 conglomerates), people have little chance of actually stopping buying the product even when its quality level dips to absurdity. People will “stop buying” one brand and buy another, but the root of their frustrations is identical across brands and manufacturers.

[Forgeties79]

Yeah for a lot of stuff every vendor is making basically the same thing the same way.

[WalterBright]

Many products come in 3 levels of quality:

1. the stripper, designed for a minimum price that will draw people into the showroom

2. the luxe, which has every feature, designed for the people who don't care about the price

3. the midrange, which is what most people wind up buying

This strategy maximizes the profit that can be made. You'll see it from refrigerators to cars.

[gtowey]

The problem I see is that main difference between those options is not quality, but features.

For example with refrigerators you see integrated touch screen, viewing windows, and all kinds of esoteric features.

But the core of the product, the compressor and overall cooling system is not actually any better. In fact, looking at reviews shows that those parts are often garbage quality too.

So it fails at the core job of keeping your food cold, and the added features are just more things to fail as well meaning that buying the more expensive products are generally a lose-lose situation.

[hedora]

Concretely, don’t buy anything made by Samsung. Here’s a $3000 washer / dryer with a 90 day [x] warranty:

https://www.samsung.com/us/home-appliances/all-in-one-washer...

[x] I got tired of following footnote disclaimers. Note the headline 20-year warranty and $2,200 price tags are blatant lies. The two year warranty below that claim has footnotes that references more off page disclaimers. When we had a samsung appliance die, we found the actual warranty was only 90 days.

Even worse, there are zero repair companies willing to touch samsung garbage in our area because it’s impossible to debug issues. So, even with their samsung care package, you’re still throwing this thing out in a few years.

I’ve also attempted to call their customer support. It makes the IRS call center seem prompt.

[sp0ck]

Why on earth you choose product so expensive where dryer is basically fan with heater ? With that price range you can buy Miele hardware with heat pump dryer that is basically non-breakable and an order of magnitude more energy efficient.

Really - I would like to know how you came to purchase decision :)

[Forgeties79]

With bigger appliance purchases like that the way often/should (clearly not always) work is they should be more robust and effective. A cheap drier needs to be babysat or it becomes a fire hazard. It also can just door a poor job of drying your stuff.

I have the cheapest Costco drier. It’s fine, but I do have to keep an eye on it.

[ungreased0675]

There is some logic to not over-engineering a product or using more materials than necessary to produce something. I wonder why that seems to have manifested in an anti-consumer application some places.

[gtowey]

I think it has to do with having no limits on executive compensation.

There is no incentive to create long-term value when you can cost-optimize your brand into the garbage while creating large short term profits from which they can pay themselves outrageous bonuses. It's an easy playbook and there is no shortage of people willing to trade their reputation for a few hundred million.

Our economy has become almost entirely a race to the bottom.

[Forgeties79]

$$$

[lotsofpulp]

> For most of history, people believed the opposite. For thousands of years, people in every major civilization believed that there WAS an objective notion of quality (i.e. value). The idea that these things are purely subjective is a very recent concept in human history.

Value has always been subjective, people in previous eras simply didn’t have the tools or technology to figure it out as quickly as today.

For example, IKEA furniture does 99% of the job for 90% of the people at less than 50% of the price of what was previously known as “quality” furniture.

The amount of money IKEA has saved me afforded multiple vacations, plus it is easier to move. So is it lower “value”?

Lots of people like to gripe about lower quality houses today. But I don’t want a house that lasts 500 years. I want a house that I can easily modify or repair that lets wireless signals through the wall, with drywall, wood studs, PEX piping, etc. And it will be a lot cheaper than a house built with masonry.

[blub]

Yes it is lower quality: doesn’t look as good as massive wood or other quality wood, less stable, breaks or loosens up after moves, so light that it easily falls over and must be anchored, etc.

What you’re saying is that low quality furniture is worth it to you for various reasons.

[lumb63]

You and parent comment are not going to see eye to eye because of different definitions of “quality”. They are using the term synonymously with the economic idea of “utility”. To them, a higher-quality item is that which provides them the most value.

To the contrary, you are using “quality” to mean something else; maybe you could elaborate on what “quality” is to you, what characteristics make something “high quality”, and why the categories you’ve used to measure quality are the “right ones”.

[MostlyStable]

I read that portion not as arguing that every possible metric is completely subjective, such that some people will actively prefer, for example, a version that doesn't last as long, or costs more for no additional benefit, but rather that quality has a lot of different axes, some of which are mutually exclusive or in active tension, and the relative weighting of different axes is purely subjective. There is no way that one can argue that it is "correct" to value durability over cost. Or aesthetic appeal over simplicity.

Basically, when there are many axes of quality, the pareto frontier gets very large and very complex and no one position on it is inherently better than another, even if everyone universally agrees which direction is "better" on every individual axis.

[thrwwy_jhdkqsdj]

I agree with you in principle but I would not put as much moral or rational in peoples head. Maybe your comment had some sarcasm in it and I missed it, in this case what's next is pushing an open door.

> ...In the west, and places influenced by it - most elites come to believe that value is purely subjective. We talk, instead, about people's _preferences_ - but we can't measure feelings, just actions. "Some things are more valuable than others" is a very different belief from "people prefer some things over others".

When it comes to functionnal products, my take is this is the rational we give because it is impossible to take down. What I think it really mean is "This is not me who wants it, it's them". It is the same argument as "I do it because if I don't do it, someone else will" when doing something illegal or immoral.

This is why I'm inclined to believe when your argument is this empty you know what you are doing. This is how you end up inventing "customer personas" and asking your consumer themselves why they buy your product.

[marcosdumay]

Subjective things are real and some times even measurable too.

The problem with objective theories of value is that they are demonstrably wrong. If you rent a small apartment and have two washing machines, one of them has negative value to you, people often give those away; try explaining that with objective value.

And yes, people's values do align to a very large extent.

[ants_everywhere]

I don't agree with a lot of what you're writing here, but reading through the lines I think maybe there's some common ground.

There is a philosophy that value (including reality) is subjective and that all that matters is making people act. That's quite explicitly the philosophy of Marx. It's in strong contrast to the "philosophical bedrock of western civilization", which is the search for objective truth and objective reality. Whatever one thinks of Marx's idea that objective reality is a middle class fiction, I don't think people would agree that those ideas are associated with the elite of Western civilization. Quite the opposite.

I think what you're ultimately referring to is the use of ordinal utility functions by economists. It's not clear how to write equations in economics where each person's preferences are accurately expressed in well-behaved value-agnostic units. You could try using money, but not everyone values having a lot of money. And even if they did, which currency? Dollars? Euros? Gold? Bitcoin?

Because utility functions are hard to get right theoretically, Paul Samuelson proposed trying to measure them empirically by revealed preference. There are lots of things wrong with this from an academic perspective and it's reasonable to have concerns about the long-term effects if this is adopted for entire economies. But it didn't start until 1938 and it's certainly not a philosophical bedrock of Western civilization. More like a desperate hack.

> we can't measure feelings

We have several ways of measuring feelings, and we use them regularly. But you can't build a utility theory based literally on current feelings. Otherwise opium would have nearly infinite objective value. You want to use something that integrates over time, like life satisfaction. Or something that measures the current feeling, change in feeling, and integral over feeling like a PID controller. But even if you could get the measurements right, doing all the measurements for all 8.2 billion people in real time would be impossible right now. So it's not clear what the right theory is.

[walleeee]

Where in Marx do you find claims like reality is a middle-class fiction or all value is subjective? The labor theory of value is premised on an idea of surplus value as a very real thing. Substituting subjective theories takes the air out of the analysis, doesn't it?

I'm perhaps willing to grant "all that matters is making people act" in the sense that he was far more thoroughly a revolutionist than a scientist.

But your antipodal impression of Marx and "Western thought" misses the many strands which make up the latter, as well as the fact that he was no island: he was steeped (and elements of his thought remain visible) in a diverse intellectual tradition which is by no means a monolith.

[ants_everywhere]

> The labor theory of value

This is value in the sense of "price". The labor theory of value was from Adam Smith and Ricardo rather than something Marx contributed.

> Substituting subjective theories takes the air out of the analysis, doesn't it?

You're right that this is an apparent contradiction. Technically, Marx was making a prophecy about an upcoming revolution as being a historical inevitability. And when he was being more rigorous he was careful to clarify that this was a statement about historical inevitability (like manifest destiny) rather than something he thought was "good".

But many people have taken this to be a contradiction. Here's an essay from Michael Rosen defending the claim that his critique of morality isn't inconsistent with his condemnation of people's behaviors [0].

Marx's attitude toward morality is discussed on page 7. The basic gist is that morality claims to be objective, but it's really, to quote Rosen, "particular and relative to the society in question".

Nowadays people sympathetic to his approach paraphrase these ideas by saying that reality and morality are "socially constructed."

> But your antipodal impression of Marx and "Western thought" misses the many strands which make up the latter, as well as the fact that he was no island

This is a reasonable claim and one that has also been well-discussed. My personal take is that Marx critiqued and rejected the Enlightenment, which he saw as serving the interests of the middle class.

I group him with Rousseau and many German philosophers of his time as being overly influenced by the Romantic movement and longing for a return to a primitive way of life.

Western thought has been firmly in the direction of the Enlightenment, engineering, and science. And the romantics have generally been a conservative counter culture wanting to return to a simpler time.

[0] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/michaelrosen/files/the_mar...

[walleeee]

I can't easily recognize (post-)modern social construction in his worldview, especially construction of reality at large (morality it is easier to see the argument) but I admit it has been years since my reading. I agree with you that there is a strand in Western thought which is infatuated with science/engineering to a historically novel degree but I am not so sure that enlightenment ideals fit so neatly in the same box, or that statements like "Western thought is firmly X" can be meaningfully interpreted. In any case thanks for your response and for the link, I look forward to reading and learning from it.

[ants_everywhere]

> I can't easily recognize (post-)modern social construction in his worldview, especially construction of reality at large

The most relevant piece is probably Theses on Feuerbach. Feuerbach advocated a materialist (e.g. essentially naturalistic) point of view to which Marx objected.

His basic argument is that it doesn't make sense to talk about an objective materialist universe. That point of view leads to middle class society. His own point of view isn't really coherent, but it's essentially that humans create the objective world and truth through interacting with it.

To me it feels like what he's trying to do is try to take German idealism and apply it to groups of people rather than single people. Conceptually you get a sort of Cartesian solipsism at the social scale. But you can read it and you may get a different take away from it.

[swed420]

> he most relevant piece is probably Theses on Feuerbach. Feuerbach advocated a materialist (e.g. essentially naturalistic) point of view to which Marx objected.

One must have a very warped understanding of Marx to claim he didn't advocate for materialism. Are you unfamiliar with his dialectical/historical materialism?

[MarkPNeyer]

> Whatever one thinks of Marx's idea that objective reality is a middle class fiction, I don't think people would agree that those ideas are associated with the elite of Western civilization. Quite the opposite.

Those are ideas are much more popular on, say, Harvard's campus and among its professoriate, than are the ideas that some things are objectively better than others, and that searching for truth is more important than social justice or people's feelings or racial equality or ending the patriarchy or reducing global warming etc etc. Witness, e.g. the uproar over anyone saying "men and women are different and those differences lead to different preferences which then affect the distribution of genders in different career tracks." That is a claim about objective reality, rooted in biology, measurable. It is, if you care about evidence more than feelings - most likely true. And yet it's deeply offensive to most people who work in an office. It doesn't matter whether or not it _might_ be true - what matters is how people feel about it. That's what i'm referring to as the bedrock.

The bedrock you're referring to _was_ the bedrock, of an older civilization that shared the same name as our own. Western civilization, today, is a distant relative of what it used to be 100 years ago. The bedrock I'm referring to was laid at the start of the 20th century, by the managerial class of the time, who wanted more power and authority, as elites always do. Our civilization today is as alien to that of the late 19th century americans as, say, the ancient romans were to the late-stage byzantines. There's a lineage relationship, for sure - but the mores, values, and guiding concepts are so radically different that it's properly conceptualized as a fundamentally different civilization, even if they both called themselves 'romans'.

[trod1234]

You are talking in circles while missing the point, and ignoring quite a lot of established literature on economics.

I'd suggest if you are limited on time that you read Hazlitt. Economics in One Lesson. You seem to conflate need for demand in your examples. The two are not the same.

Need includes anyone who could benefit/find valuable from the use of something, the value being derived from productive human action.

Demand in reality includes only the people who would make an actual exchange at a specific price point. The former is a superset of the latter.

You end up misleading others, and going into delusional territory when you ignore this nuance.

[dennis_jeeves2]

Good analysis...

(Side note: I was looking at your comment history and it appears that most of your comments are down-voted, somebody has an axe to grind)

[WarOnPrivacy]

> most of your comments are down-voted, somebody has an axe to grind

Parent's comments are months apart. What sort of somebody did you have in mind?

Of note, parent's tag is "ask me anything and i will probably give you something new to think about." This is a bold promise.

[Razengan]

This "grudge downvoting" shit has been a thing on HN for years, with Dang etc refusing to acknowledge it. Might as well join in on it yourself till they notice :)

[WalterBright]

It happens to me, sometimes. It doesn't work very well because I couldn't care less about my karma points.

[Razengan]

It makes your comment [nearly] invisible to others, unless they have showdead. It can also limit the rate at which you can post. It achieves what spam-downvoters want, without any downsides to them.

[WalterBright]

I should probably post less often, so not a problem :-)