The products we buy are getting worse IT’S NOT YOUR IMAGINATION
Iwas as competitive then as I am now. I’d fling myself across the basement to save a point. I’d throw a fit if I pocketed the 8-ball. I’d desperately reach across center “ice” tobring the puck back to my side.
And as a child I could do all of this in one afternoon with our Fisher-Price 3in-1 Tournament Table: ping-pong, pool and “glide” hockey. What I didn’t know at the time was how good I had it: Only a few years later, that combination of quality and affordability would be as hard to find as the ping-pong ball when itbounced behind the washer.
It’s not your imagination: Everything you buy is getting worse. And never is this more obvious, especially for parents, than after the plastic avalanche of Christmas. That’s the hidden inflation nearly impervious to economic policies.
Broken promises
Sometime between the end of my childhood and the birth of my own children, my parents ditched the old 3-in-1 table. After hundreds of hours of oftenrough play it was still going strong, but we all figured that, when we needed a new one, we could replace it with something new and better and still affordable. That’s the way the economy is supposedto work.
Wrong.
This Christmas, my parents placed the old table’s successor — new! improved! 4-in-1! — in the same basement spot the original had occupied for so many years. I imagined hours of letting my kids believe they could beat me, then snatching hope away at the last moment. It was going to be great.
Butit was not to be. The ping-pong surface was so dead it was unplayable. The ball bounced like a flat basketball. The hockey “goals” were plastic and flimsy and barely functional. The pool table was tolerable but tiny, and the foosball — the newcomer — was the only game that got significantplay over the holidays.
The original had built-in storage for everything. The successor has a cardboard box.
I don’t mean to be ungrateful: The table was a thoughtful and generous gift, but my parents immediately agreed it was a poor imitation of the original.
This is a story that plays out time and again in homes across America, with goods from socks that wear out after being worn half-a-dozen times to appliances with flimsy parts that stop working (and refuse to be repaired) after only a few years. Splashy technological advancements are masking, and not very effectively, a deeper truth: The stuff we buy is junk.
In other words, the implicit promise of American capitalism — that hard work is rewarded with the purchasing power to acquire progressively more advanced goods — has been broken. And while this isn’tJoe Biden’s fault, it is his problem.
Data vs. polling
One aspect of the coming presidential election that will be blessedly
will be debates about how strong the economy really is. The president will argue that everything is going swimmingly, and the challenger will argue it’s a mirage.
The economic data, for now, is firmly on the side of Mr. Biden. Polling, however, cuts the other way.
The temptation for the incumbent, and for liberal pundits, will be to argue that people who are down on the economy are being bamboozled — by Republicans, by Fox News, by a lingering pandemic pessimism that’s no longer connected to reality. They will say that real wages are growing and that despite record inflation Americans’ ability to afford the same “consumption basket” has increased, not just over the last few decades but in the last few years, especially the last two.
The problem is that the quality of goods in that basket has declined, precipitously, over the same time. This is a kind of inflation — the same money buys worse stuff, which in turn must be constantly replaced, costing much more over the long run — that the topline numbers don’t, and can’t, account for.
Focusing entirely on those numbers will be perceived by voters, and not wrongly, as out-of-touch gaslighting. The economy is more than charts and numbers: It’s the provision of tangible goods and services to real human beings. And no abstract data is going to convince people to ignore the visible evidence that it’s simply not working as well as it used to, and should work now.
Potemkin economy
What galls me most about products like the 4-in-1 play table is that no one at any responsible level of the manufacturing process — from the factory leaders to the middle managers and DEI consultants to the C-suite executives — takes any pride in the quality of their work. At no point does someone stop and ask, “Does the product we’re making actually serve the purpose it’s meant to? Is it any good?”
It used to be that, even if companies weren’t driven to high levels of craftsmanship and quality on their own, competition would require it. What they’ve realized is that if quality declines across the board, consumers will just have to suck it up.
There is, however, an exception. I looked into whether something like the old Fisher-Price play table still existed. There are a variety of inexpensive variations on the flimsy new version, but also a variety of well-crafted alternatives — that cost over $1,000. In other words, as it is across the consumer economy, the choice is between affordable schlock and expensive quality. And how many average families can afford a $1,000 play table?
The trouble for Mr. Biden is that no policies can quickly turn around decades of degradation — and anything that might work, like his laudable Made in America proposals, will inevitably jack up prices. Which exposes the dirty secret: If the quality of goods in that “consumption basket” hadn’t declined, average Americans wouldn’t be able to afford them. That’s the hidden inflation thatweighs on voters at least as much as themeasurable inflation.
The structural bias against quality is what makes our Potemkin economy possible. And turning that around will be much more difficult than flipping the ping-pong back to pool.