Expediting Obsolescence?

Deveronvale Perfection,
Scottish Ram, fetches
record $347.000 at auction.

The United States is well known as a consumer society. It is also known for its penchant for built-in obsolescence, resulting in a throw-away mode of production and incredible waste. I don’t believe this is a secret, although with the amount of storage space being built nowadays I guess you could argue that people don’t just throw away things, they hoard them for reasons that are difficult to understand. No one in America expects their appliances to last. Nor do we any longer, in general, even expect anything to be repaired if it breaks down. You probably by now all know this from personal experience. If your DVD player or TV or some other appliance goes bad you will be told it would be cheaper to buy a new one that have it repaired (this is slightly less true for major appliances but still applies). I don’t know how many times I have experienced this, but I know it is common. Not only do we not expect things to last, many people feel they must have the latest thing, whatever it is: automobile, refrigerator, washer-dryer, fashion, and so on. We have developed a culture which implicitly assumes that the earth’s resources are infinite and “there’s always more where that came from.” Virtually no one in the U.S. builds a house or even a building, with the idea that it might last a hundred years or more. In Europe many people live in buildings and houses built far more than a hundred years ago.

So what happens when a consumer-driven society like ours begins to slow down and falls into a recession, when consumers just do not, or cannot, buy things as fast and furiously as usual? Up to a point they try to just make-do with what they have. But this is difficult if what they have is shoddy, not well-made in the first place, and deliberately designed to last only a relatively short time before going on the scrap-heap. Our brilliant masters of the dismal science have begun to implement a solution, they have decided to simply expedite obsolescence. Automobiles were their first choice to try out this new idea, “Cash for Clunkers” was born. That is, if you have an older car that doesn’t get very good gas mileage, the government will subsidize your purchase of a new one up to the tune of $4500. Almost a half million clunkers have been turned in for that many new cars. This program is regarded as such a resounding success there is now talk of expanding it to washer-dryers, refrigerators, and what-have-you. The clunkers are not going to be re-sold, repaired, or used any longer. They will simply be destroyed. Is this not a great idea? Look at all the happy faces on those who were able to benefit from it. Think of all the gasoline it will help to conserve. Think of all the production of new cars it will stimulate. Think of how it will help the economy recover. I wouldn’t, however, think too deeply about it if I were you, because it seems to me it will accelerate the doomsday scenario that inevitably awaits our waste-driven society even without such draconian measures. It actually glorifies waste and will use up the earth’s finite resources even faster than usual. I am not a practitioner of the dismal science but this seems to me to be a truly stupid idea, and if it is expanded to other items it will result eventually in an absolute disaster. Like so many of our ideas it is a short-term solution to a long-term problem. It replaces one piece of planned obsolescence (junk) with another machine that will not be much better. Granted this puts people into a kind of awkward bind at the moment because you can’t very well tell them to make-do with what they have when what they have is basically junk. What we need to do, of course, is build far better products, cars, houses, appliances, etc., that will last longer, be subject to repairs rather than just being thrown away, and be much easier on resources and the environment. I can’t resist pointing out that when I was a boy people actually darned their socks. Because our economy has existed for so long based upon waste, inefficiency, profit and short-term gain, this would call for a cultural revolution. Frankly, as all of us, including our leaders most of all, have internalized these dysfunctional values, I fear we may not be up to such drastic change. The basic question for all cultures, is how do you motivate people to want to do what they have to do in order to keep society thriving and successful over time. What you should not do, it seems to me, is encourage them to increase the very behaviors that spell out so clearly, DOOMSDAY!

LKBIQ:
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he know that every day is Doomsday.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

TILT:
There is no viable long-term solution for the storage of nuclear waste.