Buying handcrafted artisan stuff is a luxury few can afford. I come from a poor family and I was always grateful for mass produced mediocre stuff that we could actually afford.
Sure but the same optimizations that bring the costs down, bring down the average laborers value.
I'm not saying that things were sunshine and rainbows pre-industrialization, but there's some level of analysis to be done on the durability and value of a handcrafted piece of clothing, the care that goes into maintaining it, the value of a local economy, and the other side where you're forced to buy cheap items that degrade at a far faster rate.
If a town's local businesses are put out by a new walmart's ability to carry low prices, does the town truly come out ahead with those low prices? Or does Walmart simply extract more money from the town than it returns, leaving the town worse off?
Those optimizations increase the value of labor by greatly increasing the amount of output per unit of labor. Do you understand how much wealthier the modern worker is than the pre Industrial Revolution peasant?
That’s a good point. What’s always been strange to me is why we as a community allow this. We should boycott the Walmarts and Devins of the world. Drive them out of business by voting with our dollars.
Handcrafted artisinal stuff is a luxury because that's the only niche that makes economic sense for it now, given mass production and other recent developments (too lazy to list, sorry).
Consider how you can't really get by in most of America without a car because we designed our cities to require them. It would be a mistake to conclude that, because life is harder in a car-optimized society without a car, society must be better off optimizing for cars.
The capitalist system keeps you poor by design. And you feed the system by purchasing the mass produced garbage. Sure, it is nice to afford stuff when poor, but we don't need to live in a society where being poor is common, or where mass produced garbage is the default option for most.
Please describe the alternative. "Mass produced garbage" is exactly how we are able to feed the world. It's not some sort of conspiracy, just scarcity.
MSFT_Edging|1 year ago
I'm not saying that things were sunshine and rainbows pre-industrialization, but there's some level of analysis to be done on the durability and value of a handcrafted piece of clothing, the care that goes into maintaining it, the value of a local economy, and the other side where you're forced to buy cheap items that degrade at a far faster rate.
If a town's local businesses are put out by a new walmart's ability to carry low prices, does the town truly come out ahead with those low prices? Or does Walmart simply extract more money from the town than it returns, leaving the town worse off?
MacsHeadroom|1 year ago
Labor has never been to afford so much luxury as the modern day.
esoterica|1 year ago
robbbed|1 year ago
dandelionsnow|1 year ago
Consider how you can't really get by in most of America without a car because we designed our cities to require them. It would be a mistake to conclude that, because life is harder in a car-optimized society without a car, society must be better off optimizing for cars.
qqqwerty|1 year ago
CaptainFever|1 year ago
Please describe the alternative. "Mass produced garbage" is exactly how we are able to feed the world. It's not some sort of conspiracy, just scarcity.
(Welfare and UBI is still capitalist.)