Toyota

[selfishgene]

There is an old fallacy still current amongst leftists that companies thrive by providing bad products. The most common example is that cars are made to last a set period and then rapidly deteriorate. Now it is true that some companies followed a strategy of deliberately limiting the life of their cars. The market has decisively rejected this ploy

Comments

[squid314]

"There is an old fallacy still current amongst leftists that companies thrive by providing bad products. The most common example is that cars are made to last a set period and then rapidly deteriorate. Now it is true that some companies followed a strategy of deliberately limiting the life of their cars. The market has decisively rejected this ploy."

It sounds like you're calling it a fallacy in the same paragraph that you admit it is true. The major automakers' ploy worked for decades until the Japanese made it into the auto market. The major American companies seemed to have reached a stable equilibrium of selling deliberately shoddy products. No upstart American company was able to break the equilibrium because there was too much of a gulf between any new company and the big established ones complicit in the "conspiracy". It took a foreign company that had evolved in a different environment and had enough resources to go up against the big American companies in a fair fight.

This raises two big questions. One, are there any markets that have settled into a state of selling deliberately shoddy products today? And two, if there were, in today's globalized world where there's no such thing as an "outside" from which someone can come to break the hegemony, would such a steady state ever get challenged?

[ilcylic]

The thing that makes it a fallacy is the word "thrive". Companies made products with deliberately engineered short end-of-life cycles. But they are not thriving.

American automotive products used to have much higher quality. But right around the end of the first Horsepower Wars, they seemed to give up.