Christopher Caldwell has written an amusing article for those of us old enough to remember the 70's, when consumer products were more dangerous and our homes were not yet jammed with an overabundance of electronic gadgets.
Why has life gotten better, cheaper and safer? Is it free-market capitalism? Or is it due to liberal nanny-state overregulation?
Why has life gotten better, cheaper and safer? Is it free-market capitalism? Or is it due to liberal nanny-state overregulation?
Is it that Reagan put an end to screw-you socialism, with the shoddy workmanship that was its hallmark?
Or is it that those hippies who now design our appliances and clog our statute books with regulation put an end to soulless, every-man-for-himself capitalism?
Is it that our own culture is, actually, deep down, as anti-humanistic as people used to say, and that the Chinese, even in the aftermath of Maoism, have a better sense of human needs?
Or are today's appliances designed for the benefit of those who lost a limb on older models back in the 1970s? (TWS - Rage Against the Machine)
10 comments:
Cool article. I would not say (which is obvious) that Reagan ended socialism, but to the extent of the progression of progress itself, it can only be attributed to free-market capitolism.
If you suppress this system, progess is suppressed itself. People actually die from the suppression of progress,example though not a gadget or appliance; DDT
Exactly! The free market has always resulted in lower costs, but try telling the libs that when debating health care...
That was extremely enjoyable - shoddy socialist quality control made the '70s something of a hazard. Things have, in part, got better. Then again we're flooded with a superabundance of cheap rubbish too...
LSP, True it's looks shoddy in retrospect, but that was the 'technology' at the time. In the 70's they would look back at the 50's and say the same,"how shoddy back then".
Here inlies the point of progress excellerated ten-fold by the free market.
To ingore or dismiss (not that you are) this put's society in general at a huge disadvantage and as Silverfiddle points out we can see this in the health care debate.
My dad was what you would call an 'early adopter' back in the 1960s when I was a snot nose brat.
He came home one day with this new fangled gizmo in 1966 or 67 called a 'Radar Range,' and it could cook bacon in 60 seconds or so. Amazing stuff back then, we were the envy of the neighborhood. That thing weighed probably 150 pounds, had a 12" door and a knob that went from 0 to 10 minutes, and a big square button labeled 'start.' He passed away in 1999, and when we went back for the funeral, that Amana Radar Range was still on the kitchen counter, and worked as good as the day he bought it.
I think my mom still has it, I'll have to check.
The moral of the story: not all the stuff made back then was junk - some of it was absolutely fantastic engineering.
All you need to do is read Atlas Shrugged (my never ending task this fall and winter). On every succeeding page "progress" squeezes out innovation and leaves everyone closer to eating bark and burning their own homes for heat.
Snarky,,Great read there and more relevant today tah whem it was written.
Fredd, My grandparents had one also, an Amana. We all had to stand back a safe distance when granny fired it up...
Thanks for bringing back old memories :)
Silver: yeah, of course we had to don protective gear with those old units, you know, lead aprons, welder's masks, it was no biggie back then.
Apparently this doesn't apply to the internet, as I kept going to page 2 of the article and there was nothing there. lol
On the Amana thread... a few years back in the market for a house one of the places we looked at still had a fully functional built in Amana Radar Range. We didn't buy.
On the trivia side, the first Radar Range was built in 1947 by Raytheon, was six feet tall, weighed 750 pounds, water cooled, and consumed 3 kilowatts. It cost about $5000, much more than a car at the time. They were sold under license by Tappan until Raytheon acquired Amana in 1965...
Hey I'm an old RADAR geek.
~Finntann~
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