"Old things are more durable/reliable than new things": what kind of logical fallacy?

Factual Questions
21

A lot of the perception of low quality in newer items comes from the fact that manufacturing costs have gone down while repair costs have soared. It is no longer feasible to repair small electronics or appliances so they are manufactured to be disposed of after their useful life. There is no point in overbuilding something with heavy or expensive materials that can’t reasonably be repaired.

Whether disposability is good or bad is another issue. The fact remains that your toaster doesn’t look heavy and expensive but it is probably more reliable than your old chromed masterpiece. It is also going to cost you far more to repair your old toaster, no matter how minor the problem, than to buy a new one.

This principle even hold true in auto repair. Fenders are replaced, not bumped out. It is much more economical to do it that way.

Electronic modules are always replaced, not repaired. There is practically no market for used TV parts no matter how much life is in them. It goes on and on.

22

I think there’s a lot of truth that the old wood and metal products lasted longer than plastic. Of course modern plastics are better than early plastics.

But wood and metal can be repaired, plastic no so much.

23

[QUOTE=Harriet the Spry]
Telephones are what come to mind when I think of something that has become less reliable over time. From some perspectives, this is a case of **Shagnasty’s ** point of overbuilding in the early days. But those old phones from back in the day you rented them from the phone company were so reliable. The rental arrangement provided an incentive for the phone company to overbuild, because if it broke they repaired it. Now, if it breaks you buy a new one.

If all you want to do is pick up the phone and make or take a call with a clear signal, the old phones are perfect. From a marketing angle, maybe the useful life of a phone ends when they come up with new features to program in, or no longer match this year’s interior design trend, but not always from the user’s perspective. Every phone I’ve ever bought, including some expensive ones, has been less reliable than the old ones. Smaller, cuter, more features, probably cheaper, but less reliable.
[/QUOTE]

This is not accidental. About 1986, when I worked in Bell Labs, I went to a seminar about how to make phones less reliable. Along with the increased quality, though, was a policy of not introducing new features - “don’t churn the market” is how someone who worked in the old Consumer Products put it to me.

Though it isn’t quite what the OP had in mind, electronic components have a relatively high early fail rate. I know from data that you don’t want to replace components in the field with new ones, since the fail rate will go up - unless there is a very large problem. While there is wearout, after some time, the period of high failure due to wearout is usually longer than the expected product life, except for stuff like military items and telephone switches. So, for chips at least, a population of one year old chips is going to be more reliable than a population of just installed chips.

24

[QUOTE=Captain Carrot]
[Hijack]
Whiteboards are better in almost every conceivable way. Writing with a marker is much easier on the fingers (not trying to hold a piece of chalk firmly enough to grind it off on rock), much faster, lends itself to neater handwriting, much easier to clean off, and markers are just generally better for writing. Markers make sketching trivial – try drawing a map with a piece of chalk!
[/hijack]
[/QUOTE]

As some one who teaches and uses both I beg to differ.
Markers are harder to clean off a white board than chalk is. You can make a board perfectly clean but only if you erase quickly or later use some kind of solvent.

The chalk-holding problem is easily solved by using a chalk holder – also keeps the dust off your hands.

Markers emit some kind of vapor which is obnoxious to the one holding the marker (at least me making me light-headed unless I cap it when I pause in my writing.

And the good type of chalk (I really don’t know the difference except by use) is hard and leaves little dust.

25

Might I suggest that old furniture is better than most newer pieces? Modern “wood” furniture is typically made from particle board, with a plastic laminate to make it look nice. After a few years, however, the laminate will start to peel off, and eventually the board itself tends to fall apart. Real wood furniture can last for decades easily.

26

[QUOTE=Diceman]
Might I suggest that old furniture is better than most newer pieces? Modern “wood” furniture is typically made from particle board, with a plastic laminate to make it look nice. After a few years, however, the laminate will start to peel off, and eventually the board itself tends to fall apart. Real wood furniture can last for decades easily.
[/QUOTE]

This example came to mind for me also, but then I was thinking - the price you’d pay ‘back in the good old days’ for your solid wood furniture was probably equivalent to the price you’d pay today for the same. But you can buy particle/laminate furniture for cheaper and many of us choose to do so. So it’s not so much that they were built better back then, but that there are now more options.

27

I know that in the lock buisness both yes and no apply.

Old safes from the early 1900’s pretty to look at, were well designed and some out there still have beautiful artwork on them.
That being said they suck when compared to modern safes. Modern safes have the benefit of modern steel alloys and modern Tech regarding fireproofing materials.

Now some of the older door locks out there are made solid and strong, mainly solid brass parts and good sized springs. Many newer locks are designed to use as little material as possible, cheaper alloys or plastic, and are machined poorly.

New locks are for the most part designed quite well, the materials used are the cause for the shorter life span.

Osip

28

Manufacturing parts for companies brings this into perspective. Sometimes they have you use the cheap parts to save money. The motors just met the minimum torques and such. Those are in the cheap end product. The parts that are better suited for the product and will increase the cost, go into the mid range products. The use of all long lasting parts go into the high end line. The companies deal mostly with failures on the low end line. There will always be items that last longer from some period in time over another period, because manufacturing processes vary over time, and they adjust to the demand of the consumers, not always to the most durable product. The old iron cooking devices are still functional 50 years after purchase, and the new plastic ones are dead in a couple years. They are both the commonly sold items of the period, but the older persons remember the iron ones that are working yet.

29

Floor joists often used to be real 2 x 10 inch planks. My 1940 house has got 'em. Today, they’re often 2 x 8 and actually measure somewhere around 1 1/2 x 7 1/2. Often they’re inadequate, not in terms of safety, but in terms of providing stability.

However, the key word here is ‘often.’ There are no hard and fast rules, and generalization will get you nowhere. There have always been well built homes, and poorly built homes. Little has changed. Those who know what they’re doing, care what they’re doing and are willing/able to pay to do things correctly or have them done correctly wind up with good homes. There have always been tons and tons of crummy homes around. Always.

As far as cars go, no idea.

As far as furniture goes, Diceman, if you made that statement on some woodworking forums, you’d cause a bloodbath. Some would agree with you, others would scream for your head. The thing is, modern wood furniture is made from a wide variety of wood and wood-based products, and laminates, veneers, plastics, etc. Quality is absolutely all over the map, and depends on a wide variety of factors. It’s not as simple as saying old furniture was hardwood, today’s furniture is particleboard. 200 years ago, there wasn’t much choice. Today there’s enormous choice. And there are still plenty of people (and companies) who make excellent furniture out of hardwood.

30

[QUOTE=Lunar Saltlick]
As far as cars go, no idea.
[/QUOTE]

Anybody that says that cars were better back in the day has rose colored glasses on, and rocks in their head.
Let’s see back in the day:
Oil change every 2,000 miles.
Most cars would use at least one quart between oil changes, often a lot more.
Tune up every 10-12,000 miles
A 1 year / 12,000 mile warranty on a new car.
You could expect to need a valve job at between 50 and 75 thousand miles.
If you made it past 100,000 miles you really took good car of your car.
No undercoating / rustproofing from the factory.
A very high performance car back then produced about 1 HP / cubic inch. (50s & 60s)

Now:
Oil change intervals can go as high as 15,000 miles
Many cars do not need oil to be added between oil changes (Best I ever did was a car that used about 3/4 of a quart in 10,000 miles)
Cars no longer need tune ups, spark plugs may last up to 100,000 miles, air filters and fuel filters 60,000 miles.
3 , 4 and even 5 year warranties are very common. 50,000 mile warranties are very common. 10 year /100,000 mile power train warranties are not unheard of, and Chrysler just announced a lifetime power train warranty.
You can expect not to ever have to open the engine
100,000 miles is just a number now, not a milestone.
Extensive undercoating and rustproofing from the factory.
A moderate performance car now produces 2 HP / cubic inch, get better gas mileage, and meets current smog regs, something the old engines never could.
Then we can start talking about all the stuff that the old cars never had, climate control, ABS, CD players, crash safety, airbags, HID lights, cruise control, self dimming mirrors, anti-whiplash devices built into the seats and all the rest.

I love my old cars, but I am smart enough to realize that they are not superior to what is being built today.

31

[QUOTE=Rick]
Anybody that says that cars were better back in the day has rose colored glasses on, and rocks in their head…

[/QUOTE]

This is kind of rude, and I certainly hope it’s not directed at me. I don’t know anything about cars, don’t care about cars and didn’t want to waste anybody’s time writing about them. As for the thrust of the rest of my post (about homes and furniture) I claimed that it was generally incorrect to say that things were better in the past.

32

[QUOTE=Diceman]
Might I suggest that old furniture is better than most newer pieces? Modern “wood” furniture is typically made from particle board, with a plastic laminate to make it look nice. After a few years, however, the laminate will start to peel off, and eventually the board itself tends to fall apart. Real wood furniture can last for decades easily.
[/QUOTE]

Centuries, actually. We have two types of chairs at our kitchen table. The ones that came with it have a frame for the seat, which is a pad. One of them have died already, after about 15 years. The other chairs are from 1820, and they are more comfortable and more solid by far.

Perhaps mature technologies have better things that are older, since they don’t show the effects of cost cutting that is used to make money on commodities. Technologies that are still developing, like cars and computers, have newer products being better.

33

[QUOTE=Lunar Saltlick]
This is kind of rude, and I certainly hope it’s not directed at me. I don’t know anything about cars, don’t care about cars and didn’t want to waste anybody’s time writing about them. As for the thrust of the rest of my post (about homes and furniture) I claimed that it was generally incorrect to say that things were better in the past.
[/QUOTE]

I don’t think that has anything to do with you. I have heard Rick same the same thing on this topic before and it is correct. There are a lot of people around that either forget about the long list of problems that older cars had or maybe they believe things that simply aren’t true like the desirability of metal that refuses to bend in a crash.

34

[QUOTE=An Gadaí]
This is a really interesting topic and not something I had thought about before. Are there cases where there are products that are definitely designed to have a shorter working life than hitherto?

Edit: Sorry for the hijack. I can start another thread if that would be better.
[/QUOTE]

I have in my downstairs office a very old phone. This is the 500C desk set, originally designed in the mid-'50s, although this particular one dates from 1973. It is a very sturdy phone, still working well. When the power goes out it’s the only phone in the house that works, although it doesn’t work for everything because since it’s a dial phone, you can’t “press 1 for English” or for anything else.

But damn, it’s sturdy. It has fallen off the desk, survived dust, survived things getting spilled on it. When I was a telephone installer I saw phones of this ilk that had been in house fires. The plastic casing melted somewhat but by golly the innards still worked and you could make a call.

Back in those days, the phone company leased all sets used in homes. The phone company set the specifications for this desk set, they were manufactured by Western Electric, a phone company subsidiary, and they were made to last FOREVER. When you moved into a new place and got a new phone it was in all likelihood not a new phone, but a polished and reconstructed old phone. Obviously, some people got new ones.

Then the phone company got out of the phone-leasing business. First it started selling the existing phones, which is how I came about this one. Then it turned out that you had to go somewhere else and buy your set–Radio Shack, or another manufacturer, including a few that were no longer subsidiaries of the phone company.

I have been through about 10 of these other phones, including one I bought from the new version of Western Electric because I figured they knew how to do it. They may know how, but when a company is selling them, as opposed to leasing them, said company not only doesn’t care if they don’t last forever, it doesn’t WANT them to last forever. So they last about two years.

35

[QUOTE=Voyager]
Centuries, actually. We have two types of chairs at our kitchen table. The ones that came with it have a frame for the seat, which is a pad. One of them have died already, after about 15 years. The other chairs are from 1820, and they are more comfortable and more solid by far.

Perhaps mature technologies have better things that are older, since they don’t show the effects of cost cutting that is used to make money on commodities. Technologies that are still developing, like cars and computers, have newer products being better.
[/QUOTE]

But you don’t have to buy cheap Ikea style chairs. You can still buy chairs made the old-fashioned way, the only trouble is that they will be much more expensive than those Ikea chairs.

The materials for those old-fashioned chairs are probably doing to cost more than the materials did in the past…old growth wood is much more expensive than it was 200 years ago. And the wages that a skilled cabinetmaker can demand are much higher than in the past. Of course, you’re much wealthier than an average person was in 1820, so getting new handmade solid wood chairs might be more expensive than it was in 1820, but much less as a percentage of your income. If you paid $1000 for a chair today that might be only a week’s pay. But it certainly would have taken an average person in 1820 much longer than a week to buy the same chair back in 1820. Buying furniture would be like buying a car today…a major investment. So relatively speaking, you can buy a brand new chair built like an 1820 chair for much less than you could in 1820…the only difference is that most people don’t want to pay even that much.

36

[QUOTE=Rick]
Anybody that says that cars were better back in the day has rose colored glasses on, and rocks in their head.
Let’s see back in the day:
Oil change every 2,000 miles.
Most cars would use at least one quart between oil changes, often a lot more.
Tune up every 10-12,000 miles
A 1 year / 12,000 mile warranty on a new car.
You could expect to need a valve job at between 50 and 75 thousand miles.
If you made it past 100,000 miles you really took good car of your car.
No undercoating / rustproofing from the factory.
A very high performance car back then produced about 1 HP / cubic inch. (50s & 60s)
[/QUOTE]

Although you should bear in mind that what it means to be a car owner has changed. The oil changes, tune-ups and lubes and small repair would be done by the owner, likely as not. A cars ability to pass 100,000 miles was largely a function of the owners determination to not buy a new one. The design of the engine was so simple that it didn’t take too much sophistication to maintain it. That’s what was sacrificed for the efficiency and reliability that you get in cars today.

37

I think a lot has to do with the switch from die-cast metal and solid woods, to injection molded plastics.That is why cars from the 50’s and 60’s are still around-while many 70’s-80’s cars are impossible to restore. I saw a 1968 Camaro-in showroom condition. In later cars the plastic parts tend to deteriorate (cracked dashes, broken steering wheels, rotted-out headliners)Plus, plastic body parts tend to crack and craze-so when you repaint them, you wind up with a spiderweb effect. What really amazes me-you find a 30’s car with a decent interior-whereas the vinyl seatcovers in cars today spilt and crack after 6-7 years.
Take appliances-you can find a 1930’s waring blender that is as good as new-now they are made of injection molded plastic-drop it and its toast. Like others have said, you don’t fix things anymore-you throw them away and buy a new one.

38

[QUOTE=Diceman]
Might I suggest that old furniture is better than most newer pieces? Modern “wood” furniture is typically made from particle board, with a plastic laminate to make it look nice. After a few years, however, the laminate will start to peel off, and eventually the board itself tends to fall apart. Real wood furniture can last for decades easily.
[/QUOTE]

No, there was crap furniture back then too, it just isn’t around much. Wicker for example. And, even middle class families that could buy a house usually bought their good furniture second hand, since it was nearly out of reach. Of course, good furniture is still hard for a middle class family to buy new. Things haven’t changed that much.

I had a used '61 Chevey Impala, which ran pretty well, except that it* used a qt of oil per every 2nd tank of gas.

  • I would buy that cheap recycled oil, you know the stuff in th efunny glass bootles with the metal tops.

When I was a kid, a journey from LA to Santa Rosa took two/three days and likely at least one break-down or flat tire.

39

[QUOTE=Lunar Saltlick]
This is kind of rude, and I certainly hope it’s not directed at me. I don’t know anything about cars, don’t care about cars and didn’t want to waste anybody’s time writing about them. As for the thrust of the rest of my post (about homes and furniture) I claimed that it was generally incorrect to say that things were better in the past.
[/QUOTE]

:confused:
I in no way intended to slam you or be rude to you. You stated that you did not know much about cars. I do, so I picked up the banner that older was not necessarily better and ran with it. How anyone that read my post could think it was a slam against you is beyond me.
I sorry if you took offense, none was intended.

saoirse it wasn’t just the owner’s determination, it had a huge amount of luck involved, and how much pain the owner was willing to put up with. The most determined owner with bad luck would never make 100,000 miles on a given car back in the day.

40

Some slight nitpicking here, if you don’t mind.
[QUOTE=Rick]
Anybody that says that cars were better back in the day has rose colored glasses on, and rocks in their head.
Let’s see back in the day:
Oil change every 2,000 miles.
[/quote]
This wasn’t entirely due to the cars themselves, though. The oil made back then was crap compared to the oil made today. One of the advantages of synthetic oils is that the shape of molecules can be more precisely controlled than is possible with natural oils. Older cars with modern oils and filters can go just as long as some modern cars between changes.

There was an AMC engine built in the early '60s that couldn’t even make it ten thousand miles without needing the valves adjusted. Also, you had to adjust the brakes periodically, until self-adjusting brakes were developed.

Rustproofing began appearing on cars in the late 1950s, but didn’t become standard on cars until the late 1960s, and carmakers didn’t start doing it right until the mid to late 1970s. A/C first appeared on Packards in 1939, BTW.

Old cars also had metal dashes which were hot as hell in the summer and rather painful to encounter in an accident. What gives older cars their rep as being more reliable is that when something went wrong, there was only a handful of parts that could be causing the problem. Now however, there’s many more parts in the cars and when you have a problem it’s hard to know what’s causing it. A starting problem could be the battery, starter, computer, wiring, or some other component.

Actually, I think that this is more of a function to save weight than simple safety. You could make a modern bumper safe and resistant to damage at low speeds, but to do so would add weight to the car, thus lowering fuel economy.