Oddbean

Some mates and I were thinking about why people don't prefer durable goods to the cheap crap. Can they not afford it? Are they short sighted? Do they not care about waste? Is it cheaper to buy cheap ones repeatedly? We concluded that it's mainly a lack of transparency in the market. Will this more expensive one last longer? Will the company be around in 5 years? If so, will they still offer replacement parts? If they sold a great make & model years ago and you want to buy another one, have they silently changed it to cut costs? It's a crap shoot. Someone should solve this problem.

All goods have to compete against bitcoin now. If it makes economic sense (price v. Value), I think people would ultimately buy. Not sure though, I haven't gotten through Principles of Austrian Economics yet.

Paradoxically you can commonly observe the opposite behavior too. People paying exorbitant amounts of money for products that are not better or more durable than cheaper, better options. Classic example: cars, phones. Individual human preference is too complex a varied (even internally to the same individual in different moments) to be analyzed and predicted. You can only guess, and the best way to deal with it is a varied market with as many options as possible, a let it sort it out.

The free market doesn't tell you when a company will go out of business. It doesn't tell you when they will discontinue a product line, silently reduce quality of existing products, stop supporting old products... It doesn't solve any of these things. It theoretically provides a wider array of options, which is good, but it is orthogonal to transparency on the quality of their products.