Planned-up's lessons is nearly universally presented as a nefarious plot by evil capitalist to make sure you get less for your money. These depictions are all flawed to their core as there is nothing wrong with designing or selling shoddy products. Here's why. The tale is often told of a group of lightbulb manufacturers coming together and forming the Phoebus cartel such that they could reduce the lifespan of their lightbulbs and therefore sell more, but rarely is it investigated how such a strategy could work and what assumptions it rests upon. Let's consider first the unhappard market. If I wanted to form a cartel to keep my profits up, I could do this either by keeping the quality low or by keeping the prices high and it's clear that these strategies are equivalent. If a group of companies A through Z came together and decided to keep the prices high, who benefits from this arrangement? If we assume that A is the most efficient and Z the least efficient, with all the intermediate values in between, then this means that Z is being benefited at the expense of A. This is because A is able to sell the bulbs at a far lower price than Z and thus gain a far greater market share and thus far greater profits. The same is true for the strategy of making low quality bulbs which burn out quicker. If the A bulbs are able to last 10,000 hours and the Z bulbs only 1000, this means that A could easily eat into Z's market share. Without any cartel arrangements, A would therefore be gaining greater profits, all of the things being equal. Therefore, these cartel regions benefit the least effective members at the expense of the most effective members. To compound this, if we earn an unhappard market, any outside company can simply produce at the normal market rates and thus undercut the entire cartel, meaning this cartel is still subject to outside competition and cannot raise the price beyond what the market will allow. After all, if it was possible for companies to arbitrarily reduce the quality or raise the price of the products, why in earth would they settle for the 1000 hours reported by Veritasium? Why not make the light bulbs last only marginally longer than candles? Heck, if this planned obsolescent strategy truly works, why were candles ever made as good as they are? Why would any product ever be made to high quality? Why is anything ever advanced beyond what nature provides? The answer is clear. And drives men to innovate, and thus it is not a viable strategy to make deliberately banned products. Some may contend that these cartels form natural monopolies and can thus use predatory pricing to drive out any external competition. However, predatory pricing cannot serve to drive out external competition, as has been seen in the case of Herbert Dow, who is an American industrialist who sold bromine and other such products. Dow decided to export some of his bromine to Europe where a German cartel was the prominent seller. This Dow was able to produce a lower price than a cartel, and thus sell at a lower price, the Germans warned him that if he did not get off their turf, they'd drive him out of the business using this predatory pricing strategy. Dow refused about their threat, and thus they started selling at well below the market rate in America. Dow swiftly took advantage of this by buying up all of this cheap bromine they are flooding the US with and reselling it at a higher price in Europe. When this 15 cent price was made over here, instead of meeting it, we pooled out of the American market and used all of our production to supply the foreign demand. This, as we afterward learned, was not what they anticipated we would do. We are absolute dictators of the situation. One result of this fight was to give us a standing all over the world. We are in a much stronger position than we ever were. Veritasium makes the argument that the light bulb cartel was maintained by finding members whose bulbs lasted too long, but it is not explained how on earth such finds are enforced. If I was running a free market enterprise and a representative from the Phoebus cartel came to me and said, liquid Zulu, you're here by fine 10,000 francs to your manufacturer of long lasting light bulbs, I would simply respond by telling them to go ahead and fuck themselves right up the ass. Unless they had some manner of monopoly grant over light bulbs, I've seen no way that they could enforce this fine and this is not explained in Veritasium's video or any of the multiple clone videos that derive from it. How then do these cartels form? The answer is and must be that cartels form as a result of aggressive interference into the market as opposed to being some natural feature of it. For instance, there are numerous intellectual monopoly grants in the form of letters of patents over technologies often cited as being examples of planned obsolescence. These monopoly grants prevent outside competition from breaking up the cartel because if I have a patent on some mobile phone design, other people can't compete with me by replicating this design. The stake in back these cartels by providing monopoly grants in other ways. For instance, licensing is required to engage in many trades. These licenses can keep out outside competition. Service hospitals are the prime example. Men are not free to build and run hospitals as they see fit. Rather, a board of local experts who are already hired by existing hospitals in the area decide whether there is a need for a new hospital and if they do not, then no new hospital may be built. It is of note here that we now have essentially everlasting light bulbs, so the empirical evidence would indeed point to the fact that these cartels are impotent to keep the quality of goods down. Thus, planned obsolescence is bad if and only in so far as it is a result of these aggressively formed and maintained cartels. However, this is not the critique against planned obsolescence that you see levied by those socialist opponents that are so heavily featured in commentary on the subject. Rather, the critique is that it is a problem stemming from free markets and free trade that already businesses deliberately making pru quality products is an evil. This argument is entirely false and the reason is simple. If I want to manufacture a light bulb, it may be the case that manufacturing one that lasts only a thousand hours is far cheaper than one that lasts a hundred thousand hours. Thus I could sell the lower quality bulb for cheaper and if a consumer does not care whether the bulb lasts a hundred thousand or only a thousand hours, he is able to get what he wants for a lower price. This is a win-win situation. The failure of the socialist critics come to on this point is their determining quality as an engineer might not as an economist should. To the economist, all that can be said about this voluntary exchange is that both parties profit as both end up with a good that they value higher than the one they gave up. Thus an engineer might complain about using aluminium to manufacture cars because there are far stronger and lighter weight carbon composite materials. What the engineer does not consider as it is outside the domain of his study is that said materials are more expensive than aluminium and thus make the car more expensive. Thus if I am purchasing a car only to take me to a working back, I don't care whether the frame is made from some fancy material. I would much rather have the cheaper materials for a cheaper car. The same is true of any clothing, electronics or anything else that is made in such a way that it degrades quickly. Moreover if they are concerned about the quality produced by the per se more efficient capitalist production, how on earth is central planning any solution? A central planner cannot effectively allocate the resources required to the production of these various goods. It is entirely possible to right now purchase goods that all last you for years. I have purchased multiple terrible quality chairs in my time, each of which have been broken before being gifted to Herman Miller Aeron and these things can last for decades without degrading in quality. But that extra startingness comes with a far greater price tag, so if that is not something you are concerned about you may well prefer the cheaper options. Socialists will bring forth also the point of perceived obsolescence in their mountain baly approach. Thus they could shift to the point that companies do indeed produce high quality products but they release a new product the next year with a fancy new paint job or whatever, thus causing men to buy the new version when the old version works perfectly fine. All I can be said to this is a fat old wawa wawa suck at the fuck up. You have no place to complain if you on your own volition choose to buy a new phone when your old phone works perfectly fine. This is my phone I can't remember which year was made. It was already old when I bought it. I only bought it because my old phone stopped working. I have absolutely no desire to purchase a newer model. Save for my trousers I have worn these exact trousers just by every day for the past three or so years. You can see this by the fact that I have had to stitch it up along the groin. I will only throw these trousers out when I am damn well good and ready to throw them out. Nobody is forcing me to buy new ones. Same for this belt. I made it myself and spent about three pounds doing so. I have worn it every day since late 2019 and I feel absolutely no need to replace it. So how about instead of shaking your face to companies for releasing shiny new products, you decide on your loonsum not to purchase any of the new products when the old ones work fine. Is entirely your fault if you purchase new stuff to replace stuff that still serve your purposes? Stop complaining about choices you are making. Therefore we see that perceived obsolescence is not a problem and planned obsolescence is a problem. It will meet in so far as the state enforces intellectual monoplay grants. To see why these grants are the true source of evil you have to watch this video where explain that all forms of intellectual property are a myth and are in fact destructive of human flourishing and creativity.