Partial List of Shallow Takes That Get Repeated All the Time
Quit saying this stuff, please.
These trite phrases are used often, but upon examination, they lack substantiation.
“We think in quarters [years, decades, whatever…] while the Chinese [or whoever is the opposition du jour] think in centuries.”
It turns out people think fairly similarly with about equal short-term focus and self interest. If anything, autocratic regimes have shorter-term focus since they are centered around a single human or small group of humans with, of course, human lifespans. And these tyrants are desperately trying to stay powerful and in power—and alive! For other societies with supposedly long-term vision, I have to ask, “If they're so smart, why are they so (relatively) poor?”
“People's attention spans are shorter today than they used to be.”
People have more options today than they used to. The opportunity cost of their time is higher, much higher. And the evidence for modern day people (usually but not exclusively “the kids these days”) we think we are seeing is are usually biased tests. “Back in my day, kids would watch a 5 minute video. Today they get distracted after 30 seconds.” No they didn't, grandpa. Those videos did not exist—nobody was watching them. That people had the patience to sit through endless hours of the same TV tropes played out in sitcoms and dramas using the same jokes or plotlines speaks to how few options people then had. Perhaps the maxim should be, “People's attention spans for substandard content are shorter today since the kids these days are much more discerning.”
“They don't make 'em like they used to.”
This one is correct, but not in the way people intend it. Things aren't made the same—they are waaaaay better. For any given level of quality, things last longer and/or work better. At every level of quality, things are much, much cheaper. Peruse the work from Human Progress on time prices or look at either this or this comparison of historic Sears catalogs compared to 2014—and then realize how far we've come in the past decade since that post.
There is of course one important way in which this adage is sadly correct. Near pointless environmental regulations have rendered many household appliances much worse at performing their intended job. Washing machines (clothes and dish) standout here, but they are far from alone. Relatedly many household things like the humble hand-held gas can have fallen prey to the damaging hammer that is extreme safetyism. The quest to make sure nothing can be harmful in any way includes complete disregard for it to be actually used in any way—perhaps that is by design.
Regardless, this is the exception via the artificial inducement of government failure that proves the rule. In truth most things are better overall than they ever were before once we consider all the dimensions along which things are valued. As Alex Tabarrok points out, clothing (to take one example) is much better today than in the past. Yet some of that improvement is to allow it to be more disposable. Things used to be built to last because that was the only option. In other cases durability happened to be a high priority, but priorities change.
“We don’t make things in America any more.”
This one is wrong on several levels. To start with, U.S. manufacturing output is near all-time highs. We can see this in both the level of industrial production:
As well as in total manufacturing output (note this series goes back farther than the prior one allowing me to start the chart in 1950):
On a second level, we need to appreciate the fact that most manufacturing assembly is desirably done elsewhere in the world allowing the U.S. to make more higher-value contributions like design and development. It is much, much better to be the economy that can conceive, design, and fully source the iPhone than the economy that can simply put the pieces together.
On a third level, there is nothing per se aspirational about being a builds-stuff-dominant economy. In fact the right way to think about this would be that such an economy was stuck in place. Just as it is a very good thing that we no longer have to devote >90% of our labor to agriculture production and can instead produce substantially more with just ~2% of our labor there, not being able to transition to a service-based economy would be a severe knock on our economic success. There is a good reason development economics labels the middle-income trap a “trap”.
For the sake of your attention span, I’ll stop this partial list here to allow you to contemplate before getting back to not building stuff and/or not doing it well just for the benefit of next quarter’s income statement.