A large part of the discrepancy is not automation, but cheap labour in the East where many of our products are made. Regulation can help redress than inequality.
Repair is so expensive because it's made to be. It shouldn't take several hours of skilled labour to replace an easily broken component like a touchscreen - it should be snap-in. Regulation can address that by mandating reparability.
It's also worth thinking about why we consider replacement being cheaper than repair to be a problem at all - if you trust the market, what's so horrible about that? Real time saver right?
Answer: the price of new goods does not reflect their full environmental and social cost. The switch in your toaster breaks - you buy a new one for a fiver instead of repairing the switch. The old one goes in a landfill. A quantity of non-renewable resources like oil and metal are used up; a the increased demand for these things contributes to the deaths of miners, and people who live near the factories and refineries. Fuel is burned to deliver the new toaster to you, and the Earth's temperature goes up a teeny-tiny fraction. None of these things are included in the price. Regulation can help that too.
Which can increase the original cost of the good.
... to better reflect it's real cost by including all the otherwise externalized costs.
I'm not saying that it's a net loss, nor that even if a net loss that it isn't worth it. But there is a cost there, and you are shoving it away on your quest to regulation instead of looking at it and deciding its worth.
What is the externality here? Trash left over when the product is discarded?
Regulating the manufacturer is a classic progressive roundabout way of not regulating the externality directly. Instead, perhaps a better solution would be regulating the amount of wasted resources / complexity to recycling, such that the consumer is made very aware of the environmental impact of a product that is no longer in use.
And if the consumer was truly bearing a non-environmental burden for cheap stuff that is hard to fix and breaks easily, they would keep name-brand businesses with durable products in business (and indeed, they do).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g
The '59 Chevy gets 13.5 miles per gallon. [1] The '09 Chevy gets 25. [2]
Yes, modern cars are more difficult to maintain than older cars -- they require more specialized equipment to maintain, parts are more difficult to replace, so on and so forth. Modern cars are also incredibly more fuel efficient and safer to ride in, and much of that is enabled by the same engineering efforts that make cars more difficult to maintain.
1) http://www.automobile-catalog.com/make/chevrolet_usa/full-si...
In short, repairability is too nebulous of a target for effective regulation. I think the appropriate angle for government intervention is to protect a "right to repair".
> A large part of the discrepancy is not automation, but cheap labour in the East where many of our products are made. Regulation can help redress than inequality...Regulation can address that by mandating reparability.
There are a number of ways to tackle this issue:
* reduce the regulatory and tax burden faced by small repair shops. Increased competition and lower overhead costs will drive down prices.
* reduce the regulations that impact the product design. Engineering is the result of navigating difficult trade-offs; the more aspects of a design we try to "fix", especially through political processes, the more complex the end result will be.
* broaden access to repair knowledge and tools. You don't even need regulatory changes for this one; It's an excellent opportunity for entrepreneurs. Part of the reason older cars are so easy to repair is that the tools and knowledge have become widespread thanks to third-party businesses that have found a way to supply those things cheaply and profitably. YouTube is a DIYer's dream.
> It's also worth thinking about why we consider replacement being cheaper than repair to be a problem at all - if you trust the market, what's so horrible about that? Real time saver right?
Sometimes it's not a problem. Is it better to use a paper towel is biodegradable and produced through sustainable tree-farming, or use a reusable cloth towel that increases demand for environmentally unfriendly washing machines and laundry detergent (and spend money on sewing machines and thread to repair holes)?
> the price of new goods does not reflect their full environmental and social cost
Nor would they with heavy regulation, because the "full environmental and social cost" is incalculable. Furthermore, there is no attempt to measure the costs imposed by the regulations and the net benefits provided (if any).
If someone has gone to the effort to buy responsibly sourced paper towels, I think they would also own responsibly sourcfed and environmentally friendly detergent. And of course the cloth would usually be washed with other items, and so not that much more water would be used. And, is thread really a cost here for home repairs?
I think the more realistic version of your scenario is:
"Is it better to use a non-biodegradable paper towel which was not sustainably produced, or to use a resusable cloth which needs to be thrown in with the other laundry occasionally, and which after many months of use may be relegated to a toolkit grease-towel, or thrown out and replaced?"
Lastly -- the OP may have been over-specific in talking about "full environmental and social cost", but there is plenty of room to move from where we are now to "enough social costs so that poor people don't leave near factories which give them asthma and lower their life expectancy, and to mitigate the effects of human-caused global warming."
All paper is sustainably harvested from tree-farms where the trees are grown specifically for making paper, rather than e.g. old-growth forests. It's also all (to my knowledge) biodegradable.
I'm not saying that paper towels are always the better choice. You can also look at other factors such as manufacturing costs, etc. My point was that disposability can be a positive trait.
With regard to externalities, my point is that regulations have them too. Yes, you can impose (costly) requirements on industry, but do we ask what the cost is in terms of economic growth (which is lifting many third-world people out of extreme poverty) and technological innovation (which creates greater efficiency)?
I don't wish to sound partisan. I think that dealing with externalities is tricky, and it's worth having a discussion about. However, I think regulations to deal with them are often zero-sum solutions. It's worth asking whether:
a) there is a positive-sum (generally market-based) solution
b) the conditions that created the externality are transient and will resolve in time
I think manufacturer hostility to third party repairers is a much bigger burden than state-imposed overhead. It's not like all manufacturers are super-open and eager to share the schematics of their products with hackers, is it?
I think an aspect of this "right to repair" would be the ability to seek legal action against manufacturers who deliberately interfere with this right.
However, the relationship between repair shops and manufacturers need not be hostile. I don't know the stats for this, but would it not be reasonable to think that many people purchase cars based on the recommendation of a trusted mechanic? I certainly do. Mechanics are generally going to recommend vehicles that are either easy to work on or aren't in the shop often (or both).
