Philadelphia Reflections

New York Times: Splendid Idea for Old Age

The New York Times devoted an entire issue of its Sunday News of the Week in Review on April 7, 2019, to variations of the theme that "Elderly People Have Surplus Spare Time." Although I have several personal connections with the editors of the Times by marriage, and other connections to the newspaper through Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons, I seldom agree with its New Yorkerish hunt for evil from greedy enemies. But this particular attack struck me as right on the mark. Sympathy with downtrodden unions has led to commercial forces preferring fragile cheap products needing to be replaced when broken, discouraging home repairing and the ultimately of the population's ability to repair. At the same time, a lot of old folks have time on their hands and limited opportunities to supplement their retirement income, even ultimately leading to the disappearance of the needed skills to make simple repairs. The Times doesn't suggest the two unfortunate curable ends of the Industrial Revolution could cancel each other out, but it seems to me they might fit if coaxed.

Apple seems to be the biggest offender, substituting unnecessary cheap electrical connectors for successive versions of expensive machinery. When you need to replace a thousand-dollar computer for its broken ten-cent plastic connector, the commercial motive is obvious to the consumer, and pretty annoying, too. A broken plastic connector isn't worth its twenty-dollar markup, but the expensive computer would justify its connector markup, which ultimately becomes a one-dollar markup for a Chinese imitator. The situation in the computer industry was explained to me in person by Michael Dell. When he had his nineteenth birthday, his mother gave him an expensive IBM portable computer. He took it to his bedroom with a screwdriver and found that not a single component was actually manufactured by IBM. He wrote each individual manufacturer for prices and discovered he could make an imitation (but identical) computer, selling it profitably and ultimately driving IBM out of the portable computer business. Substituting Chinese names for Michael Dell you get quite a different story, which paints quite a different description, about excessive markups by greedy Americans. Nevertheless, the moral I draw is the ultimately self-defeating nature of excessive markups, for commercial unfair motives. Smaaart when you reveal them to friends, but unwise, in the long run.

But buried in all this petty maneuvering is a solid truth. We once had a population which took woodshop in the seventh grade and metal shop in the eighth. for boys. And the girls were learning how to cook and sew in separate rooms. This system needs a little updating, but the point is that these abbreviated courses were adequate to teach the essentials of home repairing to whole generations of the population. You wouldn't need to buck the unions, who proved able to destroy the whole vocational school system of fresh competitors, in order to restore simple home repair to the whole population. The old retired folk could repair the broken plastic widgets in their simple lives. The ladies could cook a little instead of continuing plastic-wrapped dinners they now have more than enough time to play around with. Hardware stores would reappear to satisfy the need for widgets. And the retirees wouldn/t need to sit around for lack of simple things to do. It's a brilliant idea, even if it did come from the New York Times.

Originally published: Tuesday, April 09, 2019; most-recently modified: Wednesday, May 01, 2019