Create Jobs with Planned Obsolescence

When our the president and congress debate how to jump-start the economy they might want to look at history.

 

The idea of planned obsolescence gained legs in the 1920s and 30s when government and business people realized our industries were making more stuff than people cared to or could afford to buy. In 1932, Bernard London, a real estate broker, wrote and distributed his pamphlet called Ending the Depression through Planned Obsolescence.  His argument was for creating a government agency with the task of assigning death rates to specific consumer products, at which time consumers would be required to turn the stuff in for replacements, even if they still worked fine. London argued this system would keep our factories humming along.

In 1960 Vance Packard documented the debates about planned obsolescence in consumer products in the 1950s and 60s in his book The Waste Makers. Some individuals opposed the idea believing it to be unethical and jeopardized their professional credibility, others recognized it as a way to ensure continuous markets for all the stuff they designed, produced and advertised and accepted it wholeheartedly. He quotes an industrial designer, Brooks Stevens who is credited with the popularizing in the 1950s "instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary." Stevens said "we make good products, we induce people to buy them, and then the next year we deliberately introduce something else that will make products old-fashioned, out of date obsolete… It is organized waste. It's sound contribution to the American economy.

The strategy has worked beyond the wildest dreams of the people who instituted it. Planned obsolescence continues to dominate and define consumer culture today, and dispose of (often perfectly good) products at an ever-increasing rate. In the service of perceived obsolescence in particular, there's a whole industry hard at work spending billions of dollars each year to manipulate us into buying something new, better, different. That industry is known as ……advertising.

 

 

John Jenkins
865-803-8179  cell
Gatlinburg, TN


Email: jrjenki@gmail.com
Blogs: http://littlepigeon.blogspot.com/
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"Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too."

 

---Voltaire