Somewhat related: has anyone done a study of inflation in terms of clothing adjusted for quality? This piece notes, for instance, that manufacturers have been reducing thread quality (having exhausted their ability to reduce fabric quality, I suppose) for decades, with major implications for clothing longevity.
I’ve long suspected a lot of supposed economic progress since, especially, the 1970s, has just been goods getting worse.
Go look at what it costs to get a chambray work shirt (where we got the term “blue collar”, so, made for physical labor, not something fancy) made with similar-quality fabric and construction to a common 1940s or 1950s offering in a Sears catalog. Not the ones J Crew or whoever sells, those are fine for what they are but they’re not built for work, the fabric’s thinner and they lack extensive double- or triple-stitching and other reinforcement.
If you find one under $150, please let me know.
Similar story for jeans, sweatshirts… everything. Hell, even athletic socks were better-made decades ago.
[edit] for reference, a 1930s Sears Hercules work shirt, basically an early model of what I’m writing about above, cost $0.79. Adjusted for official inflation figures? That’s about $18. $18 shirts are almost all terrible now. This is why I suspect there’s some bullshit going on with the metrics, and it involves laundering (ha!) worse goods into alleged improvements in the standard of living. This would also help explain (along with Baumol’s) why some things so consistently outpace nominal inflation: because nominal inflation isn’t capturing reality very well, so when it hits something that can’t (for whatever reason) be made worse, that thing seems to “outpace” inflation.
My dad was privy to my grandfather complaining to my great-great grandfather about the bad quality of houses, tractors, and clothes in the 1950s — that the stuff built in the 1910s and 1920s was so much better. Carl (in his thick southern German accent) made the point that all the cheap clothes they bought to keep them out of jail (public nudity) disintegrated in a year and the only clothes that survived were the expensive ones, or the random ones that somehow survived the test of time. Apparently he'd had the same argument with his grandfather back in the 1890s. Sooo... I dunno; maybe things have always gotten worse, and were always better in the past? That doesn't seem to jive with the way I live vs the literal log fucking cabin they lived in.
What people think is quality and what is are not always the same.
Modern building codes make the cheapest houses much better than the best houses from 100 years ago. Nobody knows how to see insulation so they don't count it. Old houses often overbuild some obvious beam and so that part of the house is very strong, but some other beam wasn't strong. Yes old houses had access to old growth trees that were stronger, but that doesn't make up for good engineering.
Insulation used to be a ton less important—wood and gas heating were cheap, and nobody had air conditioning because it didn't exist yet.
What was more important was the layout of the house, the windows, and the ceiling heights, all being thoughtfully arranged to allow the right kinds of airflow in the right seasons.
Most modern houses in climates like seen in most of the US turn into an unbearable mold-farm of a wet oven if the AC is turned off over the Summer—they depend on AC or they start kinda decaying in place within a year, aside from being unbearable to enter on a hot day. A 1900-construction house that hasn't been updated to something like modern standards is far more comfortable to live in, in those circumstances.
(your broader point that some things in modern houses are better due to e.g. improving materials or engineering even as other things like framing have gotten worse due to worsening materials, I don't dispute, but modern house design as far as airtightness and insulation is very much a trade-off that leaves them dependent on AC in many—and, as the Earth warms, ever-more—climates, not strictly an improvement)
> wood and gas heating were cheap, and nobody had air conditioning because it didn't exist yet.
Gas heating in an old house for just one month uses more energy than all HVAC loads for a year in a similar sized new house. Where I live you must heat during that month of the pipes freeze/break so there is no getting around.
I live on the Potomac River in Virginia and am regularly shocked that the "come here" houses are what they left behind in northern Virginia and the Maryland suburbs. Houses are not designed for cross ventilation or with deep porches, and the like. I mean, all the cottages we visited on Cape Cod in my younger days were designed to have windows open and for the natural sea breeze to do the heavy lifting.
The old family farm, in Indiana, had all these short "barns". Because they were from Germany, they couldn't figure out how to build properly footed foundations, in the Indiana wilderness. The result was the bottom logs of the houses kept rotting out. So, every 10-or-so years, they'd just build a new log cabin. The old log cabin was the new barn. And, yeah, the old growth logs meant most of the cabins were only 4 logs high, since each log was 3' thick, after they were squared up. By the time the cabin rotted out the second log, the last logs were dry enough they'd stop rotting. The farm had a number of these weird, short, log cabin barns.
wrong, the hight of wood technology and understanding is behind us
I have worked on many very old wooden buildings, dateing back to the mid 1700's and learned from the last carpenters and shipwrights, blacksmiths
standing who carried those traditions, as things they learned as part of a greater whole.
The understanding of how to keep structures dry, and also, how the inevitable condensation and leakage must be shed, is wraped up in tiny details, choices in wood species and specific grain orientations.
If you are discussing, settler built homes, then
the choices become based on pragmatism and litteral, life/death survival decisions, so things like, a stone fireplace, but @3' the chimney is chinked log or split wood, and I have seen wooden
chimney foundations,made from truely massive, huen
timbers, dovetailed together, 36" plus timbers,still supporting an in use kitchen apparatus, after 300 years.
How is that possible?, simple, site selection, dry
but not too dry, with a spring for a well close by, and if you dig into the details, there is plenty of history around choosing "dry wells" just for, basements and larders, non muddy spots for
a house, etc.
It is a mistake and a disservice to underestimate the sophistication of the many many, hidden details and the consious choices behind them, in our ancestors lives.
seaweed, insulation, and "brushing" foundations every fall......
goes on and on
Old buildings are often stronger because they didn’t have the modelling and precision manufacturing required to make them to an exact standard - instead they were overbuilt.
Maybe, but boots for sure are better and cheaper than 100 years ago. I think the only thing that makes this slightly confusing is that what were old mass-produced workwear have become limited-run fashion items, so looking at things like M1918 boots or cowboy boots and comparing to modern Red Wings or Luccheses it's tempting to say "Oh how much more expensive leather-soled brass-hardware hand-tanned full-grain leather boots are now", ignoring that Modern soldiers wear lightweight goretex running shoe-boots and farmers wear cozy neoprene pull-ons with anti-slip soles and carbon fibre toes, both of which cost half of inflation-adjusted prices of the objectively inferior boots of 1925.
You're right that modern work and military boots are generally better for their specific purpose -- they are certainly much lighter and usually cheaper than their older equivalents. They can also be more ergonomic and breathable while still being water-resistant due to modern materials and processes. But I will say that the durability of leather, metal-hardware, stitched/nailed-sole boots is unmatched. They can be re-soled and repaired unlike (most of) their modern counterparts, and will last generations if properly cared for. And there are still jobs out there for which they are the best option.
Go look up the origin of the word "shoddy" as it relates to the crappy field uniforms unscrupulous vendors sold to the Federal government during the Civil War.
As the supply chain strengthens and expands, things breaking becomes more and more acceptable.
A hundred years ago if a piece of clothing broke it meant you or a family member would repair it yourself. Fifty years ago you could buy a new one at a clothing store in a city. Now I can order one off Amazon that'll arrive at my doorstep in the morning.
Availability is less important for superfluous for unnecessary things, but for things people's lives depend on reliability was important in a way it isn't today. A coat wearing through or a knife breaking could mean death, a long time ago.Things were expected to be cared for and fixed for decades rather than replaced.
Shoddy things have always been around, but tolerance for them slowly yet persistently grows.
It is unfair you're being downvoted by pointing out my anecdote. I argued the same point, too!
Here's another point: the Greeks used to complain about their students using punctuation & spaces in their scrolls, because it'd rot their pupils' brains; when novels (books!) became popular, academics thought it'd be the downfall of civilization.
1. You’re, rightfully, pointing out the “kids these days” bias that societies tend to have. Humans are risk-averse by nature and old things register in our monkey brains as better. This is all true.
2. Some goods are actually worse. Objectively. Clothing is one of them.
I buy and curate menswear from the 1960s and 1970s. Full suits, trousers, vests, trench coats, you know. The quality is just not comparable to modern menswear. Almost all of these items look brand new, and when pressed, better than new clothes made today.
They’re much sturdier, with no fraying or pilling. Most hold their shape to an unbelievable degree - one pressing session will easily last for 3 months of wear.
The viscose and polyester stuff is better, too, but naturally not as long-living as cotton or wool. But still, I have seen 60 year old polyester trousers with no pilling. Modern trousers can barely survive 3 washes without pilling.
This is a place where you have to be extremely aware of survivor bias.
You also have to be very careful about inflation adjusted dollars vs actual wealth values. For instance the median income in the US in 1933 was between $500 and $1000. Inflation adjusted that’s between 15 and 30k but our median income now is much higher than that.
Anecdotally my grandmother felt she was wealthy compared to her peers in the 1930s because her family could buy a dress per person per year from the Sears catalog.
We have both real examples of specific common models, and depictions (photos, sales art) of same, and not just ones regarded as “high end” (which, we’re talking outdoor workwear in an age when that wasn’t remotely fashionable like it would be after the 1950s, so there weren’t really fancy versions of these) and the fabric is better, and the construction more involved and durable, than that in an $50+ chambray shirt today. For a (supposedly) inflation-adjusted $18.
Most of the examples I’ve found that approach the originals in quality are $200 or more. I want to know if anyone tracks one down for less than $150, because I’d likely own 2-3 of them before the year’s out if they do. 8x the supposedly inflation-adjusted price of the original would be, from what I can tell, a bargain.
Your note that a dress per year felt like a lot is exactly my point: if I had to pay $150 per blue-collar work shirt I’d feel like I was doing pretty great if I could responsibly buy a couple per year. IOW, buying similar quality goods, our alleged improvements in QOL are significantly diminished.
[edit] if you look into what decently-constructed (not even finely-made! Just, like, not shit) dresses made with fabrics that aren’t mostly or entirely plastic cost, they’re hundreds of dollars today, even for fairly simple ones, especially midi-length or longer (as there’s more fabric than in a mini)
And as a reminder blue collar work was _an improvement_ over the default which was agricultural work. Most workers in the US could not afford to buy clothing from a catalog in the 1930s.
The dress comparison was as opposed to her peer group who wore clothes made out of seed bags.
Also keep in mind that the quality and durability of that dress,
and similarly-priced clothing of the era,
made it possible to not need to buy new every season.
That dress could be expected to last for years,
longer with simple repairs.
Also, shoes are even worse than clothing for declining price/decreasing quality.
You’re not kidding, I can’t friggin’ believe how bad $70 sneakers can be these days. My shitty wal mart kids’ shoes for $10 or whatever in the ‘90s held up way better than a lot of these.
Oddly, the low end getting worse while prices also go up has made $200+ good leather shoes more attractive, LOL. Though I expect we’re about to either see most of those companies go out of business, or hike prices $100 or so in a short period of time, given post-2021 labor price increases. They’ve got to be hurting for margin right now.
I have two pairs of sneakers I wear for a lot of things. They get at least weekly use. Both are >4 years old. One was a pair of Sketchers I got for $40, the other was some pair that didn't even have a box I got for $9 at Walmart.
You don't say how long you wear them,
how much you're on your feet wearing them,
or how far you move wearing them.
Shoes don't wear out (much) from being put on and taken off,
and weekly use is light use.
On the flip side, four years is nothing.
I have shoes I bought over thirty years ago,
and all I've ever done is replace the insoles.
Even the laces are original.
Trips to the office and general errands, work around the house and yard, walks through the park and neighborhood, playing with the kids at the playground, some light bike riding along with sometimes bike riding as a commute. Normal everyday wear stuff for an office drone. At least weekly, because I switch off between the two shoes (one's more grey and the other is black) and some flip flops depending on the weather for my general everyday wear. Some days I'll wear nicer shoes, some days I'll wear one of my pairs of boots, so its not really an every day thing to wear those shoes but each probably gets at least 2 days a week on average of all day wear.
I'd say over four years of this a few days a week on a $9 pair of sneakers is pretty decent. They'll likely hit at least six or seven before replacement.
And yeah, I have some nice dress shoes that I've had for twenty years that pretty much look like the day I bought them. They get worn like 2-3 times a year. I also have leather cowboy boots I bought over 15 years ago that had their heels replaced a couple of years ago and are otherwise still in great shape. Both were more than $9 though. I think the boots were like $110 back when I bought them at Cavender's. The comment I was replying to:
> I can’t friggin’ believe how bad $70 sneakers can be these days
Even in the 90s my sneakers usually fell apart within a few years, and I rarely even owned $70 sneakers back then even adjusted for inflation. These days I can get sneakers for about $15 that last just about as long as the sneakers I owned in the 90s. That's the equivalent of buying ~$6 shoes in 1990 by many inflation calculators.
These are my cheap sneakers, a little bit different but the same brand and general style:
Unfortunately, it costs $400+ these days to get quality shoes. It’s possible to find cheaper examples, but well made durable leather shoes are expensive if you buy them new.
We don't need to go back to the 1930s though. I have two pairs of leather winter boots that have lasted for a very long time now. How long these last obviously will depend on actual usage. I.e. keep in mind that these aren't work boots on a construction site. Just regular full leather winter boots for a HN type dude that drove to the train station and then walked to the office etc. plus some use for going on winter walks, going out for groceries, weekend activities etc.
One pair, $230, made in USA. Just looked it up, are now 10 years old. Perfectly fine and at this rate will last another 10, then be resoled and last another 20. These cost $440 now.
The other, which I used more often actually, made in I don't know where, are now almost 20 years old and still perfectly fine as well, tho the outsoles will need work soon.
I basically switch between the two whenever I need to wear some winter boots, except for when it's super cold, then I take out the Baffins, which are the only boots that have kept my feet warm no matter what.
In the same timeframe I've run through regular sneakers of the ~$50 kind from Costco about once per year (and I also keep 2 pairs around so I never have the same ones on two days in a row)
Rancourt starts around $200. Their styles lean casual, and their dressier options (and certainly their boots) cost more, but the construction and materials are really good.
Rancourt does make nice shoes for under $400, and so does Red Wing. Meermins are a Spanish brand you can get for under $400. Aside from that, it’s $400+ for Grant Stones and $600+ for Aldens, and even higher for Viberg, Edward Green, etc.
The desire to have a diverse and up to date wardrobe has changed whether someone is willing to only have one dress and if it is worth repairing. It’s not that people need to buy new every season, they want to. This puts downward pressure on price and quality.
People used to shop at goodwill or consignment shops. As a kid we went to church with a woman who never wore the same dress - it was affordable because she bought and sold on consignment most of the time - basically she was renting everything.
Vintage quality and style is back in, so there is a lot of clothing reuse in hip fashion. However, secondhand only works because people buy a surplus of clothing!
If you're saying there are equivalent shirts today that are as good but just in different styles and materials, I don't think there are, not at the inflation-adjusted ~$18. $50, and maybe you're getting somewhere. Maybe.
I do get that the specific type I called out might have some functional equivalent that's simply a different style & material but is just as good, but not that cheap, they don't. Under $150, probably, sure. Under $50? No.
This suggests that the cost of clothing has inflated at more like 3x the nominal inflation rate, despite the existence of $18 (or cheaper!) shirts—the inflation was eaten up by worsening quality, rather than showing up in prices, but like for like, even with a generous "functional equivalent" accounting, the change was more like $0.79 -> $50+ than $0.79 -> ~$18—your "equivalent" dollar under the latter calculation in-fact buys less.
You are talking about the hedonic adjustments which is a hugely studied part of inflation calculations. For any way to calculate broad inflation you’ll find products that inflated more than the calculation (and less).
Your own example is an interesting one because a) it’s very hard to compare clothing by objective quality b) you’re changing the goal posts. I’ve found a carhart product that nearly exactly matches your specification and msrp’s for $40. I’ve seen discounters selling it for $25. Which is getting very close to your specific target.
I'm curious what other things when compared for quality would have a higher than 'normal' inflation. Perhaps we've been suffering a higher inflation across many 'dimensions'. If CPI doesn't control for enshitification, we technically have more inflation than we believe
This would still undercount the other hidden part of inflation, which is loss of quality of services. It's sometimes subtle, but once you see it, you'll keep spotting it - the main service itself may not get worse, but everything around it does. Worse seating in the waiting rooms, magazines replaced with first-party ads, worse decor or lack of it, less complimentary items, dark patterns aimed at reducing usage of side offerings without eliminating them, adding complicated online processes, etc.
My pet peeve is automated checkouts and ordering kiosks. These save stores and venues on labor costs by making the customers do the work for the store. For free, and disproportionally wasting customers' time.
(In many cases this applies to self-service in general.)
> My pet peeve is automated checkouts and ordering kiosks. These save stores and venues on labor costs by making the customers do the work for the store. For free, and disproportionally wasting customers' time.
Based on what I’ve heard, it may be wasting time somewhere like Germany where the staff are scanning your items at lightning speed. However, here in Poland self-checkout is where you go to save time. Human-staffed checkouts are and have always been slow like an iceberg. Now and before self-checkout was ever a thing. I was relieved when they were introduced, precisely thanks to the time saved. I hate waiting in queues.
I live in Poland. The experience you attribute to Germany, is what I experienced in Poland. Still experience, on the off chance there's a human behind the register.
All self-checkout machines are moody and lock up if you so much as look at it funny. It would be somewhat acceptable if there was always a dedicated employee delegated solely to assist and unlock the machines, but stores cheap out even on that.
In America it always greatly depended in the store. Wal-mart, for instance, would get the worst workers, and checking out was insufferable. Target was better.
Now, you just need to deal with individual people being slow partially because it’s not their job and partially because it’s a lot less efficient to have a little kiosk vs a conveyer belt. Not to mention if you want to buy something that a store locks up you need to wait for them to go get it. Progress?
>> I’ve long suspected a lot of supposed economic progress since, especially, the 1970s, has just been goods getting worse.
> Go look at what it costs to get a chambray work shirt (where we got the term “blue collar”, so, made for physical labor, not something fancy) made with similar-quality fabric and construction to a common 1940s or 1950s offering in a Sears catalog.
> How do you know they were better made back then?
I think it's pretty clear based on what I've read about purchasing behavior back then: people would own a relatively small quantity of clothes (compared to today), which they'd wear for a long time. That just wouldn't be a tenable strategy given modern quality.
Also, historically, stuff in the Sears catalog wasn't super special high-end stuff. It was common mass market stuff.
Sears tools were fabricated in American factories. Compare those to Harbor Freight.
The sad thing is, if one wanted to buy tools of any sort that weren't Harbor Freight, you'd go to another store and get the exact same quality but with different colored plastic handles that just cost twice as much. And instead of tool steel, they're made out of whatever pot metal happened to be around that day.
Furniture is now almost always made out of something like cardboard, compared to the real wood that it was constructed from in that era. It would amuse me as a child when I'd watch some old film and the people had all their worldly possessions piled up on top of the Model T or maybe even a cart, and I couldn't at the time understand why they were bothering to do that if they had to flee. Well, because I'd do the same if I could somehow afford dining room chairs that weren't cheap junk.
Someone in another forum was complaining about Pyrex cookware, which is hardly some luxury good itself. Apparently they've not been made of the proper borosillicate glass in a long time, and so they're no longer really oven-safe.
> It would amuse me as a child when I'd watch some old film and the people had all their worldly possessions piled up on top of the Model T or maybe even a cart, and I couldn't at the time understand why they were bothering to do that if they had to flee. Well, because I'd do the same if I could somehow afford dining room chairs that weren't cheap junk.
I think it's a bit more than that: those possessions not only weren't cheap junk, they also probably consisted of a significant fraction of that family's total wealth.
It's a good example of the question: "where is your generational wealth stored up?"
For homeowner types it's in your real property and the house sitting on top of it. A home and land are assets that also come with significant costs for maintenance and upkeep. And homeowners are in ridiculous situations of living childfree in a 4BR/6BA filling up with litter boxes, or their kids all flee the nest and don't want Mom and Dad's old place at all? Owning land, however, is a good way to ensure that a family invests in their local community and cares about the direction it takes, because they're not liable to pull up their stakes and go elsewhere.
So a century ago, and probably for hundreds of years, if a family didn't own land, I can see furniture as the soundest investment for generational wealth. Because sturdy furniture can be used by anyone for a long time, and its maintenance costs can be minimal. So you sit in your great-grandfather's chair, and occasionally needing to move, hopefully find ways to take it all along with you. Sadly in an emergency, transportation costs and logistics can outstrip their value now. All the time I see people abandoning furniture because they didn't account for how unwieldy it becomes with time. But furniture and clothing are so replaceable, interchangeable, and nearly fungible, it's now a lousy way to store up wealth.
So where's your generational wealth built? What will your great-grandchildren enjoy when the world's a different place? Your 401(k)? A McMansion? Your Prius?
You can most certainly still buy real borosilicate PYREX. But most people will not buy a $32 borosilicate roasting pan when the soda-lime glass version is less than half the price at $15. The boro versions are marked PYREX, the soda glass ones are marked pyrex.
> would own a relatively small quantity of clothes (compared to today), which they'd wear for a long time. That just wouldn't be a tenable strategy given modern quality.
one problem though. My clothing would also last noticeably longer if I was hand-washing it. How much longer I don't actually know, but some of the dresses that was passed to me from older generations have never seen the inside of a washing machine. I also can find similar fabric in some stores, so, theoretically, some clothes today would also live for decades.
We have to adjust to washing machines and our washing habits. Some people I know wash their jeans every week. Every. Week. On a high speed. Yeah no shit they would fall apart in a year, that's like 20-30 washings in a year if they had 2 pairs.
>> would own a relatively small quantity of clothes (compared to today), which they'd wear for a long time. That just wouldn't be a tenable strategy given modern quality.
> one problem though. My clothing would also last noticeably longer if I was hand-washing it.
While modern clothing might last longer if hand washed, the question is how long. Up-thread it was noted an old $18 (adjusted for inflation) work shirt has the quality features of a $200+ shirt today. I'm under the impression that no amount of babying would allow many modern clothing items to last a long as people used to wear their clothes.
> We have to adjust to washing machines and our washing habits.
And then we have to adjust washing habits to ongoing loss of quality^W^W^W progress of clothes.
This hit me once I started to see ads for laundry detergents supposedly able to clean clothes in cold water, like 20℃ or less - what's happening is, the fabrics and colors got so bad they start to degrade quickly even in 30℃ or 45℃ programs. The market, instead of giving us more durable clothes, decided to give us more high-tech detergent.
Oh, and this is sold under the guise of being eco-friendly - cold water = less energy. Even if that's a valid gain, I think it's not what's driving the existence of those detergents. Rather, they're the "fix" to the problem of low-quality clothes, and its existence only lets the quality get even worse (and further enabling the "fast fashion" phenomenon).
> people would own a relatively small quantity of clothes (compared to today), which they'd wear for a long time. That just wouldn't be a tenable strategy given modern quality.
I think the point being made by the OP is that it might be a tenable strategy if you were to spend an equivalent portion of your income on said clothes - which would be ‘very expensive’ by modern standards.
> I’ve long suspected a lot of supposed economic progress since, especially, the 1970s, has just been goods getting worse.
My take is that for the most part the high quality stuff is, inflation adjusted, similarly priced, but the market is now saturated with an enormous amount of cheap stuff.
The $5-$10 shirts you can buy off Amazon would be literal pennies back then. You couldn't get clothing for pennies in the 1970s.
Hahaha, I admit I posted in part to get the “HN is better than Google at finding things, as long as you claim it can’t be done” effect :-)
Not quite the fabric I had in mind, but those look damn good, really close style-wise, and are on the short-list for the next time I sit down to look over my next batch of clothing purchases. Thanks!
I generally assume crowd funded to mean "created by a quasi-outsider with not much industry knowledge who will make simple mistakes that drastically reduce the quality of the product"
This isn't a group looking to make a potentially one-off product in an attempt to break into the industry. This is a different marketing and manufacturing model that is trying to mini-max the cost-to-quality ratio by only making products that have already sold. Similar production quality as other selvedge denim companies like APC or Iron Heart, and sewn in the US. The fabric they source is often of limited supply, either discontinued or small production runs, from high quality mills.
The Five Brothers Shirt which I was gifted when I was down on my luck and just out of the service was made in a quantity which allowed a friend's aunt to purchase 4 of them as gifts for all the younger folks at her Christmas party that year, and there were quite a few on the sales floor at Sears when my folks took me school clothes shopping each year.
They are still in business, but I wonder what changed when the last time I looked at their shirts, they were north of $150, and now they are quite competitive in price, and I worry about the quality as is being debated in this thread.
Still have that shirt, four decades later, and still wear it around the house, though it's a bit frayed from rough work chopping and hauling firewood when I was younger.
OP mention shirts from the 30s-50s. I’m sure the operation warehoused more as the market changed, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the garments 100 years ago were basically made to order for a mail order taking a week or more to deliver. I’d expect by the 80s this had entirely changed.
This is a good question and this is definitely happening but it's not clear how big a percentage of purchased goods fall into this category. Many other sectors (Automobiles, Consumer Electronics, Chemicals), have radically improved in quality since the 70s.
Your point about inflation is such a clear observation that it seems self-evident, and yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen decline in product quality linked explicitly to causing skewed inflation numbers (and even skewed productivity numbers) before. Would be fun to see a same-quality inflation index, as tricky as that would be.
Just to be clear: Filson is still "good" quality for the price IMO, but vintage Filson is built like a tank. My button down shirts from 15 years ago have never even needed a button replaced, whereas newer shirt construction from Bangladesh does not seem as strong to me. Material quality is better/heavier for my older shirts.
I'm not sure if they scrapped it, but somewhat recently (a year ago?) I saw that they were trying to facilitate sales of vintage Filson through their site presumably because they see the people who care about quality buying vintage Filson on eBay instead of the newer stuff they're selling.
Also, while it's certainly not the case that "made overseas = lesser quality", Filson's website has a prominently displayed filter/category for "Made in the USA". This is where you can get a really heavy knit sweater for $500 that IMO is worthy of the old Filson name.
This is the same story with everything. Companies all want to take as much as they can possibly squeeze out of you while giving you as little as they can get away with. A few companies start out by charging higher prices for higher quality, often pricing out a large number of consumers, but eventually the greed wins out and they start to cut corners too.
If you're wealthy enough to keep chasing after luxury goods you'll be ripped off at a slower pace than most, but eventually you'll be increasingly disappointed in what you're getting and have to look harder and harder, and pay higher and higher prices for anything nice. The poorest people are stuck paying increasing prices for poisonous products that are basically trash and that's all they can barely afford.
Has cotton become more expensive in the last 90 years? What about labor? I'm sorry for being lazy, I don't have time right now to research. I just want to bring up the point that a lot can change in almost a century. So just doing an inflation-adjusted price comparison is not that helpful.
Oh, I don’t think it’s so much that: I think, rather, that improvements in economic productivity have been wildly overstated, especially since the 1970s, and instead we’ve been seeing a lot of our “improvements” in the form of goods getting worse. IOW inflation in terms of same-quality goods from the early or mid 20th century is a ton higher than our ordinary inflation rate, and much (not all!) of our “productivity improvements” are actually goods getting worse—inflation’s only as low as it is because we’re treating worse goods as comparable to better ones.
I think this thread is conflating "quality going down" and "low-cost tier getting cheaper and more popular."
Look at Ikea. They sell a wooden table with four chairs for $199 (Hagernas). $199 for a place for a family of four to eat on new furniture, and it looks all right! That is a remarkable amount of value. Even if that won't last forever, high-quality stuff has always been expensive; like any dining set that anyone would consider "quality" would be at least $1000 new, or the cost of five of these Ikea sets.
So I guess my point is that the Dust Bowl farmers who had nice furniture maybe only had that because they didn't have a choice; maybe they would have preferred to save that money or buy clothes or better food but they really had no low-end options. And having that choice for an Ikea table would have actually made them richer, not poorer.
Another factor is reluctance to repair. When a plastic laminated particle board breaks, virtually nobody wants to fix it. I don't personally know how, but it's not impossible. For whatever reason, simple repair skills have massively deteriorated in later generations.
The argument being made here is that, if you hold quality constant and adjust for inflation, many goods now cost a greater percentage of the median income than they did in the past.
That argument seems false. It is land, education (or access to that network of people), and healthcare that is more expensive. Of course, the healthcare is much better than the before, so it’s not quite comparable.
I believe that real incomes, even under some expert analysis incorporating my vaguely-proposed adjustments and assuming I'm even right in the first place, are up! I haven't done the legwork to be prepared to argue against that, and anyway I very much doubt it's wrong. We are better off, over all, I think, than in the early 20th century (say).
I just also don't think we're as much better off as some common metrics suggest. I especially worry that those kinds of measurements have been badly decoupled from reality over, in particular, the last ~50 years or so, such that experienced improvements in standard of living are far smaller than one might think from looking at the numbers, and I think that's true not only because we see certain very-important things like housing, healthcare, and education costs outpacing inflation, but because of declines in the quality of many (not all!) goods at nominally-same (inflation adjusted) prices. In fact, I think this is part (in addition to the oft-blamed Baumol's cost disease) of why those important things are outpacing inflation so very much—they can't cut quality as readily or as much as other categories of goods have been able to, so only have actual productivity increases to put downward pressure on their costs, and I think actual productivity increases have been... quite a bit smaller over the last five decades than some figures suggest they are.
I think progress is far more mixed—and that an awful lot of real progress has manifested due to regulation forcing quality above certain levels, in concert with improvements in industry & materials, not solely from productivity increases or better materials. This is a sharply different narrative than the common one, especially since Reagan in US popular culture, and in modern libertarian-influenced discourse that's now fairly influential.
We have better ordinary, bottom-tier ready-made bread than in 1850 because it's illegal to mix in sawdust now, and not only is it illegal, there's a good-enough chance of getting caught and punished that it isn't really a thing any more. We have better housing (to the degree that it is better, which is a mixed bag but I would certainly concede leans overall better) due both to improvements in how we build houses and to new materials, and because legally-required minimum quality is way, way higher than it used to be in a variety of important ways. Cars are very safe mostly because of regulation (they're more reliable largely due to international competition! Market pressure does work, I'm just extremely skeptical that they're as magically-effective, and certainly not as optimally-effective-when-minimally-regulated, as some suppose)
Online has made things more expensive. Returns cost a lot of money. Company is paying $10+ to return an item with returns at 20%. Factor in the exchange processing and shipping.
Dyes make fabric fit differently. Dark shirt will have more weight and less stretch than a lighter colored shirt. If you’re a big company, you have multiple manufacturers making the same line and the pieces will fit differently.
There's been a lot of discussion in recent years about how fashion has stabilized over the past couple of decades whereas it used to be that fashion was in constant flux. Can we notice much difference between the typical street clothes of today versus those of a decade or even two decades ago? The clothing styles of the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s are all quite different. Perhaps the lower quality means the industry now has a way to guarantee constant product sales so they're no longer pushing fashion trends as hard as they used to.
Trends certainly do still come and go, especially for young women, but overall society seems to have settled into a state of low energy for fashion change.
Might have something to do with "trend forecasting" companies coming into vogue and quickly becoming standard for clothing companies (among others) starting in the '80s, leading to more-conservative offerings. The Articles of Interest podcast had an episode about it, weird and (of late) influential world I had no idea about.
Le Laboureur work shirts can be under $150 at some stores. They are a different style though and have been difficult to find in stock online.
I only recently ordered some so have no direct experience. The durability of the fabric and quality of construction are substantial from everything I've read.
I'm not sure why, but the inflation estimate felt off and inflation calculators get less accurate the further back you go, so I looked up some figures for the 1930s. Turns out that $18 is a decent estimate.
You can absolutely make a thick, hard-wearing shirt for $18 - I am sure someone does indeed make this shirt; most people just want different things. Today's consumer wants clothes that fit nicely, something in fashion, with soft materials and trendy colors and comforting advertising.
I can't point you to a $18 hard-wearing work shirt, but I can point you to something even better: regular Wrangler Rustler jeans from Walmart, $13.98. 100% cotton, thick solid denim, and they look and fit the same as $100 Levis. Even better, for the denim nerds there is a raw denim version, only available online in a boot cut; select the color "rigid" [3].
In another category of heavyweight cloth objects, I can also recommend the "Rothco" canvas duffle bag, $30 [4]. Brand in quotation marks because it seems to be generic Indian military surplus sold under other names as well. The stitching is a bit on the weak side for extreme use but it generally holds up well. If anyone here knows of an even sturdier alternative I would love to hear it.
My checklist: 1) material - must be all natural fiber, 2) weight of material, 3) strength of stitching, 4) type of stitch, 5) reviews that mention serious long-term use. One review by a mechanic/firefighter/etc is worth ten million generic reviews.
Anyone else have tips on quality, long-lasting clothes?
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I used this very useful site [0] to find a paper discussing household income in 1930 [1] which estimates the mean at around $2900/yr and the median around $2500/yr per "family." 2023 household income is 114.5k/year mean and 80.6k/year median. That is, household income has increased by a factor of 32.2x.
That said, household size has declined from 4.1 to 2.5 from 1930 to 2025, so that is 0.61x the size in 1930, so median individual income is really up by 19.6x. So your $0.79 shirt is today $15 (by median individual income) or $24 (by mean individual income.)
You don't even have to go back that far. I have shirts from Target I bought in the late 2000s/early 2010s that are still in great condition despite regular use. They've outlived plenty of newer clothes. The entire space got enshittified in the last decade especially.
A $4 pair of costco wool socks performs as well as $40 darn toughs.
There's a youtube channel that visits Asian clothing manufacturing expos to get quotes. TLDR the difference between a disposable $10 shirt and durable $100 shirt is like $5 in material and labor. $20-$50 for a $100 jacket and $500 one. It is extremely cheap to make very high quality clothing now, brands just decided to segregate market and capture value according to durability, percieved or actual, and take disgusting margins off the top.
I wonder how much companies spend on branding/advertisement 50 years ago.
I’ve long suspected a lot of supposed economic progress since, especially, the 1970s, has just been goods getting worse.
Go look at what it costs to get a chambray work shirt (where we got the term “blue collar”, so, made for physical labor, not something fancy) made with similar-quality fabric and construction to a common 1940s or 1950s offering in a Sears catalog. Not the ones J Crew or whoever sells, those are fine for what they are but they’re not built for work, the fabric’s thinner and they lack extensive double- or triple-stitching and other reinforcement.
If you find one under $150, please let me know.
Similar story for jeans, sweatshirts… everything. Hell, even athletic socks were better-made decades ago.
[edit] for reference, a 1930s Sears Hercules work shirt, basically an early model of what I’m writing about above, cost $0.79. Adjusted for official inflation figures? That’s about $18. $18 shirts are almost all terrible now. This is why I suspect there’s some bullshit going on with the metrics, and it involves laundering (ha!) worse goods into alleged improvements in the standard of living. This would also help explain (along with Baumol’s) why some things so consistently outpace nominal inflation: because nominal inflation isn’t capturing reality very well, so when it hits something that can’t (for whatever reason) be made worse, that thing seems to “outpace” inflation.