The luddites were right. Everything is worse because they did not win, which is obvious if you spend a second thinking about what them not winning means: more concentrated wealth, more disenfranchised workers.
Durability, quality and reparability. Most fabrics build today are so fragile and needs to be replaced soon, despite the advance in material and weaving.
Most highly qualified workers loves what they do and would stand for keeping they’re output quality up. On the contrary interchangeable cheap workers have no real incentive to that. The factory’s manager is left alone in charge to balance quality versus cheapness, and the last comes with obsolescence (planned or not), which is good for business.
> Most fabrics build today are so fragile and needs to be replaced soon
Because that's what people want. You can get high quality clothes for much cheaper than you could in 1816, but people prefer disposable clothes so they can change their look more often. This is just producers responding to demand.
“People want so producers responds” is a nice but candide eco theory, 2022 looks more like “producers pay for marketing that makes people want” oh and by the way,
who’s really paying for the marketing at the end ?
Properly sourcing high quality stuff is incredibly difficult for consumers. Price is not a good discriminator, unfortunately. This is a problem everywhere but for clothes in particular.
It would indeed be an outstanding catastrophe if 200 years of the most incredible scientific and technological progress yielded a worse result. Of course, that is entirely not the point (none of the times this trope comes out). What is being argued is that 2022 as it is is worse than 2022 as it could be.
In other words: things improved because of technology and despite the societal/economic framework, not because of it.
We've also steadily lowered tax rates over the last 50 years. Many countries are at historically low tax burdens despite rising inequality and no evidence of this improving economic growth.
Yet the public narrative centers around perceived anti-technologism and implied anti-comfortism, wholly ignoring the societal underpinnings of the issue: an increase in power and income inequality amounting to disenfranchisement.
