On Being Stingy, Miserly, Cheap, and Stupid

You can look at all manner of things that have become less expensive over the years once inflation is factored in. Usually "efficiencies" will be touted. Mechanization, the Internet, and new managerial strategies supposedly remove waste from the production process. It's all supposed to be a paean to Occam's Razor.

Instead, what these supposed efficiencies amount to is a substitution. We get something that has certain superficial similarities to an existing product or service. But it's provided more cheaply. So we favor it, discounting the minor changes from what we're used to as mere inconveniences. The new way drives the old into oblivion. We're left with a new but inferior product, and we can only rarely get the old one back.

Take the airlines in the United States. Once deregulated in the 1970s, their hallmark became low fares rather than good service (in the old system, the fares were set by the federal government, i.e., the owner of the airspace). The only thing better about the airlines today compared to the regulated era is their safety: we were still climbing a steep learning curve about accidents in the 1970s; all the accidents and lessons learned from them have made those of us fortunate enough to have avoided the tragedies much safer when we fly. Otherwise, flying has been turned into a commodity. Once anything is commoditized, it's much cheaper per unit, but it's also driven relentlessly into conformity with every other unit. The laws of pricing demand it and punish any suppliers who dare stray.

Food is another great example. While we may have a superficial variety in the middle part of the grocery stores, it's really all about how many new and flashy ways we can recombine corn, soybeans, and wheat. Those crops were long ago commoditized and thus became exceptionally cheap because of their very uniformity.The challenge then became figuring out how to use all the commodities. So it started ending up in places we'd never used it before: high-fructose corn syrup supplanting sugar, for instance. And thus, just as our airline experience of being treated like recalcitrant cargo is the new normal, so is corn sweetener. "Food" has changed meanings. You can't fairly say food has become cheaper because you're comparing two entirely different things, just as you can't truly say flying has become cheaper.

A book I happened across nearly twenty years ago contained many lines of advice from a father to his son. One of them was "Demand excellence and be willing to pay for it." We might add: "because if you don't, you will lose the very possibility of ever experiencing excellence." Chasing the lowest price may be human nature, but it's also stupid. The moral of the story to me is: scale back the variety of your experiences (and therefore expenses) so that you can demand excellence in the few that you choose to retain (and pay more for). View spending as a statement of your values and not just as a game where the object is to get the most stuff.