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Is Repair As Important As Innovation? (economist.com)
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from The Economist: Events about making new things are ten a penny. Less common are events about keeping things as good as new. Maintenance lacks the glamour of innovation. It is mostly noticed in its absence -- the tear in a shirt, the mould on a ceiling, the spluttering of an engine. Not long ago David Edgerton of Imperial College London, who also spoke at the festival, drove across the bridge in Genoa that collapsed in August, killing 43 people (pictured). 'We're encouraged to pride ourselves on all being innovators and entrepreneurs,' he said. Maintenance is often dismissed as mere drudgery. But in fact, as he pointed out, repairing things is often trickier than making them.
It is also more difficult for economists to measure. The discipline's most prominent statistic, GDP, is gross (as opposed to net) because it leaves out the cost of wear and tear. To calculate these costs, statisticians must estimate the lifespan of a country's assets and make assumptions about the way they deteriorate. [...] And how much do economies spend fighting decay? No one knows, partly because most maintenance is performed in-house, not purchased on the market. The best numbers are collected by Canada, where firms spent 3.3% of GDP on repairs in 2016, more than twice as much as the country spends on research and development. In closing, the report mentions the tyrannies of the ancient East where people were forced to maintain fragile irrigation systems. "In those societies, to repair was to repress," the report says. "But some people today have the opposite concern. They see maintenance and repair as a right they are in danger of losing to companies that hoard spare parts and information too jealously."
It is also more difficult for economists to measure. The discipline's most prominent statistic, GDP, is gross (as opposed to net) because it leaves out the cost of wear and tear. To calculate these costs, statisticians must estimate the lifespan of a country's assets and make assumptions about the way they deteriorate. [...] And how much do economies spend fighting decay? No one knows, partly because most maintenance is performed in-house, not purchased on the market. The best numbers are collected by Canada, where firms spent 3.3% of GDP on repairs in 2016, more than twice as much as the country spends on research and development. In closing, the report mentions the tyrannies of the ancient East where people were forced to maintain fragile irrigation systems. "In those societies, to repair was to repress," the report says. "But some people today have the opposite concern. They see maintenance and repair as a right they are in danger of losing to companies that hoard spare parts and information too jealously."
In Asimov's Empire books, when a society no longer recalls how to repair something, it is a sign of societal collapse.
Looks to me like a false choice.
I'm a step further, I eliminated the need of throwing the junk away by not buying it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's not the engineers. Blame the business-school types who manage them, who went through the US b-school system and learned how to be better sociopaths.
As far as laptops, business-grade Dells and Lenovos (7000 series and X series) work fine, are repairable, and last long. Yeah, Apple is junk.
I have industrial machines. If manufacturers designed equipment where I could no longer repair them by myself, I'm not going to purchase their machine. I'm quite capable of designing and building my own if I have too.
And believe me, I've already met some manufacturers attempting to do so under the guise of "Litigation", "Liability", "Proprietary". They lock down their devices, do not want to give me electrical or control schematics and insist this is the way the industry always was (By the way, access is required under all our standards in both Europe and the US for industrial machines, including schematics, so go F*** yourselves). Imagine the whole debacle with locked down phones being placed on multi-million dollar machines where you're required to somehow dispose of it after 2-3 years (Or of course they'll buy it off of you for pennies and resell it for another million). A lot of equipment is designed with standard replaceable parts, the moment they try to veer from that path, I'm no longer interested.
All this is nice and correct, except it only take labor costs into account. Mining raw materials and throwing waste are not zero-cost. They cause a big impact, but economists, specially those promoting free market, prefer to ignore it.
I don't think a repair economy would work. How much of a $50 item would you pay to repair it? How much would you charge to repair stuff? Would that be enough to live off of and also provide value back to the repaired item? Even if you were to assume the part acquisition cost was close to the original raw part cost and ignored all the inventory holding costs in the supply chain, just labor wise, it would still be expensive.
Each part would have its own supply chain linkup (of course most would be shared with the whole product). So there would be multiple supply chain links for the same product; which lowers predictability. The labor units in all those links also have a cost. The defect rate within those links would actually increase the cumulative defect rate & cost of the repaired product. Then there is a forecasting of the demands of various parts. In today's tech, you would actually end up with more waste. But lets assume we have the Walmart logistics system of 2050 and those are all automated and highly reliable and forecasting of parts requirements is better or equal to just the product.
An economy that has high labor cost like US, doesn't mean people just cost more. It also means that people must produce more too. Either through automation, or specialized skills (ie: a forklift driver costs more than 50 people in around country, but produces more results). Repair positions need to bring in enough revenue to sustain the "average lifestyle" of that community. Unless we have double digit unemployment where that average is low enough; a repair position just won't be worth it.
Example: for a $25000 car, you don't need to do your own oil change. There is a sustainable industry for that, and it wouldn't exist if that is all they did. It is actually subsidized by all the other services that shop provides. But for your $250 lawn mower, there is no industry to replace the oil. Even for the expensive car, there is no workforce to pump fuel. Because the revenue for those services will be less than the societal necessitated labor cost.
I am not saying a repair system won't work or we shouldn't encourage it. We all change our own vacuum bags, residential air filters, usb cables, AA batteries, etc. So if the product was built to be easily repaired many would use their own "free labor" to do so. I just don't think it would sustain a segment of commerce and solve the labor problems in our society. Or the labor problem will go away, but societal advancement would take a hit.
BTW, there are LARGE parts of our economy that are repair based. Big equipment like AC Units, farm/mining/construction/industrial machines, hospital systems, airplanes, ships, cars, etc. But these are all big ticket items and we are talking about more commodity level stuff here... like your laptop, cell phone, water bottles, microwaves, furniture, toaster, milk/juice/egg cartons, etc. And these are actually repaired and/or reused in more developing economies.