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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.
I say no. Business analysts want clean revenue cycles. They like planned obsolescence. Or they build only a few spares, moving on, because the design said that only a fraction of people would complain that there are no spares/replacement parts/people trained to fix them.
This behavior, however, is praised by the corporate hegemony. They like clean numbers, campaigns, so they can shift quickly in a highly competitive world. The consumers get the shaft, and not very much justice from bad equipment. Quality counts, but so does the supply chain for post-sale equipment support. The general public isn't taught to look for post-sale support, only to buy the shiny new object with easy third party financing.
Most every laptop I buy these days croaks early. Looking at you, Apple, Lenovo, Asus. Disposable electronics is a bad concept. And that's what happens when you can't fix it or get it fixed (or for a reasonable cost).
To my fellow engineers that design short lifecycle drek: you're evil.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
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.
If anything, it would be in the best interest of politics to enforce that things have to be repairable. If politicians put their money where their mouth is, making things repairable IS where "taking jobs home to the US" is.
That would take care of all the thinks currently done. First, repairing locally is cheaper than sending stuff halfway around the globe. Repair shops would pop up quickly where people with the skill to repair sell that skill to those that need it. It's also one of the best kinds of industries you can possibly have, because you're selling raw work force with a minimum of investment. This would be American as all hell, something where someone who has little money but lots of skill and talent can start a business. And it would instantly also take care of the postal bickering with China, because that is only a problem because sending stuff from China to the US is cheap and nothing moves the other way. China would either have to accept that fewer things get shipped over here, because the stuff isn't thrown away but repaired, or they have to accept that they, too, have to uphold their part of the deal and deliver the returns for free, too. Which they won't.
So if our politicians really were about getting jobs back, they wouldn't try to bribe large corporations into building plants here. All they really had to do is to force them to make their shit repairable. But, of course, where's the kickback in that?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's a lot of assumptions, too. If it's cheaper to make something that lasts 10 years and then gets replaced, then do that.
Think of it this way: humans build machines, produce electricity and energy storage, mine and recycle materials, refine things, build components, assemble products, and ship and retail them. That's a lot of human labor, and it's reflected in the price of products--yeah, it's not that the mining equipment is expensive, but that the labor to create it, maintain it, and fuel it is expensive.
Your $20 toaster comes down to a grand total of $20 of human labor. At Chinese $3/hr rates, that's around 7 hours. Troubleshooting the electrical circuit when it fails can be costly: maybe it's some internal module which is 80% of the toaster anyway, and your repair tech spends an hour swapping it out, and it costs you $30 to repair. For that matter, maybe it's just a blown MOSFET, and your repair tech spends an hour disassembling the device, and another 3 hours troubleshooting it, and then 10 minutes replacing the MOSFET itself. You might be ahead on labor, but the labor-hours are priced high.
Assembling a computer motherboard doesn't take much in terms of labor-hours. Once you've set up the assembly line, it's fairly rapid. The motherboard is extremely-complex and takes potentially days to troubleshoot, meaning there's more human labor in repairing it than in replacing it.
At a point, you've reached the break-over: it's a waste of time to repair this. Maybe you're poor and you can spend 4 hours repairing your $20 iron, at $10/hr, when you could work 4 hours for $15/hr--if only you had work. It's still a waste of time; you're just poor.
At that point, the economics of reuse have passed. You've got electronics waste, and you should send it for recycling. We readily smelt chips for silicon and gold. Copper, plastic, and aluminum are valuable.
You're going to spend $2,400 on high-quality oil changes for your engine, and another $100 on spark plugs, every 100,000 miles. You might spend $800 for an engine rebuild around 200k-300k. If you don't maintain that engine, you're spending $6,000 for a remanufactured engine swap somewhere around the 80,000-100,000 mark, if not closer to the 50,000 mark. Which is cheaper?
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On a lot of things. One of those things is a side-effect of the rate of change of computer systems.
Sure, my Tandy 2000 from 30 (or so) years back should be repairable. But that would require that the maker continue making parts for 30 or so years. Which would make sense if nothing much had changed in 30 or so years.
Alas, a smartphone today has more computing power than my Tandy 2000 did. Making parts for the Tandy 2000 today makes about as much sense as making parts for a stagecoach does.
As is, for the most part, spare parts are made as long as it's profitable to do so. And no, the fact that seventeen people in Maryland want to be able to repair their Tandy 2000's doesn't mean that it's worth the bother of maintaining archaic machine tools, training operators for same, and distributing parts to stores for display on strictly limited shelf-space....
Of course, there are other considerations sometimes. For instance, pollution control laws exist. Allowing the owner of a vehicle to bypass the pollution controls on his vehicle (or just to muck them up by accident) is generally considered a bad thing.
And on and on.
Short form: yes, you should be able to repair your stuff. Except when you shouldn't....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
"Innovation" is not making new things--that would be "invention". Innovation is bringing things to market that weren't available before.
Innovation can be as simple as offering the same car, but with financing that wasn't available before. Simple change, "innovation". (Peter Drucker, the late management writer, gives this exact example involving cars. Make of that what you will.)
Repair hasn't been a credible option in a long time for a lot of things. Make repair affordably available, and you're innovating.
This was discussed on the Freakonomics podcast several years ago - In Praise of Maintenance. He had been doing a series on innovation and then did a counterpoint on how maybe maintenance was as much if not more important than innovation. It's a good podcast and goes into more detail than the short Economist piece.
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.
There's an easy solution to all those problems - modularity. You can streamline the process even further by spending a few extra cents per unit installing well-considered diagnostic elements so that it's easy to determine what's wrong.
Dead toaster? Test the coils. Test the cord. Test the switch. If one of them has a problem, replace it. If none does, replace the electronics board (which is not "the toaster" - in fact it's probably one of the cheaper components in it). Total diagnostic time - 5min. Total repair time, 10min. After all, all you need to do is remove a few screws, unplug the faulty module, and install a new one.
If a device takes hours to diagnose, and more hours to repair, it's because it wasn't designed for easy diagnostics and repair. That's a failure of design, not an argument against the value of repair.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Where are you seeing exclusivity? I see "is A as important as B? Because right now B gets all the attention"
That's the diametric opposite of a mutually exclusive statement.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I think we're already headed that way. Most people change their computers a lot less than in the early days of home computing. Even tablets sales have been slowing down and people don't feel the need to buy a new one. The closer we get to "peak computing capacity per watt", the more the need to upgrade goes down.
My main computer is a Mac mini released in 2010. I "repaired" it three times by upgrading the RAM, swapping the HDD by a low-end SSD and replacing the fan.
Two decades ago, the top new games required a PC no more than one or two years old to run properly.
Today, people are playing the latest games on PCs they built five years ago or more. If you lower the quality settings, you can run games with PCs built a decade ago.
Most PCs can be upgraded which is a similar to being able to repair it. Need more RAM? Add RAM. No room for more RAM? Remove old RAM and add new higher capacity RAM. New game requires a better GPU? Remove the old one and install a new one. That's a kind of repair, removing old "non-working" parts to install a brand new ones.
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(...) it would be in the best interest of politics to enforce that things have to be repairable (...)
With rules like that, it would have been quite difficult to introduce the IC. How do you repair an IC?! The primary reason these days that things are becoming increasingly difficult to repair, is further integration and minimization. While in some very specific cases (I'm thinking about batteries or exposed/vulnerable parts like cameras and screens), it may make sense to be able to repair things, in general it does not make sense; repairability makes things more expensive to make, it makes parts larger and therefore it requires more materials and thus is bad for the environment.
If we're going to enforce anything, let's do it specifically for things that make sense. But enforcing that "things" have to be "repairable" would not be in anybody's advantage.
0x or or snor perron?!
There is another aspect out there though, and that is at what point do we decide that it is time for the technology to stop?
Hey look, I'm rich; I can spend $50,000 on a brand new car, and in 5 years I'll buy another one.
You lot don't get that luxury. You can buy my nice, shiny Audi S5 for $12,000 when it's 10 years old and have a nice car with 70,000 miles on it. That's efficient. Your econoshitbox of today isn't on-par with a nice Audi luxury car from last decade.
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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.
My main computer is a Mac mini released in 2010. I "repaired" it three times by upgrading the RAM, swapping the HDD by a low-end SSD and replacing the fan.
You lucky bastard! I can't do that on my new Mac :*(
The lack of the ability to repair is a tragedy of the commons. People are willing to pay more for a sealed phone at the expense of the environment when they throw it away. The commons is the environment that nobody owns but everyone benefits from. This is exactly the sort of thing that regulation is for.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
First, repairing locally is cheaper than sending stuff halfway around the globe. Repair shops would pop up quickly where people with the skill to repair sell that skill to those that need it.
Depends entirely on what's being repaired. Let's imagine I want to open a repair shop in San Francisco. To pay the shop's rent, taxes, utilities, a salary for myself and everything else I discover I need to charge $150 / hour + parts.
So someone brings in a TV for repair with a power supply problem, and you tell them the cost for the repair (labor and parts) will be $200. Most people will just say "never mind, I'll just go buy a new TV.:"
Why were there TV repair men in 1968? Because a 23" color TV cost $2500 in today's dollars. Back then it was cheaper to repair it.
http://www.tvhistory.tv/1968-A...