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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.
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 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.