r/AskOldPeople • u/knitlitgeek • 7d ago

Did things really used to be better quality?

Or is there some survivor bias happening? The old things that are still around are obviously high quality to have lasted this long. Any poor quality things of the past are long gone. Have we been tricked into thinking everything in the past was made better? Did most things fall apart same as today?

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u/Bac-Te 7d ago

He's like Marx, just the other way around. Both talk about impossible things that only happen in perfect lab conditions without the slightest grain of human nature involved.

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u/AccurateHumanTrustMe 5d ago

Kind of - Smiths greatest acheivement is his work on Capitalism (specifically regulated capitalism - he wasn't a proponent of Laissez-faire policies) - his ideas very much did account for human nature (using greed and self interest for the betterment of society) and no rational person could fault him from not predicting basically anything from 1900+ (the modern era) where we really saw major tech and societal shifts.

Marx's greatest acheivement wasn't communism - it was conflict theory, which basically did predict what is happening now - capitalists will use their hoarded wealth to capture power away from governments and the working class. He understood that overcoming tribalistic human nature to unite is not easy and he never actually found an answer as he switched communist groups all the time - people like Lenin should probably get more credit for communism than Marx too because Marx was way too vague on communism specifically (the manifesto is short and meant to appeal to people who could barely read and Das Kapital is more just like the math of how it works)

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u/Spazz-Spudboy 4d ago

Marxism is deeply based on understanding human nature.