Case in point of the waste-maker model: many EV charging stations in the US that were installed in the last few years are now broken or removed altogether.

Why? Because the companies got a tax credit for installing them, not maintaining them. Worse, for some companies the chargers become an insurance liability, making them an easy target for cost control and removal.

One of the great forgotten classics of the twentieth century is Vance Packard’s 1960 book The Waste Makers, which anticipates our era of consumerism with an almost haunting prescience. Modern economies, it argues, both create wants and fulfill them, in order to make a throwaway culture. It’s a process that neatly frames the mindset to empty the wallet. Packard notes that the postwar economy, humming on a hair trigger, was akin to a runaway train where the only way to keep the wheels turning was by forcing people to buy things they did not need with money they did not have. The game plan was to manufacture products that were designed to fail, the so-called planned obsolescence; then, through advertising, instill a psychology of obsolescence in which people were made to feel ashamed of their outdated possessions. This two-pronged strategy became the corporate solution.

Ed Bernays shares some no small part of guilt in this with his psyop marketing techniques. His so-called “torches of freedom” got women hooked on smoking, paying for the privilege of slow, gruesome suicide. Also, clothing were no longer marketed on quality cuts and long lasting, breathable, moisture wicking natural fabrics, but on “self expression.” And I’m fine with that but quality began deteriorating about the same time.

I would, however, be interested to know whose idea pink-taxing was. Why do I have to pay as much for tailoring a two-piece suit to fit my height and shape as the suit itself, which isn’t inexpensive off the rack, and between the two, while not being in the same price point as haute couture, still cost several months’ salary, even when I’m fully employed, while a man’s equal quality three-piece is tailored as part of the cost of the suit?

I think nuclear energy is arguably the clearest example of how the US model fails. Nuclear reactors take over a decade to plan and build, from research to blueprints to approval and finally construction. Corporate strategy and startup culture completely falls apart at these timescales, while Chinese planning enables continuous and sustainable buildouts, leveraging economies of scale and experience to make each reactor less expensive than the last.