Your shoe example is beautifully rigged: you’ve contrived a scenario where both options pollute equally and the company profits the same either way; so of course the only variable left is consumer choice. How handy. But in the real world, the company decided what to produce, how to price it, and what trade-offs to build in. The cheap shoe exists because the company chose to manufacture it at that price point rather than, say, making only the durable version and pricing it at 1.3x. The product landscape a corporate decision. You’re treating the menu as if it fell from the sky.
You dismiss demand engineering as “just an advertising campaign.” Advertising is a multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry built on decades of behavioral psychology, and that’s before you get to planned obsolescence, lobbying to suppress alternatives, and regulatory capture to keep externalities unpriced. Cigarettes aren’t the exception; they’re the most documented example of a widespread practice.
Your EV example backfires even harder. For decades, automakers actively killed electric vehicle programs and lobbied against emissions standards. The “choice” you’re pointing to was shaped by years of corporate behavior. And even now, when TCO is lower, upfront cost still gates the decision. If you can’t aford the higher initial purchase, long-term savings are irrelevant. That’s not irrationality. That’s resource scarcity doing exactly what it’s designed to do.
Choice requires resources: money, time, information, access; which is precisely what is most scarce among those you’re blaming. And that scarcity is systemic by design, not a result of consumer inaction. You’re looking at people responding rationally to a landscape they didn’t build, can’t control, and can’t afford to exit, and calling it their fault.
While you’re right that my example is simplified, it’s not wrong. Shoes are actually like that in real life. A good pair of shoes can last many times as long as the cheap shoes, and pollute the same or even less than cheap ones. There is significant market competition from different companies including small start up brands and long term high quality brands that keep the entire industry quite well balanced.
If two companies produce high quality expensive shoes, that a customer likes equally, the only thing driving the consumer choice is going to be price. So one company cuts their costs a little bit to compete by dropping the quality ever so slightly. Consumers buy that, and then the other company says “I can do that too” cuts it a little bit more to undercut and it goes back and forth. The expensive shoes didn’t stop existing, customers can still choose them, but they aren’t choosing them. The back and forth only stops when the consumers refuse to buy it any cheaper because the quality is no longer even acceptable to them.
That is ENTIRELY customer driven. The moment a company releases a product that isn’t sufficient, consumers stop buying it, and the company goes back to the product that does sell and generate profit for them.
Car companies lobbied to kill emissions standards not because they didn’t want to produce EVs, but because it would cost them profit as fewer people bought cars that were more expensive to meet the standards. Oil companies may have tried to kill EV programs, but that’s not the car companies.
Upfront price isn’t real, people who are broke finance cars. An non-luxury EV is effectively the same price per month as a gas vehicle unless you don’t drive very much (no commute or very short commute) or happen to live somewhere where electricity rates are extremely high and gas costs are extremely low.
Your lack of education cannot be blamed on companies. That is YOUR responsibility, not theirs. The information is available for free to everyone at this point, even homeless people have access to the internet at this point. The fact that people choose not to be informed can only be blamed on them.
You may want to pretend that you’re not responsible because it lets you pick the easier option and not feel like you’re bad, but it’s no more real than crashing into a parked car and getting mad at them for being in your way.
You have the causality exactly backwards.
Your shoe example is beautifully rigged: you’ve contrived a scenario where both options pollute equally and the company profits the same either way; so of course the only variable left is consumer choice. How handy. But in the real world, the company decided what to produce, how to price it, and what trade-offs to build in. The cheap shoe exists because the company chose to manufacture it at that price point rather than, say, making only the durable version and pricing it at 1.3x. The product landscape a corporate decision. You’re treating the menu as if it fell from the sky.
You dismiss demand engineering as “just an advertising campaign.” Advertising is a multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry built on decades of behavioral psychology, and that’s before you get to planned obsolescence, lobbying to suppress alternatives, and regulatory capture to keep externalities unpriced. Cigarettes aren’t the exception; they’re the most documented example of a widespread practice.
Your EV example backfires even harder. For decades, automakers actively killed electric vehicle programs and lobbied against emissions standards. The “choice” you’re pointing to was shaped by years of corporate behavior. And even now, when TCO is lower, upfront cost still gates the decision. If you can’t aford the higher initial purchase, long-term savings are irrelevant. That’s not irrationality. That’s resource scarcity doing exactly what it’s designed to do.
Choice requires resources: money, time, information, access; which is precisely what is most scarce among those you’re blaming. And that scarcity is systemic by design, not a result of consumer inaction. You’re looking at people responding rationally to a landscape they didn’t build, can’t control, and can’t afford to exit, and calling it their fault.
I’m not getting it backward.
While you’re right that my example is simplified, it’s not wrong. Shoes are actually like that in real life. A good pair of shoes can last many times as long as the cheap shoes, and pollute the same or even less than cheap ones. There is significant market competition from different companies including small start up brands and long term high quality brands that keep the entire industry quite well balanced.
If two companies produce high quality expensive shoes, that a customer likes equally, the only thing driving the consumer choice is going to be price. So one company cuts their costs a little bit to compete by dropping the quality ever so slightly. Consumers buy that, and then the other company says “I can do that too” cuts it a little bit more to undercut and it goes back and forth. The expensive shoes didn’t stop existing, customers can still choose them, but they aren’t choosing them. The back and forth only stops when the consumers refuse to buy it any cheaper because the quality is no longer even acceptable to them.
That is ENTIRELY customer driven. The moment a company releases a product that isn’t sufficient, consumers stop buying it, and the company goes back to the product that does sell and generate profit for them.
Car companies lobbied to kill emissions standards not because they didn’t want to produce EVs, but because it would cost them profit as fewer people bought cars that were more expensive to meet the standards. Oil companies may have tried to kill EV programs, but that’s not the car companies.
Upfront price isn’t real, people who are broke finance cars. An non-luxury EV is effectively the same price per month as a gas vehicle unless you don’t drive very much (no commute or very short commute) or happen to live somewhere where electricity rates are extremely high and gas costs are extremely low.
Your lack of education cannot be blamed on companies. That is YOUR responsibility, not theirs. The information is available for free to everyone at this point, even homeless people have access to the internet at this point. The fact that people choose not to be informed can only be blamed on them.
You may want to pretend that you’re not responsible because it lets you pick the easier option and not feel like you’re bad, but it’s no more real than crashing into a parked car and getting mad at them for being in your way.