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Musings Report 2024-37 9-14-24 The Filters of Quality Are Gone: Is This Why Quality Has Declined?
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The Filters of Quality Are Gone: Is This Why Quality Has Declined?
The insight that physical costs impose a quality filter was shared by my friend Jim E.
His example was the difference between physical media and digital media: if we have to press vinyl records or print physical copies of books, magazines and newspapers, the costs of production, storage and distribution are high. As Jim put it, "This cost ends up being a substantial barrier to entry. You had to have a pretty good product to make it economically viable. This applied not only to music, but to news, films, books, art and advertising. In the digital era, there is no 'filter' for quality."
If we can only press 50 albums or publish 50 books a year, then we have to invest money in sorting through hundreds of bands and thousands of manuscripts to select what we reckon are of a quality high enough to sell enough units to keep our business afloat. The high costs demand careful attention, as each product is make-or-break due to the costs.
This applies to product and labor costs as well. If we operate a shoe store, can we afford to stock low-quality shoes nobody wants or hire an unproductive staff? The higher the costs, the more attention we pay to the quality of our products and work.
In other words, when physical / labor costs impose a quality filter, then the way to make money is to focus on maintaining quality.
What happens when we can drastically lower costs by manufacturing low-quality products overseas? Volume matters more than quality. Consider a container load of shoes that we bought for an incredibly low price. The price is low because the quality control is shoddy. Everyone in the supply chain knows we can't return the container of shoddy shoes, so the manufacturer has no incentive to pay attention to quality. And since our costs are now low, we don't care, either: what matters is selling the containerload of shoddy shoes as quickly as possible.
In the realm of online / digital marketing, we can game the "customer satisfaction" ratings by paying low-cost overseas labor to post 5-star ratings about the shoddy shoes, and since they're so cheap, consumers trying o save money are easy marks. If we ship directly from overseas using low-cost labor, our costs are even lower.
In the realm of digital media, the way to make money is to focus on quantity and sensationalization, not quality. The more posts, videos and content we produce, and the more sensationalized our marketing, the more clicks, engagement, "likes" we get, and the more money we make.
The incentives are to go around the high barriers to entry by digitizing our market and our labor. We can create and market products digitally for very low costs, and if we automate customer service portals, we no longer have to care about the quality of our workforce: most of the public will give up trying to reach a human employee and put up with the unpaid "shadow work" of dealing with our low-quality "digital assistants" / chatbots.
Since putting music and books for sale online is essentially free, there is every incentive to publish hundreds of low-quality books online--either cobbled together from legitimate books or fabricated by AI--as even a few sales to unwary buyers make the venture profitable. The same is true of music and any other digital content.
How do legitimate creators find a market in a rising sea of limitless content and sensationalized marketing? The temptation is to give up on quality having any influence and focus on marketing, and so we pay a tech monopoly for higher placement or to target a select audience based on users' data.
Given these dynamics, what incentives are left to pay attention to quality? And since the incentives have eroded or vanished, so too has quality, replaced by quantity and sensationalized / targeted marketing.
The quickening pace of the bombardment of content, marketing and sensationalization has increased to the point of overwhelming derangement. In the frenzy to make money in this ever-expanding bombardment, we accelerate the pace.
It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
We arrive at a difficult question: what ability to discern quality is left after this bombardment?
As a writer who apprenticed under journalist-editors, my observation is that editing is now too costly for all but the most well-funded institutions, so "editing" is now a software tool that catch grammatical / spelling errors.
Due to its high cost, actual editing--a much more demanding task--is now rare. I'm not sure how many people actually know how to edit for more than error correction. And why should they, given that there's so little money in high-level editing skills when software checks are "good enough"?
The experience of another writer on Substack is instructive. She authored a cookbook and devoted enormous energy to marketing it to publishers. She was rejected not on the quality of the content but because she lacked a large enough social media presence to sell the book for the publishers.
So she spent a year working hard to build an impressive social media presence, and now her book is under contract.
In other words, publishers no longer have any real marketing reach; they rely on the authors' own social media efforts to sell the books. I doubt they offer much in the way of editing, either. Their role as "gatekeeper" has shrunk down to their membership in an institutional cartel that controls access to bookstores and catalogs.
You see where this is going. Quality assurance is now too expensive for anything less than a costly iPhone.
Consider the cost-quality filters on labor. If we're hiring someone that we're paying almost as much (or more) than we're paying ourselves, we need to be sure that this employee has the "right stuff" to do quality work, show up on time, leave personal dramas at home, stay focused and remain dedicated to the tasks at hand.
But if we're only hiring gig workers for a few dollars as needed, then how much dedication to quality can we expect?
Let's consider another quality filter: professional qualification and compliance standards.
In some states, the barrier to becoming a licensed building contractor is relatively low. In others, it's high: the prospective contractor has to pass an exam, post a completion bond, show proof of workers compensation and liability insurance and provide proof of a physical business address. This process is time-consuming and costly, and so it weeds out a lot of people who lack the experience, capital and drive to grind through it.
Those who climb over the barrier may or may not prove to be good builders, but they will have shown they have what it takes to cover their employees with adequate insurance and protect their customers (and their lenders) from non-completion of the work that was contracted.
The cost of building a house is high, and so the quality of the work matters. But what about professions such as hair styling that have far lower costs? How strict does the professional qualification filter have to be to protect the public?
Turning to "quality control" compliance, we find that physicians are now so burdened with data entry and compliance work that the time and energy left to actually care for patients has been crimped. All this digital work is presented as maintaining quality, but meanwhile, in a classic manifestation of Anti-Progress, the time and energy available for patient care has declined.
Is all this "shadow work" more about avoiding litigation than "improving patient care"? I am not in a position to make an informed assessment, but as a patient I've observed the incredible rise of this "shadow work" over the past 20 years, and it seems self-evident that it is a factor in physician dissatisfaction and burnout.
The point here is efforts to "insure quality" can become so burdensome that quality actually declines.
Is there a way to reverse the decline of quality? Unless the incentives change, then the decay will continue.
What can we do about it? Maintain the quality of our work, regardless of the financial incentives to focus on marketing and quantity, and choose what we buy with a focus on durability and quality rather than price.
Highlights of the Blog
What's "Free" About "Free Speech"? 9/12/24
When Local Newspapers Close, We Lose What Matters: Journalism 9/11/24
Does Anyone Else Smell a Market Crash in the Air? 9/8/24
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
A delightful lunch at a local cafe with NYC friends Peter and Ivy.
In the garden, breadfruit and long eggplant are abundant.
What's on the Book Shelf
Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (recommended by Stuart L.)
From Left Field
NOTE TO NEW READERS: This list is not comprised of articles I agree with or that I judge to be correct or of the highest quality. It is representative of the content I find interesting as reflections of the current zeitgeist. The list is intended to be perused with an open, critical, occasionally amused mind.
Many links are behind paywalls. Most paywalled sites allow a few free articles per month if you register. It's the New Normal.
Red and processed meats linked to Type 2 diabetes risk: new study
Eating Meat Is Linked With Diabetes Risk, New Studies Suggest.
China’s Dead-End Economy Is Bad News for Everyone
This Isn’t the China I Remember (Gish Jen)
What Kalamazoo (Yes, Kalamazoo) Reveals About the Nation’s Housing Crisis
Why Homeowners Are Struggling To Afford Monthly Expenses (8:47) (via BrandonRox)
Morality and rules, and how to avoid drowning: what my daughters learned at school in China -- his daughters learned Mandarin on the fly....
Auto loan rejection rates spike this summer
Why China's Economy is Failing (22:55 min)
Visits to Japan’s only Shinto weather shrine surge as climate crisis bites
Koda Farms, California rice and Asian American dreams
'Stop freaking out.' Here's what's next for Koda Farms' California rice legacy
Alain Delon: how family feud brought Shakespearean tragedy to final years
"Taste is a result of a thousand distastes." Francois Truffaut
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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