Planned obsolescence

Bulbs at the beginning was designed to have more than 2.500 of hours of life, it was the thinking of the inventor Thomas A. Edison, but then in secret meeting in Geneva in 1932 with the company S.A Phobus and other companies of bulbs Got an agreement in which the life of a bulbs just were reduce to 1500 even to 1000 hours and if some of the company doesn’t comply with this had to pay a fine. Nowadays we have many products that doesn´t have long time of life to use like printers, cellphones, cars, computers and so on. This is as a result of and a consumer society that appeared in the postwar, when the United States increased their life style and the society turned into an addicted to consume, without taking care the consequences and businessmen takes advantages telling “one product that has a long life will be a trouble for business”. so we have to reduce the quality. In 1929 the united states was in a depressed economy because of the recession. in order to overcome this appeared Bernard London a new Yorker who proposed an alternative. the planned obsolescence but they didn´t apply until 1953, but also we have to make and important question he proposed that in order to resolve the employment problem or to increase the profit of businessmen. Today in many universities teacher teach the planned obsolescence like “the cycle of life of a product” this is a euphemism which doesn’t pay attention to the moral of engineer and architects and some of them think that If it doesn’t apply we would have bad problem in everything like jobs, trades, industries specially consumer problems. On the other hand there are people that fight against this, like Serge Latouche who said this problem has increased because of three things “the publicity, the planned obsolescence and the credit” At the middle of last century Dupont company created a new Nylon very strong and they began to make the pantyhose for women, they were very happy about it because it didn´t break or tear but the owner of the company stopped producing of theses because it wasn’t a business to them, so they told to the engineer to created pantyhose weaker and lest resistant in order to increase the productions and get more profit. all of this happened in America and others countries but in the ancient URSS they didn´t apply this kind of economy they paid attention to the quality and make products for a long time of life, because it was an economy directed by the government, so they made car, fringe, bulbs and so on that had many years of life even when the Germany country was divided by the cold war. In one side they did but in the other side they didn’t. An important company called Apple make the same methods they produced their articles with and small defects with a short period of life so as a result, when the time is over you have to buy another one, it could be more modern, luxurious, smaller or with another functions that the other one didn’t have but the terrible thing is that this company mentions his contribution to the ecology and make companies favor it, but the truth is that they send all the trash to poor countries like Ganna polluting them knowing that is illegal but they don´t really care. We have to think over it having in mind the idea of Mahatma Gandhi “On earth there is enough to meet everyone's needs, but not enough to satisfy the greed of a few. "
By Gabriel Gonzalez Garcia