The fun of inconvenience; or, an American tech reviewer in Europe

Let's pose a few questions to New York Times tech reviewer David Pogue, who reports on his recent trip to Europe. He writes:

Americans like to think that conserving power and water is a huge inconvenience. But in Europe, it’s just the way things are, and somehow people survive. 

Toilets have two buttons: a big one and a small one, depending on how big a flush you need. 

In public buildings and hotels, motion sensors turn the lights on when you enter a hallway, off again once you’re past.

Hotel showers tend to have wall-mounted shampoo dispensers, to prevent millions of small plastic bottles from winding up in the landfill every year. 

And most controversial (to Americans) of all, your room key has to be inserted by the hotel-room door to turn on power and air-conditioning. 

Yes, it means that your room takes a couple of minutes to cool when you return in the summer. But it also means that you can’t leave for the day with all lights and chillers blazing... 

The power, water and time savings of the tweaks we’ve observed here are designed to address whole-world problems. And they’re something more American institutions might want to consider.

The questions:

1) How are "a huge inconvenience" and "inability to survive" the same thing? Should human beings be happy to suffer huge inconveniences imposed by environmentalist ideology and government force (or lots of small inconveniences) so long as we can continue to exist as we suffer the inconveniences? If it is more convenient for human beings to waste a greater amount of materials and energy than to suffer mandatory inconveniences in the name of waste reduction, how is making our lives harder automatically the better alternative?

2) How is having two buttons on a toilet so that you can have two different kinds of flushes better than having a toilet that flushes in one way but adequately for every occasion? Do the European bathrooms Pogue saw have the two-button flush toilets because hotels have voluntarily implemented the feature, or was it imposed on them by government force?

3) Are the wall-mounted shampoo dispensers that Pogue observed in some European hotels mounted in those hotel rooms because a government mandates this or because the hotels have some independent reason for preferring dispensers to small plastic bottles? If American public bathrooms feature soap dispensers, as they have for at least decades, does that mean that the purpose of builders and owners has been to avoid the tragedy of "millions of small plastic bottles winding up in the landfill every year"? Also, what difference does it make whether "millions of small plastic bottles [wind] up in the landfill every year"? Do shampoo bottles make up the bulk of all the garbage that ends up in landfills, or only a tiny percentage? As long as a business makes sure that the garbage it produces is properly disposed of, what is the problem?

4) Why is it a bad thing, on a 101-degree day, for a 92-year-old who has paid for a hotel room to be able to leave the air conditioner on so that the room will be cool when he returns? Is the necessity of using the hotel key card to turn on power and air-conditioning in a European hotel room an innovation voluntarily accepted by the hotels in order to either better satisfy customers and/or to save on their own expenses; or has the restriction been imposed on the hotels by government force?

5) How does Pogue distinguish technological changes designed to address the specific problems of specific businesses and their specific customers from technological changes designed to solve so-called "whole-world problems"? Do the latter refer to all those solutions which are imposed by government force and/or advocated with an air of a social engineer's sanctimony? If you buy food from a supermarket or patronize a restaurant because you're hungry, is your intention to satisfy your own hunger for your own sake, or are you thereby most importantly addressing a "whole-world problem"? Is the function of industrial civilization in making human survival possible and easier via sundry waste-producing conveniences a "whole-world" solution, or just a solution that every convenience-loving human being on the planet is happy to have?

More of David Pogue's anti-capitalist bias

David Pogue is a good reviewer but often bad in his moral assessment of business practices. In a recent New York Times article about T-Mobile’s decision to change a few important terms of its cellular service, he summarizes at the close what he asserts in the opening, that "the two-year contract is an anti-competitive, anti-innovation greed machine."

The Great Cellphone Subsidy Con is indefensible no matter how you slice it — why should you keep paying the carrier for the price of a phone you've fully repaid? — and the two-year contract is an anti-competitive, anti-innovation greed machine. Those practices should stomp right across your outrage threshold.

Presumably the cellular companies do nothing to earn their revenue but sit around counting the money that comes in.

The same charges of greed and anti-innovative anti-competitiveness could be made against a home owner or any renovator, or any investor of resources, who charges more for an improved product than the labor and materials required to make improvements in the product or to create a product or service to begin with. Pogue assumes that is that there exists a certain “just profit,” and that if a businessman earns more than this "just profit" or "surplus profit"--some arbitrarily fixed amount of revenue above quantifiable costs--he is ripping somebody off.

I have never signed a multi-year contract for a cellular plan, even in the days when prepaid options were much scarcer. Part of the reason is that I didn't want to be locked in. Perhaps if I had had a more urgent need to use a cell phone more sophisticated than a Tracfone, it would have made sense for me to lock myself into a contract. I never felt ripped off by multi-year plans because no one ever shoved a gun at me and said "Get the multi-year plan or else!"

Is there something about multi-year cellular plans that prevented Tracfone, other providers of prepaid plans, and T-Mobile from offering a different approach? What a seller offers may not be optimal from the perspective of a consumer's wish list that fails to take into account all relevant considerations. But there is nothing "anticompetitive" about not having done things the way a competitor now does who tries to take customers from other businesses by doing something different (i.e., by innovating). What's "anticompetitive" are coercive barriers to entry--imposed by governments, not businesses (though businesses may wrongly encourage governmental assaults on competitors).

If a company misrepresents what it’s selling, it's appropriate to criticize this as dishonest. (Do people generally misunderstand the basic terms of the cellular contracts they agree to, however?) But it’s wrong to criticize a company as "greedy" for charging more than it is "supposed" to charge for services on terms nobody was obliged to accept to begin with. There's nothing wrong with self-interested pursuit of profit per se. Nor with self-interested pursuit of the benefit expected from purchasing a product or service. No participant in a voluntary trade need engage in it if he believes he'd be giving too much for what he's getting.

You didn't invent that

See what you make of this comment by a New York Times reader, who styles himself "X-Doc," made in response to Samsung's announcement that it is working on a smart watch:

It's clear Samsung's decision was a response to a "rumor" that Apple is working on a watch. Apple is almost certainly working on a watch. However, for 2 very proud companies this is so sad to witness. Samsung to react defensively with "I gotta have it too" mentality and for Apple to try to force a watch on us. Who the heck wears watches these days? My mom wore a watch for 50 years and last year she stopped wearing one because her phone told perfect time. And Apple (and Samsung) won't even be the 1st with a smart watch, not by a long shot. Is this the best Apple has these days? So sad.

Mr. X-Doc is easily saddened. It is hard to understand why he believes that working on a product (or announcing that one is working on a product) is so tragic. It has long been par in the marketplace for more than one producer to compete by offering products in the same category. Would Mr. X-Doc chastise farmers for selling wheat when other farmers already sell wheat? What about selling toilet paper, shovels and laptop computers? Do the vast majority of car makers and plastic-bag makers suffer from an "I-gotta-have-it-too" mentality? Or are they pursuing the rational goal of trying to earn a living by exploiting a market opportunity to provide products and services that people want?

X-Doc's complaint is too broad, if correct, to pertain only to smart watches or only to the rivalry between Samsung and Apple, or only to any particular product that he happens to know about and that he regards as superfluous. His is actually a lament about market process as such. Of course brand-new inventions are important. But the inventions that we already have are also important. To make a profit, a company must strive to satisfy the needs of consumers somehow better than competitors do. Fulfilling this goal often entails marginal but still significant improvements in the product as such, or in its price, distribution, or other aspects. These efforts don't make me feel sad. I am glad that so much work is put into providing goods and services that make my life easier.

Contrary to X-Doc's assertion that Apple is trying to "force a watch on us," no person is "forced" in a market to buy any product that, with respect to his own values and purposes, misses the mark in some way. That's why X-Doc's mom--who for some reason is offered as representative of the prospective market for smart watches--was able to dispense with wearing a watch despite her half-century habit of doing so. X-Doc should distinguish between voluntary transactions and coercive transactions. An offer to sell is not the same kind of action as an order to buy given at the point of a gun.