I think we are living in an age of cheap labor, but instead of getting very high quality we are getting very high volume. Lots of stuff for everyone.
I agree, we have cheap labor available to us (from other countries) - maybe the difference is that "back in the day" in the US, the labor was cheap relative to the price of the materials. I know my FIL (an "old school" carpenter-contractor) is very much of the mindset that you put in some extra labor if that allows you to save on materials. I was often doing the opposite in my line of work. Well, whichever made economic sense actually, but materials are more predictable than labor, so my bosses steered me towards reducing labor costs.
I think there is too much stuff. Go to Goodwill and see how many plastic kids toys and stuffed animals there are. Tons. Not only can every kid have toys they can have way too many toys.
Maybe that's a combination of cheap foreign labor,
and cheap materials? It is so much cheaper to blow-mold something out of plastic, and glue/snap together a few different colored parts than it is to manually carve that out of a selected piece of hardwood, paint each part, wait for it to dry, etc.
It would be interesting to compare the prices of some basic toys of equivalent quality (that's subjective though) - dolls, Lincoln logs, pull toys, stuffed animals (not fancy electronic ones) with prices in the 50 or 60's. If my theory holds water, those should be cheaper now (adjusted for inflation) than back then. Now that I flashback to my youth, playing with toys with my cousins - most of those toys were pretty cheap stuff. Tin-plate, poorly fit together, plastic and rubber parts, those green army men with the molding lines in them, and those plastics were terrible compared to today's stuff (which is why plastic is associated with "cheap" - but it's often the opposite today - ever see a wood motorcycle helmet?).
And if you want a hand-carved, hand painted pull toy today - they are available. You may need to search them out, and some places will price them very high trying to cash in on the nostalgia factor, but I'm pretty sure you can find some at decent prices if you look.
It's sort of like "labor saving" devices - many people still work
over 40 hours a week. We didn't "save" the time, we spent/invested it in different ways. So today, so many things are relatively cheaper, we just have more of everything (more toys, more TVs, computers, GPSs, iPods, stuff that didn't even exist 20 years ago).
I gotta stop thinking about this - I keep writing..... But another analogy - beer. We are awash in cheap, low quality mega-swill. It's everywhere, people buy tons of it. But there is also no better time to be alive than right now if you want to enjoy the highest variety of fantastic quality beers from around the world and around your own locality (or home for that matter, home brewers have access to quality ingredients that they never had before). So it is really about choice, IMO. You can shake your head at all the crap out there, or you can decide to appreciate the greatness of what we do have, and bring quality into your life.
OK, I'm finally reigning myself in... for now
-ERD50