Style obsolescence, of the sort most commonly identified with yearly model changes in the automobile industry, is a more obviously real phenomenon than material obsolescence. It is not clear, however, in what sense any reneging on contractual or moral obligations on the part of business is involved in this form of obsolescence. If consumers choose to trade in last year’s model of some commodity for the latest version, in what sense are producers to blame? And yet a good deal of criticism was directed at the practice of frequent model changes. Even as sober a body as the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, in a study analyzing depreciation in the auto market, came to the conclusion that style obsolescence has deleterious economic efects.4 The view expressed in the study was that the depreciation caused by planned obsolescence of style (as opposed to substantive changes in function) is in some sense a “false” depreciation, resulting in unnecessary waste. The study, which was cited by Vance Packard (1960, p. 88), estimated that frequent model changes were causing automobiles to depreciate “twice as fast as they reasonably should.” A normative distinction was being made here between genuine material reasons for depreciation and style-related reasons that are somehow illegitimate. But within what moral framework is style, or “psychological,” obsolescence objectionable, and loss of value for aesthetic reasons an “unreasonable” kind of depreciation? Again, the answer is not obvious.5
Technical obsolescence might have been a more genuine concern. If products are rendered useless because they have become incompatible with an infrastructure required for their use that is continuously being upgraded, then consumers might have good reason to feel hard done by. Yet prior to the explosive development in the later twentieth century of consumer products incorporating information technology, with software standards linked to rapidly evolving hardware, obsolescence of this kind was not very common. In the mid-century discourse about planned obsolescence, concerns about technical obsolescence are, in any case, not strongly expressed. The moral panic about the issue focused primarily on material and style obsolescence.
Concerns about obsolescence thus seem underdetermined by the economic facts of the matter, given the unlikeliness of widespread material obsolescence, the obscurity of the reasons for regarding style obsolescence as problematic, and the fact that technical obsolescence was not a common fact of product life until later on in the twentieth century (by which time the intense concern about planned obsolescence had largely subsided). How then can we account for the force of mid-century fears and suspicions about planned obsolescence?
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Time for Things