In a diferent vein, politicians made a connection, following Ralph Nader’s groundbreaking work on automobile safety, between planned obsolescence and car accidents. Daniel Moynihan, then assistant secretary of labor, commented in 1966 that planned obsolescence might cause accidents, noting a correlation between accident rates and rates of profit of auto manufacturers, and speculated that planned obsolescence “itself may account for a fair number of vehicle failures”77 (an association jokily rifed upon in a Chicago Tribune article, in 1966, about obsolescence in men’s fashion, with the title “Unsafe in Any Tweed”78).
In the early 1970s, the issue of planned obsolescence came under the scrutiny of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)—this despite the fact that there was by that time a growing consensus that the practice of annual model change was on the decline, at least in the auto industry.79 The FTC began its investigations with an uncommitted position on the scale of the problem. Lawrence G. Meyer, the FTC’s director of policy planning and evaluation issued a statement that he and his staf were trying to determine whether “we are dealing with a problem of mass proportions” while noting that the problem was “substantial from the consumer’s viewpoint.” At the same time, the General Counsel of the FTC, Joseph Martin, claimed that “cases of built-in obsolescence are common” and that “this planned obsolescence is accomplished by several ways—by failing to provide a source of spare parts for the reasonable life of the product, by making frequent style or nonfunctional changes so that the user feels he must turn in his old model for one which gives him better performance, and by including certain components made of materials which have a shorter life than the reasonable life expectancy of the product itself.”
The FTC’s investigation was a response to popular sentiment about the issue but also, more specifically, was in reaction to a well-publicized study on planned obsolescence, published in the Yale Law Journal by Bradford C.
Moral Panic about Utility
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