I think it’s mostly a fallacy that product quality has been falling across the board. It’s been a common trope. Even when I was growing up in the 80s, my parents would say the old adage that “they don’t make things like they used to”. But this relies on an incredibly distorted false nostalgia. How often does a television repairman come to your house and replace the vacuum tubes? When was the last time your radiator in your car exploded because you were running the air condition in hot weather? How often does the compressor in fridge break down, and refilled and re-pressurized with coolant? When was the last time you heard of a car needing its transmission to be rebuilt when it had less than 150,000 miles on the odometer? These things were all common occurrences and were considered par for the course in the past. But people will swear up and down that all these things were built to much higher levels of quality in the past. People’s common retort is to point out that a lot of these goods have a lot of “plastic” in them, instead of metal. As if, it’s always preferable to make everything out of metal than plastic. Metal is heavier. It bends. It conducts electricity (when maybe you don’t want it to). When it bends, it doesn’t bend back. But people will swear this is a hallmark of “quality”. Which I think is complete nonsense. Anyways, I know you’re talking about food, here. And there is some reason to believe that fruits and vegetables have become somewhat less nutritious over time, as a result of nutrient-depletion in the soil from intense industrial farming. However, to attribute that to inflationary monetary policy, instead of the Green Revolution — which by the way, has almost completely eliminated famine from the entire planet, would be a very silly thing for people to argue.

Good points! So does the IMF only play a small role in helping out certain nations? Wonder this because of Gladstein's work...

Bitcoin Magazine

Structural Adjustment: How The IMF And World Bank Repress Poor Countries And Funnel Their Resources To Rich Ones

The IMF and World Bank do not seek to fix poverty, but only to enrich creditor nations. Could Bitcoin create a better global economic system for th...

Just the car example alone is enough. To extend it, I remember as a kid in the early 80s in Canadian winter having to *always* plug the car in (for the engine block heater) and my parents pumping the gas while turning the ignition and *praying* it would start in the morning. I remember more than one occasion my dad would call in to work saying he'd be late because the car wouldn't start and that he had to take the bus. I tell younger people this and they find it absolutely mind blowing. Nowadays, I almost never plug my car in during winter and it pretty much always starts first try, even in the closest of weather. Any car made in the last 20-30 years, cold weather starts are mostly a non-issue.

If leaving a car to sit sub 0C for more than a few days its almost always a good idea to plug the battery into a decent maintenance charger.