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New Refrigerators, Washing Machines, Furniture and Tires Will All Have to Last Longer, Europe Mandates
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this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2025
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Improving markets means regulation. Rating systems as you propose them are easily influenced and gamed by companies and subject to the same information and irrationality problems that individual consumer behaviour are.
Lastly, don't think that such EU regulations aren't initiated by and pushed for by consumer advocate groups. The commission is not in the habit of going around, saying "where is a market segment that isn't regulated and what pointless shit can we accost them with". If things work fine they just plainly let things be.
Thing is: There's always going to be chuds saying "REEEE I want a more powerful vacuum" and go with the one with the higher wattage number on the box, no matter what comparison portals say about actual performance. Those portals are nothing new, they have existed for a long time. Yet companies did get into a wattage war, and to write a bigger number on the box so that people would buy it you need to use a bigger motor and use more energy. Problem being: Noone is helped by vacuums which stick to the floor, so you also have to leak, and be loud. All that extra power, good for nothing.
There's exactly one way out of such a market failure: Regulation. "vacuums may not use more than X watt per Y of sucking power".
That's a good argument but doesn't fit the situation. The bad buying decisions can be corrected with market mechanisms. Allow people to finance the products over the entire expected lifetime. Then high quality goods are cheaper and people will choose them.
Some people speculated that Britain left the EU because they believe in markets whereas many EU countries don't. This could be one of many decisions that put the EU onto a different trajectory. We will see in 20 years if the EU can stay on top of its regulations.
Britain (where I live) left the EU because lots of people where unhappy and Leave ran a much better campaign that Remain (and lied a couple of times). Racism probably also had something to do with it but that's hard to prove.
It wasn't really about markets because most voters don't know enough about them to decide based on them.
Most voters rely on the campaign communications which was not equally good. Is it too far fetched to think that Remain was intentionally bad?
So you want to capture regulation in the name of the banks and whatever presumably private (because markets!!!11) agency does the life expectancy rating while simultaneously letting the manufacturers off the hook warranty-wise. Got you.
Those people are stupid. At least in so far as "they" refers to Britons at large. If with "they" you mean certain nobs and posh folks and with "market" you mean "offshore tax havens" then you have a point.
Brexit was pushed for by Atlas network members, notably against opposition from Atlas members from anywhere else in the world, right before the EU started tightening regulations on tax havens. Coincidence? You tell me. The rest of those neoliberal fucks rather pay taxes than burn the cake they're eating.
The EU Commission, back then in the form of the ECSC High Authority, has been doing this stuff since 1952. All European post-war prosperity is based on this kind of approach. Details differ but by and large the European economical policy is ordoliberal.
Manufacturers are not off the hook. If they are not reliable then the expected runtime is low and their monthly payments go up.
Without Britain, it could become more ordo than liberal.
We don't have to prevent this regulation. However we should prepare ourselves to prevent the appliance market to become like the housing market. Citizens are unable to make a change there. That shouldn't be ignored when other markets are regulated more.
If you're a manufacturer and you're not sure whether your product can last 10 years then you're free to contact an insurer and hash something out with them. Still, the buck stops with the manufacturer everything else is pointless bureaucracy. Shit broke? Manufacturer is on the hook, replace it. Simple as that. Not "customer now has to deal with a bank and the manufacturer and a rating agency".
I don't see much speculative capital flowing into home appliance rentals and turning regular home appliance rentals into short-term high-profit rentals.
There's not even an oversupply of luxury appliances at the expense of reasonably-priced ones.
Quite literally nothing about the housing market issue has anything to do with what's going on on the home appliance one, or with overregulation. Sure, in places there's regulations to re-think or even straight abolish, e.g. parking minimums, but generally building codes don't make stuff more expensive. Least of all on a macroeconomic level. The issue, for a long time, were ROI expectations of investors. It's a general problem in the economy: Too many rich fucks with too much money, not knowing what to do with it, where to invest it, but still wanting their 8% because... why. They're already filthily rich. I totally get a starving artist rent-seeking, "then I can let go of my day job and focus on my art", but a billionaire? Get the fuck out of here.
The main bottleneck for the housing market is land in areas where people want to live. People have to pay whatever they can to live close to their work. If demand is so big, of course only housing with the highest margins is developed, which is the luxery market.
The speculative capital is flowing because the high demand keeps prices stable. If there would be a surplus to the point that the speculative capital doesn't find a buyer when selling, prices would be much lower. The backing for the high prices are the real tenants though who want to live where they work.
Appliances don't need the speculative capital to become expensive. It is enough if there is less competition. Then customers can't 'move' to other products and have to pay whatever is demanded.
If the requirements stay limited to an extended warranty then things can remain competitive but I doubt that the regulations will end there. This should take cheap Chinese brands off the market that don't have a support network in Europe. That's good for nature, but it removes the cheap options off the market which will allow the market to rise the prices for the cheapest durable goods.
BS. There's no market for overpriced accommodation which developers finally understood so they're dialling it down. Took them long enough.
It's not about not finding a buyer. It's about finding a buyer that meets their ROI demands, otherwise they're happy to just let properties sit idle. That's the "speculation" part.
Again, the solution is regulation in the form of taxing vacant property. Can't find a tenant, you say? City will be happy to provide you with one, straight off the top of the waiting list for social housing. Not the price range you want to rent for? Well, then you can pay taxes until you think otherwise.
In the end, money is power. If you don't want all the power to end up with whoever happens to have money you gotta stomp people with money at some point or the other. When they whine, tell them they should become better business people, not invest in such stupid schemes as trying to turn a working class neighbourhood into accommodation for billionaires.
Turkish, more like, China isn't really in the market here and Beko rules the low end. Still, two years warranty instead of the one year that's the legal minimum.
And honestly, 120 Euro fridges turning into 150 Euros fridges would be a good thing. Building things in a solid way is a different thing than blinging it out: Don't push designers to get rid of the fourth bolt for the attachment plate, don't save fifty cents by buying cheap lubricant, penny pinching is a disease. May increase GDP in the broken window way but who the hell wants that.
A surplus in supply would threaten them with an infinite time to wait for their target ROI.
fully agree
Fiat currency. Public banks can hand out credits to whomever wants to build with a solid calculation.
You tax them. Of course only possible if the masses are not manipulated. Drones and AI, stomping would only be possible for something like 5 more years. Afterwards there is not much more power left.
More like 120 Euro fridges leave the market and 150 Euro fridges cost 200 Euros.
I want to live in a society where people choose the solid products on their own. Everything else calls for trouble down the line.
I don't undderstand that.
Dindingding winner winner chicken dinner. That's exactly what's happening. Question still being why such stuff should be allowed in the first place, why should ordinary folks have trouble getting apartments just so that some rich fucks can try to make profit.
You can't just print money because inflation. That said, yes, public banks are absolutely able and willing and happy to invest in housing projects. It's how e.g. these folks get much of their money. Things get difficult though when there's speculators throwing money around, artificially increasing property, land, and construction prices. Public and cooperative banks are generally happy if your project earns enough rent to finance their fixed-term deposit rates but with inflated costs earning that rate means inflating rents and then you again might be out of people who can afford it.
Side note the mortgages on multiple flat type properties don't tend to get paid down, ever: By the time the mortgage matured it's time to renovate the thing, and you roll it over into a new one. Still the rent prices you can achieve with that are nothing like you see on the open market.
It is irrational to expect rational behaviour from people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Because we have a market economy. We can switch to planning, but that has its own disadvantages
They should not. It's market manipulation that we don't have enough apartments. With different zoning laws or more plots to built, there would be enough apartments.
Tax empty housing, or housing in general, and speculation will disappear.
In which way? Why are those apartments not on the open market?
That's also why people shouldn't be forced to be rational. The Sovjet Union was forcing people to be rational but people weren't happy.
I tried to make sense with this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
Now it's clear.
Planned economy is not when there are regulations.
"Manipulation" implies intent to achieve that state of affairs, and, no, that wasn't the goal of capital. Capital wanted ROI and looked for it in the wrong place.
In the US, yes. Europe by and large doesn't have such inane laws.
The syndicate -- did you read the link I gave you -- specifically works towards removing properties from the market, get all control into the hands of the tenants. Rents pay for the mortgage, that's it, no middleman, and the legal structure ensures that tenants can't band up and cash out like many a cooperative did.
The fuck has the USSR to do with anything we're talking about. Also why are you calling tankies rational go to lemmygrad if you like them so much.
For me, the context was surplus to drive prices down. If you want to avoid surplus, you need other ways to regulate prices. Do you just want to fix prices for many things and otherwise let companies figure out how to supply the things for the given price?
It is a political decision to keep the housing market stable. If the market goes down, many people lose their retirement provisions.
There are not enough plots, in Germany the rent is capped but the building requirements don't allow to reduce costs. Change those, and capital will build more housing. But capital doesn't matter. Those syndicates could build all housing, but they can't, because the housing market is politically manipulated.
There are enough laws in Germany that you cannot have a prefabricated house and build it everywhere without ajustments. Low tech high risers should bring rent down to a fraction but they are not allowed to be built.
Then you want to regulate the market such that there's a surplus of ordinary apartments and a relative lack of luxury ones. People are free to furnish theirs more luxuriously, that's not an imposition, but not having affordable ones would be. No need to get into fixing absolute prices all you need to control for is relative availability.
The market is not a good in itself. It is a mechanism to attain good things. To do that, in the real world, to actually approach the free market ideal (perfect resource allocation by perfectly rational actors acting on perfect information) you have to enact regulations because, as we already discussed, both rich and poor folks alike are idiots: The rich invest in stuff based on hype, creating real estate bubbles, the poor tolerate 120 buck fridges even though they want 150 buck fridges.
Again we're in /c/europe, here, not in the US. Also why should irrational investors deserve protection. "Socialism for the rich but not the poor"?
Rent increases are capped. Not rents for new construction. Rents that the welfare system will pay are capped, not the ones on the open market.
...and yes there are plots. There's actually a shortage of construction capacity, not in the least because politics just won't commit to firm targets, something that construction companies can work with, make sure they don't overshoot when growing. They'd rather not go bankrupt so they only increase capacity conservatively.
There is no shortage of capital flowing into the market, there has never been a shortage during all of this. The issue that noone wants to, or can, pay the rents that those people demand. We've been over this. The same investment at a more moderate ROI expectation would've built everything we need multiple times over.
Oh sure some municipalities will tell you that your roof needs to be at a certain angle. That's peanuts compared to the overall costs and believe it or not, there's generally a reason for those requirements -- it may seem cultural but if you e.g. get a lot of snow you either want all snow to come down as fast as possible, or not at all. People weren't stupid 500 years ago when everyone started to angle their roofs like that.
They're absolutely allowed to be built, you can still build the same kind of housing stock as was done after the war during reconstruction.
Lastly, beware of looking at all this in isolation: Getting rid of regulations that ensure that the city looks nice, is liveable, is walkable, that housing is healthy to live in, the whole shebang, would have untold macroeconomic costs down the line.
The market doesn't achive that. There need to be inefficiencies like the surplus for the market to work. Regulations can improve the efficiency, but too many regulations kill the market. Then it's better to change to government services, with their own inefficiencies.
Forbidding luxery apartments is a bad regulation. Who is judging that? But introducing a tax on unrented apartments is good. People will rent out their luxery apartments to regular people to still be profitable.
Because there is no surplus. Empty apartments already cost money because the renovation has to be refinanced. If prices don't go up, it would be foolish to not offer them for less rent to minimize losses.
The bottleneck is not greedy investores. It's the approval process and lack of plots. If the snow safe roof is needed, then allow it everywhere. Every regulation has its use, but the approval process must be fast.
https://tageswirtschaft.org/warnung-vor-zunehmendem-engpass-auf-dem-wohnungsmarkt
This is just a random link from searching for the bottleneck in construction.
That's a different, even more important issue. There can be costs but there are also many opportunities. That debate will never happen because it is stuck here, at single housing problems, between believers in regulation and free markets.
To bring us back to appliances, there are also many opportunities like unified standards for their network connections or solid lifetime statistics. Ultimately citizens themselves have to organize and demand it. Letting the EU regulate the market prevents the citizens from organizing. Likewise, if the housing market would deteriorate more, those syndicates would be common and not the exception. I would expect a much better housing situation and a platform to discuss better city development.
I wasn't talking about inefficiencies. Try again.
I just did. And I gave a reasoning. You also judged it, but came to the opposite conclusion, and gave no reasoning.
I can't be arsed you're a hopeless case. Learn to care about the shit you argue about.
Thanks for the conversation.
I may have used the wrong word, though. By judging I mean that somebody has to decide if an apartment is a luxery apartment that is not allowed to be built. If that's done by price, then you just don't allow the price to rise until there is an equilibrium of supply and demand, for all housing.
That kind of judgement already exists in the form of what rents social services are willing to pay (the personal allowance is the same everywhere, allowed rent varies by location). As far as building permits go you can always build luxury housing, it's a question of how much social housing you're required to build alongside. Municipalities have been way too lax on that in the past, social housing status was allowed to lapse, pretty much no municipality makes use of their right of first refusal for land sales, etc.
The trouble with allowing the market to come to an equilibrium at its own pace is where are people going to live in the meantime. If this was about avocado toast, no problem, let them eat brioche, but basic human necessities being in undersupply has potentially catastrophic outcomes. As in: People are going to vote for Nazis because they don't trust any party to solve their issues catastrophic.
The limiting factor is not construction crews but plots and approvals. If people could build, the market would quickly adjust. The problem is that the market is supposed to stay high.
I forgot to reply to this:
Because every regular citizen who owns their house or appartment will lose half their wealth or more when the housing market goes down.
Everybody who bought a house above construction costs will lose. People in poorer countries can afford houses because construction can be cheap. It's artificially increased and can be brought down in the same way that European farmers can compete with third world countries, by using automation and reducing manual interference.
If it is not the circumstances, of course the problem must be the investors and their unreasonable ROI expectations. But it's the circumstances that limit supply and thus keep prices high. If established parties would suggest to change that they would massively lose voters.
People who understand this, and see that the old parties don't change this, have strong incentives to vote for the AfD.
Which is of no consequence when you're living in it.
[citation needed]. There's plenty of land left and right, it's almost trivial to re-designate agricultural land as residental, but who the fuck is going to build all the streets, tram line, all the houses. A stroke of a pen on the one side, actual training and logistics on the other.
It's not. Unless you're someone with multiple properties trying to profit off it, then you want it to raise. Otherwise, everyone benefits from low prices.
I agree with you that everybody profits because a liquid housing market will make life much easier.
But people plan to sell their house, or appartment, either to have money to travel when they retire, or for their children to inherit, or for many other reasons.
It can be argued that they already lost the money when they bought the house, so they shouldn't worry when prices come down now. But I am very confident that whichever party approves the laws that change the market will not be elected for decades.
There was a quote some comments ago about the main factors to change for a better housing market.
The designation of the land is the point. It is trivial but it doesn't happen.
Actually I approve that it doesn't happen because agricultural land shouldn't be destroyed unnecessarily, especially when there is still hunger in the world. However, there are many areas with single family housing. Those could be repurposed.
It's right that there are some logistics to settle. To me, they are small compared to the magnitude of the housing problem. If they are not approached then I think that's on purpose, with the main goal of keeping the housing market high.