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.