Let’s Talk Toasters

Not long ago, Vice Presidential candidate and now Vice President-elect J.D. Vance asserted that “a million cheap, knockoff toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American manufacturing job.” There’s a lot wrong with this comment – see this Reason essay pointing out some of the issues with what Vance is saying. But I want to add one more issue to the pile – what, exactly, does Vance mean when he says these are “knockoff” products?

The term “knockoff” has usually been taken to mean a low quality, counterfeit product attempting to pass itself off as an expensive product with a prestigious brand. I’ve heard of knockoff Louis Vuitton bags or knockoff Rolexes, for example. So what would make an imported toaster a knockoff product? The toaster in my kitchen is an imported product – is it therefore a knockoff? Well, not by this measure. It’s not a counterfeit of some other brand. I can’t imagine someone looking at the toaster and calling it a “knockoff” – a knockoff of what, exactly?

Well, was the toaster “cheap?” To say something is cheap can be taken in two ways – sometimes it means a thing is inexpensive, and other times it’s meant to signal low-quality. In this case, my toaster was cheap by one measure but not the other. It’s a good, reliable, and high quality product – but it was also fairly inexpensive. Cheap in quality, no, cheap in price, yes.

But it’s also worth pointing out that a product being cheap in both senses – low cost and low quality – is not in and of itself a problem. Sometimes, buying something inexpensive and basic is a perfectly sensible option!

When I moved into my first apartment, I had to go about acquiring furniture and kitchen supplies. The first sets of furniture I bought were low cost, low quality items. And that was ok! I wasn’t looking to furnish my first apartment with high quality, expensive artisanal products that would become timeless family heirlooms. I just needed some basic stuff to make my apartment livable for the time being. As time went on and as I moved from one place to another, almost all of those items were replaced, one by one. Not having an option for inexpensive and basic furnishings wouldn’t have resulted in my first apartment being glamorously decorated with finely crafted work, handmade by Ron Swanson himself. It would have just resulting in me sitting on the floor all the time and having nowhere to put my clothes.

Calling things like imported toasters “cheap knockoff” products doesn’t seem to mean much besides signaling contempt for the items and the people who buy them. My toaster is not low quality, nor is it a counterfeit product. But it is imported, and for some people, that’s bad in and of itself.

Readers of this blog will likely be familiar with the famous short story I, Pencil by Leonard Read. But perhaps less well known is a Ted talk that makes the same point as Read’s story – a man who attempted to build his own toaster, from scratch. And when I say “from scratch,” I mean he literally hand mined the ore needed for the metal components, using hand made tools. But he quickly discovered just how intricate even the “cheapest” toaster actually is. He says,

Working on the idea that the cheapest electric toaster would be the simplest to reverse-engineer, I went and bought the cheapest toaster I could find, took it home, and was kind of dismayed to discover that inside this object I’d bought for just three pounds ninety four, there were four hundred different bits made out of a hundred plus different materials.

Even the cheapest, lowest quality toaster available on the market is an absolute marvel. In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Joseph Schumpeter wrote about how, “Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.”

In the same way, capitalism makes home appliances easily available to even very low income people at very low prices. This deserves more than the snide condescension and derision of “cheap knockoffs” preached by populists. For the cost of just a few dollars, Thomas Thwaites was able to acquire a toaster infinitely better than anything he could make himself with months of effort. Vance is wrong. The fact that even the poorest Americans can find a toaster in their price range is not a problem that needs to be solved. It’s a thing of beauty.

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