The standard argument against them being "quality" products is that they have such low prices. Price is generally considered the best readily available metric for quality.
The production processes that create those cheap products might be high-quality without the products themselves being high-quality.
So they can have a desirable quality such as low price without being quality but if quality is subjective and affordability is the most important quality a product can have to a subset of the billions of individual actors in a market, are those products quality products to those actors?
Fun
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I have a post idea for you at some point. A thought experiment I have considered for some years now. Some years ago when the progressive left started to rise in popularity and media coverage, one of their primary talking points was around income inequality, wealth inequality and the fact that Billionaires should not exist. Around this time, in a CNBC interview with (I believe it was) Jeffrey Gundlach, he was talking about fed policy and inflation/deflation/printing money and said something along the lines if the Fed wants inflation they should just give everyone one million dollars and there will be a lineup at the Lambo dealership tomorrow. Something to that effect. Quite honestly I don't recall the entire context of the conversation or what he exactly said.
But I started thinking about this idea as the progressive left and MMT got more attention and I came to the conclusion they would never be satisfied with one million per person because they would still need to crush the evil billionaires who still have way more but what if they went really crazy and said "one billion dollars per person. now everyone is a billionaire". Now any sane person is going to understand that prices will hyperinflate almost instantly and the dollar will be worthless etc but what I am interested in is the how it plays out, the second and third order effects, The crazy, creative scenarios people can think up.
So the idea was a post essentially along the lines of. "the year is 2040. The progressive democrat party has been in office for 8 years under President AOC and despite multiple efforts during her term to legislate away billionaires, wealth inequality is worse than ever. In a last ditch effort to cement her legacy, a loophole was found in the 2035 "end all billionaires" bill, that gives her executive authority to make everyone a billionaire if billionaires have not been eradicated by 2040. The week before the 2040 election she signs into law "executive order- 12345" which gives the Federal Reserve the authority and directive to create 350 Quadirillion USFedcoins and at 1201am est the morning of the 2040 election to deposit 1B USFedcoins in each citizens FedNow wallet. What happens next?
*hope I got the math correct on 350M people x 1B.
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I love it. Cross posting now.
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It's really tricky to disentangle, because prices reflect both the ease of production and value to consumers. However, we do differentiate between "Demand" and "Quantity Demanded".
"Demand" is the set of quantities that would be purchased at each price: aka the Demand Curve. Whereas, "Quantity Demanded" is the amount that will be purchased at the equilibrium price.
A quality good would have high "Demand" compared to it's substitutes, regardless of what the "Quantity Demanded" ends up being.
Essentially, what "quality" means in a subjective value framework, is that people are willing to pay more for it.
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