At a fire department garage in northern California, there’s a light bulb that has burned continuously for more than 120 years. Why have your bulbs at home been burning out while what’s known as the Livermore Bulb has kept shining? It’s because a handful of powerful men decided a century ago that light bulbs should be made worse — that is, less long-lasting and dependable.
Economists consider the story of the so-called Phoebus cartel a prime example of planned obsolescence — that is, the business strategy of boosting sales by forcing consumers to buy replacement products. If you own a refrigerator or a washing machine or a TV set, you know about that: they don’t last the way they used to. And three years ago, Apple agreed to pay $113 million to settle a lawsuit claiming it had sent a software update that deliberately slowed older iPhones, which, of course, pushed people to buy newer models.
It's all a pretty good metaphor for a political movement underway in America these days: To market candidates, and in the name of ideology, some politicians are deliberately degrading American institutions and attitudes — most notably, our schools.
But first, about those bulbs: After Thomas Edison got his patent for light bulbs, there was a rush to develop the glass, filament and gases that would make better products. That was so successful that by the 1920s, bulbs like the one hanging in that California fire station were being made – bulbs that would burn for thousands of hours. So even as electricity was spreading rapidly, the sale of bulbs was dropping. The leading bulb-makers were worried about revenues, so they met in Geneva in 1924, and agreed to standardize their manufacturing globally to create bulbs that would burn for only about half as long. The group of business titans gave their gathering a name, settling on Phoebus, the Greek god of light.
That’s why relatively short-lived and inefficient incandescent bulbs, a 19th-century technology, became the standard for homes worldwide. Only now, a century later, is a law taking effect to make more durable LED lights the standard. It’s a change that will save consumers $3 billion a year in utility bills and cut carbon emissions by 222 million metric tons over the next three decades.
Think about this: Our nation is both the home and the beneficiary of great and sustained progress. Americans invented the telephone, the steamboat, moving pictures and the airplane. Only Americans have stood on the moon, and it was in America that the digital revolution took hold. It’s hard to reconcile that history of progress with an acceptance of turning back technological capacity in something as fundamental as a light bulb.
Yet we’re witnessing a political movement today that is similarly retrogressive. By devaluing honest debate, encouraging distortion of the truth and disabling key elements of our educational system, something is occurring that’s far more pernicious than planned obsolescence. It’s an embrace of preferred ignorance.
Consider what’s going on in the public schools in such places as Florida and Texas – where politicians are forcing a return to the scholarship of the late 19th century, which focused on European descendants, never broached the term “racism,” and depicted westward expansion in purely heroic terms.
And consider climate change. Right-wing politicians don’t want to talk about it, want to roll back the recent progress toward a greener future, and certainly don’t want the topic raised in the classroom.
Or think of the conservative hostility to vaccinations — a practice embraced by physicians 200 years ago. That’s putting at risk not only the education of children, but also their very lives.
Perhaps this retrogressive push in schools shouldn’t surprise us, since Republican politicians have for years attacked education as a tool of the left. Never mind that a college graduate is likely to earn 84 percent more than someone with just a high school diploma . Only half as many Republicans as Democrats agree that a college degree is the best way to get ahead in America. And the anti-education push of the right is re-aligning the parties: At the beginning of this century, Republicans had an 11-point edge on party affiliation among college-educated voters; by the end of Donald Trump’s term, the margin of college education was 13 points in Democrats’ favor.
That 24-point swing in the political leanings of educated Americans over just two decades is a warning of future polarization by class, which is in no small part a function of education. As Donald Trump’s Republican Party reshapes itself as a radical right-wing force, it is losing favor with voters who, thanks to the benefit of education, grasp the value of truth and nuance.
A conservative leader of an earlier generation, the philosopher Allan Bloom, wrote in 1987, “Education is the movement from darkness to light.” Light, indeed: The hard-right politicians who are consciously corroding education and intelligent discourse today would have fit in quite well with the bandits of the Phoebus cartel a century back. They seem to be the sort that prefer darkness.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.