"The increase in number and specificity of building codes has come in-part due to foreign-made building materials and poor QC."

Quality Control from foreign made building materials was far less than those components manufactured in the U.S. at the time. I grew up in a pipefititng and piping wholesale family, which is closely adjacent to steel manufacturing. You're welcome to dive in if you're genuinely curious, there's tons of reading material available. I'd recommend starting with the decline in fitting production and consolidation in the U.S. in the 90s with the introduction of Korean-made fittings. Chinese-made cast iron is another one to poke at. Starting in the 70s, Chinese-made cast iron was widely imported and was used widely in underground piping, namely sewer and sanitary. Cast iron failure was a huge problem for 20 years.

If you're looking for a xenophobe angle to argue, it's simply not there.

Your complaints aren’t directed at Swedish steel or German fittings. They’re directed to Asian sourced parts imported by American companies.

The regulatory context that permitted self assembly of houses seems wholly orthogonal to parts supply chains for professional manufacture.

The price of them being imported does not have the same meaning to me that I think you want it to have. Why are we pussy footing around this? Shit is just made with less quality than it was "back in the day". Even shit made in the USofA is of lower quality than it used to be, so it's not just something "foreign made". Why? Because consumers did not want to pay for quality. Making it right is expensive. Good quality assurance is expensive. Manufactures trying to get ahead decided to start cutting costs and lowering quality and lowering QA standards, and consumers bought that shit up left, right, and center. People decided they preferred to have cheap things now, and if it breaks and it's still cheap, then just replace cheap with cheap.

This is not any different than companies looking for short term profits to make stockholders happy rather than what's better for long term results for the stockholders or the company itself. So, it's not just a thing evident in manufacturing but in all business.

We (the royal we) have lost long term vision in pretty much all aspects

So I think the thing I'm confused about is what this has to do with Sears kit houses.

Were they, like, really good quality? Was Sears not an incredibly profitable company that made its money by volume supply of cheaply sourced parts?

I got the impression Sears houses were basic but functional. The fact that "Remarkably, almost 70% of these Sears DIY houses are still standing today" is reported uncritically in almost every online source about them, including the original piece, but... is that remarkable? How much 1920s suburban housing stock in general is still standing today?

It is however true that corporations have strong incentives to support politicians and media entities who are aligned with their own interests.

Oh, that old trope that never dies. Companies that sacrifice the long term for short term profits have their stocks tank and go out of business.

Big investors are not the fools people imagine they are. About 3 milliseconds after they catch wind that a company is eating its seed corn, they dump the stock.

But if you are sure you've identified a company that is doing this, then short their stock and make a bundle.

You're probably right about big public corporations and institutional investors. But PE firms don't have the the same incentives; their incentive is often to squeeze as much ROI as possible out of the companies they purchase, consequences be damned. You're mostly right though on this part:

> Companies that sacrifice the long term for short term profits have their stocks tank and go out of business.

Or they file for chapter 11 bankruptcy and let someone else pick up the pieces, while destroying a good business and leaving a bunch of people unemployed.

> The increase in number and specificity of building codes has come in-part due to foreign-made building materials and poor QC.

And clarified specifically:

> the decline in fitting production and consolidation in the U.S. in the 90s with the introduction of Korean-made fittings. Chinese-made cast iron is another one to poke at.

I’m not pillorying anyone, I’m just trying to get them to join some dots up.

Why is the location of fitting manufacture relevant to the decline of the Sears house?

Doesn’t the availability of cheaper parts manufactured to apparently lower quality standards make it easier for catalogue houses to exist?

And didn’t the Sears house decline long before the Chinese cast iron of the 70s and these Korean fittings of the 90s?

Did building regulations make it harder to offer kit houses? Yet building regulations did not prevent cheap imported parts coming in to the US apparently, so… building refs both were a reaction to foreign parts but also a cause of a decline in US part manufacturing?

Another problem is home designs are adapted to their locations. That doesn't work so well with a cookie cutter design.

If I were to say, purchase 100,000 gpu's direct from a chinese manufacturer, and half of them were dead on arrival, what is my recourse? Where does customs fit into that recourse?

Now if I were to purchase them from an american company, I may have an opportunity to sue.

So a cheap and bad option appeared on the market it was only from overseas, not domestic. It's not an issue of where it's made - just different qualities made available.

It's not what was built in here per se, it what wasn't - not back then at least - cut out to shave a penny (or a buck) off costs. On the other hand, to break into a new market (lower) price - often with lower quality - is a known entry path

Along the same lines, look at American made cars back then. Sure there were sloppy manufacturing issues. But no one accused any individual part of skimping, cutting corners, etc.

Believe it or not, things were noticeably different back then.

So much of this is survivor bias or just nostalgia. Some things were better back in the 50s, some weren't. Somethings in the 50's seemed great but in hindsight were pretty bad (asbestos, thalidomide, DDT, aluminum wiring).

And some of the "American Exceptionalism" was also a response to WW2. I know an entire generation who would never buy anything made in Japan because of Pearl Harbor. And I had an uncle who flew in the 8th AF who would go into a rage whenever he saw a VW Beetle on the road. In electronics, Japanese-made used to be a slur, until they dominated electronics.

My first home was a Sears home. It was small but seemed okay for a first home. It had new siding, and the previous owner had replaced the aluminum wiring. I don't know if the plumbing had been replaced, but it was, as most houses are, a House of Theseus.

Sadly, everyone had to learn this lesson "the hard way", the timelines were just different.

Pinto didn't explode because the material used for the gas tank was too thin or defective. Pintos exploded because the design was bad.