Dick, a member of the Deming DEN List forum, forwarded me an article by Barbara Tuchman written around 1980, entitled “The Decline of Quality“. Tuchman is the author of “The Guns of August”, which I regard as one of the greatest books of the 20th Century, so I read the article with great enthusiasm. In her opening she says that she planned to take a holiday in Patagoniato hide from the blowback that would inevitably occur upon publication. From my standpoint, Patagonia wouldn’t have been far enough!
At the root of the problem is her adoption of the idea that quality is an inherent characteristic. This is of course, Platonic nonsense. Quality is in the eye of the beholder in a given time and circumstance. She speaks from the position of an elite that scorns peasants and lesser beings as incapable of recognizing “inherent” quality.
She does touch on the idea of “intention” as a necessary precondition for realizing the creation of quality, but then she races off into the self-contained elitist world. She cites great books as more worthy of study than the television viewing assigned by the school teacher, yet Shakespeare was a producer of the soap operas of his day. A punster of unrivaled skill, he wrote immensely clever trash for his peasant audiences.
We should not be surprised if the cleverness of some television writers, producers, and performers, survives the ages as future classics. If the human race manages to survive the folly of its own making, the Internet will undoubtedly become the medium by which authors and artists, no longer beholding to moneyed gatekeepers and solicitous contemporaries, produce tomorrow’s “classics”.
I do agree with her that the ubiquity of poor quality has increased, but it does not come from our egalitarian tolerance of the mediocrity of those with lesser tastes, lazy dispositions, and peasant genes. The source of decline comes from the subordination of all intentions (aims) to our quasi-religious worship of the profit motive. When quality, by any measure, is systematically subordinated to profit, those characteristics we value in product and service, whatever they might be, must suffer, because the dictates of profit always take precedence.
All things being equal, consumers of all classes will opt for quality (what they value) as they define it, but when constrained by what is available, by economic circumstance, and by deceptive practices, they can only do what is possible. And if the evidence of their senses tells them that the quality of a person is measured solely by profit, in spite of all other measures of quality, they will subordinate their very being to actions that they believe will maximize profit — at the cost of qualities such a honor, loyalty, membership, responsibility, creativity, and diligent endeavor.
Today, this is what we teach in our schools — to profit in tests, in grades, in money, in life — by any means. The “idea” that human interaction is driven by the “profit motive” is not only false, it is doing irreparable harm. As Deming said, “economists have led us down the wrong path”.
