They have much less choice because all of those businesses that cared about quality have gone out of business!

100 years ago clothes were expensive items. Which is why they were class signals - less because of fashion and more because if you were poor you needed to buy long lasting fabrics. Clothes for the poor were expensive as well as the rich.

You can buy those same quality items today but nobody will because we expect clothes to be cheap and not have to repair them.

Take flights... For all the complaints about lack of legroom etc the price of a flight 50 years ago was the same as first/business class today. And yet how few people will pay for it. They'll grumble about small seats and bad snacks but hardly anybody will fork out for the upgrade. Not because they can't actually afford it but because they believe it should be cheaper.

I think it changed before that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

I'd cite as a counterexample in recent memory Sears, GE, Boeing, and Intel. I think collectively they've destroyed close to a trillion dollars by focus on quarterly results over long term, and they're not alone.

The exception proves the norm.

The only major example I can think of is Amazon dot com which famously reinvested all its profits into itself for well over a decade.

The fact that investors didn't punish Amazon dot com was seen as befuddling in the press.

> Companies routinely lose money for years in pursuit of long term growth.

No, I don't think this is true at all because you used the word "routinely". I would claim it is very rare.

Growth in this case can also be growth of valuation. Or maybe that is in general the goal. Get the market cap or nominal valuation to go up.

Some money is lost to push up this valuation or valuation based on some future sales, or market share or anything...

> Companies routinely lose money for years in pursuit of long term growth.

But much of that long term growth now is just the company growing to displace competitors in existing markets, often by subsidizing prices and dodging regulations - see: Uber, Lyft, Air BnB, etc.

We've all seen the playbook a dozen times now: move into a market, keep prices artificially low until the existing competitors are displaced, then the raise prices to return the initial investment and more. That kind of growth-by-displacement is genuinely necessary sometimes but in these cases it's more like a fungus than a plant, just metabolizing an existing system.

It's not the same thing as actually expanding a market or investing in concrete assets (steel mills, power plants, boats, railroads) or R&D that compounds future growth. When the actual investment is just spent artificially lowering prices there's no actual efficiency gains and the consumers ultimately pay the price and more when the company hits the peak of the existing market and shift to enshittification mode to really extract wealth.

The US also had a period of time in which their government directed large construction projects, and they too were particularly prosperous in the time afterwards.

Yep, it's way better to overbuild than underbuild. Lack of houses for young people looking to start families / move in for better jobs has big negative societal impacts that we're only starting to see.

Or rather thinking one step forward the question arises, whether we use the right words for the right things? Does the capitalist West has any defining economics characteristics of a liberal free-market capitalism at all?

Private ownership of means of production: On an atomic, legal level of course. But if point at an NVIDIA based compute rack at a US based random datacenter, can someone tell me actually who owns it? I am interested in the actual natural person who has an ownership share of this capital asset, not the myriads of layers of corporate and financial networks of equity delegations through investment banks, but the actual owner?

Profit oriented: Of course, it is said so. But do really companies, entrepreneurs do things to maximize the profits of the actual owners, shareholders? Are the executives and boards really that keen on putting forward the interest - of the previously referenced unknown - actual owner of the capital assets?

Free market based: This has also multiple sub-characteristics, but most importantly something about competition, or rather the lack of collusion and that economic actors (including consumers, (natural person) investors) are all fully informed. How much is this true in the West?

I think we are very much lost in labels.