Guest blogger John Kutasz talks about value and choices in a massive consumer society.

As consumers, we’re living in something of a golden age. Look back on what it meant to be part of the 1% fifty years ago. If you were rich, you played golf with custom made clubs, drove an immeasurably nicer car, could buy electronics that others could only dream about, and had servants waiting on you hand and foot both at home and at the country club.

Well, we in today’s 99% still don’t have the servants, but look at how far we’ve come otherwise: custom made golf clubs are undoubtedly better than ever, but even the cheapest off the rack set of clubs is now likely to have cavity backs, graphite shafts, and, most importantly, to be perfectly weighted and matched to all the other clubs in the set. Years ago, that kind of quality came from meticulous hand-work from a craftsman who had spent his/her life acquiring their skills. Today, computer aided design and highly automated factories can routinely spit out beautifully engineered products.

Today’s cars can generally be relied on to start every time, have a climate control system that guarantees almost instant comfort regardless of the weather, is seemingly infinitely less likely to have a flat tire, and run quieter. Yes, you can easily still pay more for some cars than any of us might every pay for a house, but the ‘extra’ that you get from paying 25 times as much has really diminished. Companies like Lexus and Infiniti came along in 1989 and provided true luxury amenities and greatly improved build quality at a lower price than the traditional deluxe brands. And jumping forward, Hyundai can put you in a car with a 100,000 mile warranty that is a pretty close Lexus knockoff in design, features, and quality, for about 2/3s of the Lexus price.

And with electronics, where do I start? Even 10 years ago, an article about a high end home theater would have spent a large amount of space discussing the installer’s choice of a ‘scaler’. This was a piece of equipment that cost many thousands of dollars, and was an add-on that took VHS tape (S-VHS, of course, that the customer had spent an extra $1000 for) or laserdisc output, and reconfigured the signal to be best displayed on a crude, early high-definition TV. Today, that scaling technology has vastly improved, and is already included in the $79 blu ray player that is connected (BY A SINGLE CABLE!) to your massive $900 flat panel TV. Of course, now you rarely need the upscaling feature because the blu ray signal is already a perfect match for the number of pixels you have available to display it. And the audio signal that accompanies your blu ray content (OVER THE SAME SINGLE CABLE) is lossless as well – a perfect match to what the people in the mixing room intended. Last year saw blu ray content releases that will satisfy anyone – from Citizen Kane to the entire Star Wars saga to women crapping in a sink. A golden age indeed. On the audio front, our friends on the internet now have truly high resolution music available to wirelessly beam its way into your pocket on onto your iPad on demand.

For people on-the-go, the vastly increased storage space on portable devices lets a music collection be stored in much higher quality formats, before it is fed to an external DAC and headphone amplifier that bring high resolution music to life. My headphone amp (from ALO Audio) and DAC (the Cypher Labs AlgoRhythm Solo) turn an otherwise miserable slog on the bus into a twice-daily chance to truly enjoy my favorite music. I used to play MP3s straight through earbuds and it made for tolerable background sound, but now I’m regularly startled away from what I’m reading because the AlgoRhythm Solo is delivering something in a recording that I’ve never noticed before. Whether it’s the interplay of instruments or the sonic characteristics of the theater where a recording was made, songs I’ve known for years are fresh and new.

Are there inequalities in our society? Absolutely – but that’s a topic for 9000 other blogs.

But on the subject of electronics, do customers have it infinitely better now than anyone at any income level did 10, 20, or 50 years ago? You betcha’.