On Quality

In 2011 my grandmother took me to a guitar store for my sixteenth birthday. It was a big day. I had been playing for six or seven years at that point. I was obsessed… and it was time to buy my first ‘real’ guitar.

I spent hours comparing dozens of options while my Nanna patiently read her book in a corner of the store. I had never deliberated over a decision with such intensity. I can still tell you the exact moment the search ended.

A Gibson Les Paul Studio came off the wall and onto my shoulder. Its weight settled into the strap like it was made for my frame. The lacquer was so thick it looked wet. I knew nothing about tone woods or pickup winding at sixteen. I knew this was the one.

Fifteen years later I still have it. It survived almost a decade of sweaty metal shows. Its back carries the belt buckle rash to prove it, a raw patch of bare wood ground through the finish by several hundred nights of playing.

Guitarists will tell you that wood opens up as it ages, that the resonance frees up over decades. I can't prove the physics. I can tell you the guitar sounds better today than it did in the store.

Everyone owns something like this: the old pair of boots, the battered wrenches, grandma’s cast iron pan, the 400,000 mile truck that will not die, etc…

Objects that wear in instead of wearing out. The ones whose quality you can feel the moment you pick them up.

Now try to explain what it is you feel.

Some quality lives in the guitar, the boots and the pan. You are able to detect it intuitively within seconds. But try to put to words precisely what it is you detect and you’ll discover a dilemma.

Your first instinct is to point at the materials. It's mahogany. It has real humbuckers, a set neck, the best nitro lacquer. But that answer collapses the moment you notice the description fits every guitar on that wall. Two instruments leave the same factory in the same month, matching spec for spec down the line, and one sings while the other sounds weak. Every guitarist knows this, which is why nobody buys the model, they buy the individual guitar, only after noodling on it for a while. The spec sheet names everything the guitar is made of, and whatever quality is, it is not on the list of materials.

Fall back on "I just like it" and you sell the knowledge short, because standing in that store I wasn't just voicing an arbitrary preference, I was detecting something. “This is a thing of quality. It is the one I want.” Fifteen years of ownership keep proving my instinct that day right.

That gap, between knowing good on contact and being able to say what good is, is one of the oldest open problems in Western philosophy. It is also the fundamental question this newsletter is attempting to answer.

Every investigation I've published documents the same story: a product stripped of what made it good while everything a shopper can check stayed intact. Same logo, same spec sheet, same four and a half stars, same price or higher. What got swapped out, the steel gauge, the stitch count and the years of service life, sits in the parts you can't check from the aisle.

That gap between what you can verify and what actually matters is the whole game, for them and for you. They use it to slowly diminish the quality of the products you once loved without tripping an alarm. You can use it to watch the theft happen.

So this essay is about what quality is and where it actually lives, which makes it the philosophical foundation under every investigation this publication will run.

In the late 1950s, a rhetoric instructor at Montana State College named Robert Pirsig noticed that his contract required him to teach "quality". He asked around the faculty at the university and discovered that nobody could tell him what the word meant.

Teachers had been passing and failing students on the basis of quality for centuries without a definition. The problem ate at him for fifteen years, ultimately driving him to insanity. Pirsig’s best thinking on the nature of quality was eventually set down in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It stands alone as the most formative book I have ever read.

To illustrate the problem, Pirsig relays an experiment he ran with his students. He read four student papers aloud and had everyone rank them by quality on slips of paper. He ranked them himself, collected the slips, tallied the results on the blackboard, and set his own ranking next to the class average. His ranking and the students’ matched almost every time, across classes and semesters. A room full of undergraduates who could not define quality independently agreed on where it lived and where it didn't.

So Pirsig landed on this problem statement:

"Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined."

Then he added the sentence that should be nailed above the door of every product team in America.

“Even though Quality cannot be defined, you know what Quality is.”

When colleagues demanded proof that an undefinable thing existed at all, he offered this subtraction:

Pull quality out of the world and street noise ranks with symphonies, slop ranks with dinner, and no made thing is worth choosing over any other. A world without quality would still function. You just wouldn’t want to live in it.

Similar threads have appeared across disciplines.

The architect Christopher Alexander encountered the same problem from a different angle. A career spent asking why some buildings feel alive and others feel dead ended in the same non-definition, a quality that in his words "is objective and precise, but cannot be named."

What Alexander did about it is the useful part. If the thing itself could not be written down, the places where it reliably appears could be, so he and his collaborators catalogued 253 of them, pulled from centuries of buildings people love, and handed architects and builders a working method for producing quality in buildings and towns.

That is what every craft tradition is: a transmission system for the unnameable, carried in people rather than paper. It is why apprenticeship survives every technology invented to replace it: the judgment that produces quality transfers only by demonstration and correction, through thousands of supervised repetitions across years, from a person who has it to a person who does not yet.

That fact cuts both ways. The judgment that can only be carried in people is also the one thing no spreadsheet can measure.

Whatever resists definition resists measurement. Whatever resists measurement vanishes from the dashboard. And in a company run from dashboards, what vanishes from the dashboard vanishes altogether.

That blindness is not an accident of modern business. It was designed, it has an inventor, and the tragedy is that it was invented to do the opposite job. During World War II, a General Electric engineer named Lawrence Miles was tasked with scaling turbo-supercharger production for B-24 bombers from 50 a week to 1,000 while steel, copper and nickel were rationed to hell. He hunted substitute materials, and noticed the surprising fact that substitutes often made the part cheaper and better at the same time. In 1947 he formalized the method and called it value analysis. Identify the function a part serves, then find the best possible way to serve that function. Function first, cost second. Through this process, Miles built a machine for producing quality cheaper.

The method worked so well it quickly became universal. The Navy adopted it in the 1950s and renamed it value engineering. The Pentagon eventually wrote it into federal procurement rules. Miles's 1961 handbook was translated into a dozen languages, and within a generation nearly every large manufacturer ran a version of the program. Continuous, itemized, never-ending review of everything a product is made of, scored in dollars saved. That framework is now as ordinary as accounting.

Unfortunately, his descendants now run the machine backward. The modern cost-down program starts from the spec sheet and asks what can be removed without a statistically significant change in buyer perception this quarter. The thinner steel passes the test. The glued joint passes. The plastic gear where the brass one was, the foam that loses a third of its resilience in two years etc…

Each change is approved in isolation, and each is too small for any buyer to notice on its own. That is the trick. No test compares the product to what it was ten years ago. Each product version is measured against last quarter's, comes back as "no detectable difference," and ships. So the degradation compounds beneath the threshold of every individual measurement, invisible at each step and enormous in total.

It is by this mechanism that quality, the unmeasurable property, erodes as a company places a greater insistence on measurement.

When we ask what quality actually is, only two answers exist. Either quality is objective, meaning a physical property located in the object itself. Or quality is subjective, meaning an opinion located in the person judging.

Take the first answer seriously. If quality is a physical property of the object, then instruments should detect it. We can measure a guitar's weight, its neck relief, its fret height, its finish thickness down to the micron. No instrument has ever measured whether it is good. If quality sat inside the object the way mass sits inside the object, quality control would be a solved engineering problem and a factory could certify goodness the same way it certifies tolerances.

Now take the second answer seriously. If quality is only an opinion, then a quality judgment reports a fact about the judge and no fact about the object. Two things follow. First, quality judgments should distribute evenly, because nothing in the object itself would constrain them. Second, no quality judgment could ever be right or wrong, because there would be nothing objective in the world for it to be right about.

Ultimately, both answers fail.

Pirsig’s blackboard example demonstrates the failure of the first: his classes converged on the same rankings, semester after semester, with no criteria handed to them. They agreed independently on some notion of quality, recognized it, but could not explain it.

The second fails on an experience everyone reading this has had: being wrong about quality. Nobody has ever been wrong about liking vanilla, because a preference claims nothing factual about the world. A quality judgment claims plenty. When I decided that Les Paul was good, I was predicting that the neck would stay straight, the frets would survive the abuse, and the guitar would still be worth reaching for in fifteen years. Every one of those predictions could have failed, and with other guitars, for other players, they have. Boots that looked right have come apart in one winter, and every buyer of a bad pair has said the sentence that pure subjectivism cannot explain: “I was wrong about those boots.”

So if quality is not an objective property, since no instruments can detect it, and it is not just a subjective opinion because we are able to make predictions about the quality of an object that are verified in time, then what is it?

Pirsig's answer was that the question itself smuggles in the false assumption that quality must be located in one place or the other. He argued instead that quality is a feature of the relationship between the person and the object. Quality occurs when a person and a thing meet in use: the weight settling onto the shoulder, the wrench loaded to its limit and holding. Before they meet there is only a guitar and a player. Quality exists in the connection.

Apply this idea in the realm of consumer products, and the slow decline of quality starts making sense.

Every measurement a company takes lands on one side of the objective/subjective divide or the other. Spec sheets, tolerances, and materials testing measure the object alone. Surveys, star ratings, and focus groups measure opinions alone. And they sample the opinion at the wrong moment. A star rating gets filed in the first week of ownership, while the surface still shines, and the failures arrive in year three, when almost nobody returns to amend it.

Nothing measures the relationship, because the relationship only exists in use, in the hand, on the road and across years. So when quality drains out of a product, it drains from the one place no instrument points at. Both sets of numbers can hold perfectly steady while the thing between them disappears. That is how a product gets worse without a single metric moving. That is also how the people doing it stay convinced that nothing was lost.

What produced quality in the first place was care. Pirsig again: "Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares."

A good object is a fossil record of care. Thousands of small selections made by people who could tell the good facts from the bad ones and picked the good, even when not doing so was cheaper or easier. The extra ounce of brass, the second coat of lacquer and the tolerance held a hair tighter than the drawing demanded. Every one of those selections survives for exactly one reason, which is that somebody with power over the object gave a shit.

That is why extraction works the way it does. When outside capital buys a great brand, nobody issues a decree that the product shall now be garbage. Instead, the people who previously made those thousands of selections either get laid off, retired out, or reorged into irrelevance, and the decisions migrate to a floor in an office building where nobody has ever actually used the product. Care cannot be exercised at that distance. Quality follows care out of the building, and the whole thing happens without any individual ever choosing badness directly. Absence does the job on its own.

There is this scene in Pirsig's book that I often reflect on. His riding partner John owns a new BMW motorcycle, the best machine you could buy in 1968, but its handlebars keep slipping. Pirsig offers to fix them with shims cut from an aluminum beer can. Soft, rust-proof, precisely the right thickness, and in his words the best shim stock in the world. John is horrified. He would rather ride a malfunctioning bike with loose handlebars than let a beer can touch it. He cannot see past the ugly surface to the perfect function underneath.

That was 1968's confusion: good things that looked cheap. We industrialized the reverse. The heritage fonts, the small-batch copy and the unboxing moment engineered to simulate the exact feeling my Les Paul earned honestly. The surface has never been more perfected, wrapped around the glued joints and the plastic gears.

Fifty years ago a man refused a great repair because it looked like trash. Today we pay premiums for trash because it looks like greatness. Same confusion, now commoditized at scale.

There are two ways to make money on quality. You can make a thing so good that people pay for it, keep it, and hand your name to their kids. That is the Miles road: quality found cheaper, profit as the receipt for care. Or you can buy the name after the caring is done, spend down four generations of accumulated trust, and be gone before anyone's memory catches up.

Pirsig opened Zen with a line carried down from Plato's Phaedrus, which makes the question in this essay at least twenty-four centuries old:

"And what is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good. Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?"