Was old stuff built to last longer than new stuff? If so, why?

This is not a serious post. I enjoy (economic) history, and think it's important. But I'm really bad at it. History is the only subject I failed in school (too much stuff to remember). But my mind is still stuck on thinking about barns and other old buildings after spending last week at the family's farm in England. A lot of the older stuff (200 to 500 years old) still looks good for a few more centuries. The newer stuff is in worse shape.

I'm trying to make sense of this. Here are some random thoughts.

1. Survivorship bias. Maybe there's no difference between old stuff and new stuff. Some was built to last, and some wasn't. But all the old stuff that wasn't built to last has already fallen down and disappeared, so we observe a biased sample of old stuff.

From Arthur Young's 1804 "General View of the Agriculture of the County of Hertfordshire":

"Sir John Sebright has begun an improvement of a quantity of waste common that he had a power of enclosing without an act of parliament, which does him much credit. He has built a good cottage for the overlooker, a barn, has enclosed a stack-yard, now full of stacks, and built a double range of sheds from the barn to the south, open only on that side for cattle-stalls, stables, sheep-yard, &c. &c. well planned and executed."

(This was an example of the "Enclosure" of previously open common-land in England. In this case, Sir John compensated the commoners for their loss of rights and so got their consent to the enclosure. An act of parliament was not needed. This shows that not all enclosures violated commoners' rights, but presumably consensual enclosure was rare enough to warrant Arthur Young's praise?)

The 200 year old barn is still standing, with its oak beams in very good shape, as is one of the "double range of sheds", built of brick and slate. Old men remember the ruins of the cottage, which must have lasted until about 100 years ago. There is no memory or trace of the other range of sheds. Maybe the buildings that have not survived were not built to last?

There must be some truth to the survivorship bias explanation. But there's also something strange about it. It's not just that the old stuff that has survived until the present will last longer in total than newer stuff. The old stuff looks like it will last longer from the present than the newer stuff.

Suppose every building has a fixed probability of falling down d per year. Then the expected remaining lifetime of a building is 1/d years, regardless of how old the building already is. For survivorship bias alone to explain why old stuff looks like it will last longer from present than newer stuff, you would need to assume a decreasing hazard rate, so that d falls over time. Like fighter pilots, the longer they have survived, the more experience they have gained, and the better their chances of surviving the next sortie. But that doesn't seem quite right for buildings, which can only deteriorate with age.

2. Time preference. Maybe people cared more about the future in olden days, so built stuff to last?

Suppose there are two ways to build something: an expensive way, which means it will last; and a cheap way, which means it won't last. The more you care about the future, which means the lower your rate of time preference, the more likely you are to build something to last, even if it is more expensive.

But in a market economy, the marginal rate of time preference is equal to the real rate of interest. If real interest rates were lower in the past, it would have been more profitable to build longer-lasting stuff than at present. But, at least according to Gregory Clark's "A Farewell to Alms", real interest rates, as measured by the years' rental equivalent to the purchase price of English agricultural land, were considerably higher in the past. And I'm talking about English agricultural buildings, so that's presumably the relevant interest rate.

Hmmmm. That explanation doesn't seem to work.

3. Increasing rate of technological change. They built stuff to last in the olden days, because they thought it would still be useful in the future. Nowadays, we know it probably won't be, so it's not worth any extra expense to build stuff to last.

As a boy, I unloaded thousands of small bales of straw, by hand, into my 200 year old barn. It is now empty. It just doesn't work for the big bales, which cannot be moved by hand. Nearly all the old buildings are useless for any agricultural purpose. You can't get a tractor inside. The old granary built over the pond is scenic, but was last used to store my motorbike in the 1960's. The grain silos my father built in the 1950's will be demolished next year, because it's cheaper to handle grain with a large tractor and bucket in an open barn, just dumping it on the concrete floor. Etc.

One (maybe all?) of Thomas Hardy's novels describe an agricultural technology that had slowly begun to change, but in which much had stayed the same for a thousand years, so old threshing floors could still be used. Thrashing machines replaced flails for just over a century, until replaced in turn by combines.

500 years ago, or even 200 years ago, it must have been very hard to imagine that the stuff they were building would be useless today. How much extra would you pay for a cell phone that was guaranteed to last 100 years rather than 5?

I think that's my preferred explanation. Plus a bit of survivorship bias.

OK. That's got that out of my system. Now, what's been happening with monetary and fiscal policy while I've been away?