A Deadline for Every Product
London’s proposal tried to solve a problem of too little spending, not too little productive capacity. During the Depression, factories and workers could sit idle even as households needed goods. His answer was to make replacement compulsory: if products had legally assigned lifetimes, their eventual withdrawal would create a predictable stream of new orders.
The plan depended on more than persuading people to shop. A government would set a useful life for each kind of product, mark when that period ended, and require the old item to be surrendered or destroyed. In effect, the state would turn a private choice—whether to keep using a working possession—into a public deadline.
Why the Mechanism Was So Radical
Ordinary replacement demand is uncertain: people buy when something breaks, becomes inconvenient, or is superseded. A mandated expiration date would make that demand more reliable for manufacturers. But it would also discard useful goods, force households to pay for replacements, and require officials to decide how long products should last and how the rules would be enforced.
That tradeoff separates London’s scheme from the broader modern use of “planned obsolescence,” which often refers to products designed or marketed to encourage earlier replacement without a law requiring their destruction. His 1932 paper was a proposal, not an enacted system. Its striking implication is that, in his attempt to restart production, a still-working object could count as an economic problem simply because its owner had not yet bought another one.
