IELTS Academic Reading — Practice Test 23

In December 1924, the leading lightbulb manufacturers of the world met in Geneva and formed an organisation that would later be known as the Phoebus cartel. Among its agreements was a curious one: the companies would deliberately limit the working life of their bulbs to around 1,000 hours, down from the 2,500 or more that some bulbs of the day could achieve. A firm whose lamps lasted too long was fined. The cartel is often cited as the founding scandal of what came to be called planned obsolescence — the suspicion that manufacturers design their products not to last, in order to keep customers coming back. Whether the practice is as widespread and as deliberate as the story suggests, however, is a question that repays closer examination.

It helps to separate two rather different things that the single phrase tends to run together. The first is physical, or functional, obsolescence: a product that stops working, or becomes impossible to repair, after a predictable period. The second is psychological obsolescence, sometimes called perceived obsolescence, in which a product continues to function perfectly well but is made to seem outdated — overtaken by a new model, a new feature or simply a new fashion. The annual restyling of cars and the yearly cycle of smartphones both trade heavily on the second kind. A device discarded because it looks old rather than because it has failed is a victory for psychological obsolescence, and arguably the more powerful of the two forces.

Manufacturers, unsurprisingly, resist the darker interpretation of their behaviour. Building a product to last indefinitely, they argue, is neither free nor necessarily what customers want. Sturdier components, better seals and higher-grade materials all cost money, and a washing machine engineered to survive fifty years would be priced beyond the reach of most households. Given the choice, the argument runs, shoppers overwhelmingly reach for the cheaper item, and it is consumer demand, not corporate conspiracy, that sets the balance between price and durability. On this view, the short life of many goods is simply the visible result of a trade-off that buyers themselves have made, whether or not they realise it.

Critics find this account too convenient. They point to design choices that seem to serve no purpose except to shorten a product's useful life or to frustrate repair: batteries glued into phones so that they cannot be replaced when they wear out; screws of unusual shapes that defeat ordinary tools; spare parts withdrawn from sale a few years after a model is discontinued; and software updates that, users complain, leave older devices running noticeably more slowly. Each such choice may have an innocent explanation, the critics concede, but taken together they look less like accident than like a strategy, and the burden of proof, they insist, should lie with the manufacturer.

Beyond the frustration of the individual consumer lies a larger cost. The rapid turnover of goods, and of electronic goods above all, has helped to create one of the fastest-growing waste streams on the planet. Discarded phones, laptops and appliances contain valuable metals that are seldom recovered, along with toxic substances that are hazardous to dispose of. Manufacturing each replacement, moreover, consumes energy and raw materials extracted at considerable environmental expense. A culture that treats durable objects as disposable, whatever its convenience, exacts a price that does not appear on any receipt.

In recent years the reaction has gathered force. The right-to-repair movement, an alliance of consumers, independent repairers and campaigners, argues that people should be free to mend the things they own, and that manufacturers should make spare parts, tools and manuals available rather than hoarding them. Lawmakers have begun to respond. In 2021 France introduced a repairability index, a score displayed at the point of sale that tells buyers how easily a given product can be fixed, and the European Union has since moved towards rules of its own requiring longer availability of parts. Such measures do not outlaw obsolescence, but they shift the incentives that surround it.

What, then, should we conclude? Deliberate intent, of the blatant kind displayed by the Phoebus cartel, is genuinely hard to prove; much of what looks like conspiracy can be explained, at least in part, by the ordinary pressures of cost, competition and consumer taste. Yet the outcome is much the same whether or not anyone planned it: a stream of goods that fail sooner than they need to, and a set of incentives that rewards their makers for it. The most useful question, in the end, may not be whether obsolescence is a plot but how the incentives that produce it can be redirected — towards durability, repair and reuse rather than replacement. Assigning blame is less important than changing the rules of the game.

For much of its history, science told a flattering story about itself. Knowledge, on this account, advanced by steady accumulation: each generation of researchers added new facts to the store gathered by its predecessors, correcting the occasional error and edging ever closer to a complete and accurate picture of the world. Progress was gradual, cumulative and essentially peaceful. In 1962, a physicist-turned-historian named Thomas Kuhn published a short book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that challenged this comfortable picture at its root. Science, Kuhn argued, does not in fact advance in a smooth line at all. It lurches, from long stretches of stability broken by sudden, disruptive upheavals in which one way of seeing the world is overthrown and replaced by another. Understanding science, he suggested, meant paying attention not only to its triumphs but to these moments of rupture, and to the human communities that live through them.

At the centre of Kuhn's account stands the idea of a paradigm. A paradigm is the whole framework of shared assumptions, accepted theories, standard methods and agreed examples within which a community of scientists works. During the long periods that Kuhn called normal science, researchers do not spend their days questioning the fundamentals of their field. On the contrary, they take the reigning paradigm for granted and get on with the detailed work it makes possible — refining measurements, extending theories to new cases, and solving the smaller puzzles that the framework throws up. Normal science, in Kuhn's memorable description, is less a heroic search for truth than a form of disciplined puzzle-solving, carried out by people who broadly agree about the rules.

No paradigm, however, accounts for everything. Sooner or later, researchers encounter anomalies — observations that stubbornly refuse to fit the accepted framework, results that the reigning theory cannot explain. At first, Kuhn noted, such anomalies are rarely treated as reasons to abandon the paradigm. They are set aside as minor puzzles awaiting solution, blamed on faulty equipment or clumsy technique, or simply ignored in the hope that they will eventually be reconciled. Only when anomalies accumulate, and when they strike at matters the paradigm ought to handle, does unease begin to spread. The field enters what Kuhn called a crisis: a period of doubt in which the old certainties loosen and scientists become willing, at last, to consider genuinely new ideas.

It is out of such a crisis that a scientific revolution is born. A new paradigm emerges, one that makes sense of the anomalies that defeated its predecessor, and a struggle follows in which the new framework gradually wins over the scientific community, often as its older defenders retire or die. The replacement of the earth-centred astronomy of Ptolemy by the sun-centred system of Copernicus is one of Kuhn's favoured examples; the overthrow of the phlogiston theory of burning by the chemistry of oxygen is another. In each case, Kuhn insisted, what changed was not merely a single belief but an entire way of seeing. The defeated paradigm does not simply fade; it is displaced, and the transition can be as much a conversion as a calculation. After the revolution, scientists inhabit what is, in effect, a different world.

The most controversial element of Kuhn's argument concerns what happens between paradigms. Rival paradigms, he claimed, are incommensurable: there is no common measure, no neutral standard, by which they can be straightforwardly compared. Because each paradigm defines its own problems, its own methods and even the meanings of its key terms, the supporters of competing paradigms are, to some degree, talking past one another; they cannot fully translate their disagreements into a shared language that would let a simple appeal to the evidence settle the matter. A choice between paradigms, on this view, is never a matter of logic and observation alone. It also involves persuasion, judgement and values, much as any other human decision does.

To Kuhn's critics, this was a dangerous doctrine. If there is no neutral ground on which competing theories can be judged, they asked, what becomes of the idea that science makes genuine progress towards the truth? Does the choice of a paradigm reduce, in the end, to a matter of fashion, persuasion or even mob psychology? The philosopher Karl Popper, who held that science advances by the rigorous testing and refutation of bold conjectures, was among those who worried that Kuhn had opened the door to relativism — the notion that no theory is really any better than another, only differently favoured. Kuhn himself resisted this reading firmly. He maintained that later paradigms are genuinely better than earlier ones at solving problems, even if they cannot be said to bring us closer to some final, observer-independent truth. Whether his position can be held consistently remains a matter of debate.

Whatever the verdict of philosophers, Kuhn's influence has been enormous, and not always in ways he would have welcomed. The phrase 'paradigm shift' escaped the seminar room and entered everyday speech, where it is now applied, often very loosely, to any change of approach in business, technology or fashion — a usage that empties it of most of the precise meaning Kuhn intended. His more durable achievement was to change how we think about science itself. After Kuhn, it became much harder to regard science as a purely rational march towards truth, conducted by dispassionate individuals weighing evidence in isolation. Science came to be seen, instead, as a profoundly human and social activity, carried out by communities with shared commitments, histories and blind spots. That insight, rather than any single claim about paradigms, may be his most lasting legacy.