Technical advancement is driven by the profit motive, and not common sense!
I picked up on the tail-end of a BBC radio 4 program last week, and they had a Professor in something or other on who summed it up for me when he said that he wasn't anti-capitalism, rather, he believed that markets should work in the best interests of people, and not the other way around, as they have come to over the past 25 years.
The Thatcherite mentality of allowing free market forces to prevail has allowed common sense, morality, and honesty to fall by the wayside. The ulltimate driving force has become the desire for profit, further profit, and more profit. It's made a small number of people extremely wealthy, while the rest of us are re-cycling junk that has barely lasted five minutes. Job satisfaction has gone out of the window in many trades because people know that what they are doing is sub standard, or could be done a lot better. Most of the mega-sized companies that are doing well strive to find ways of using less staff, which means putting people out of work. Large numbers of manufacturer's will seek to use cheap labour in other parts of the world whenever possible, thus adding to the unemployment figures. The scrap copper that you sold last month is probably now sat in a Chinese recycling plant the size of a small town.
According to the rules of the free market, this all makes sense!
People who challenge such rules are likely to be branded as socialists/ communists/ anti-capitalists, or with some other inappropriate branding slogan that has been imported from America where the media drip feed "the benefits" of the free market 24/7.
Plumbers may prefer copper, but the politicians will tell the people that plastic is more hygienic, more environmentally friendly, and generally the better product, and you can bet your last fiver that they will quote the research of some graduate in green studies who claims to have shoved a copper pipe up a rat's backside and found that it caused cancer.
Unfortunately, a lot of people will just soak it up and believe such spin, oblivious to the vested interests of those in power who will ensure that the markets work for them, and not for the majority, many of whom will come to realise that they can barely afford plastic pipes, let alone copper ones.
