They Don't Make Them Like They Used To

Most cultures have this feeling, particularly among the elderly. If anything, Americans tend to reject it more than most cultures.
Often older things are over-engineered, which causes them to last longer and endure hard usage. A business that has been producing an item for awhile starts to find ways to either reduce cost, or improve some other important attribute (such as reducing weight), often at the cost of reducing durability for the end user.

Once a product has been around long enough, multiple businesses compete in a race to the bottom to produce the cheapest product that will hold together long enough to leave the shop. This applies to everything from microwaves to things as mundane as shoes. (Shoes made with older technology cost more, but they also tend to last longer).


Older cars were made under the theory that, in a crash, the car should show as little damage as possible, and hence were made of thick steel; the body panels were often not load-bearing and could be easily removed. Newer cars (i.e. engineered in the last 30 years) are designed to simply fall apart in a crash, keeping the occupants safe by allowing the car's frame to absorb the energy involved in a crash by crumpling and going to pieces instead of transmitting the energy to the occupants. Of course, this does destroy the car.

There are also maintenance issues. It used to be the "tree-shade mechanic" could fix an engine with basic tools, but newer cars require complicated and expensive tools. On the other hand, these efficiencies and cost reductions have allowed more people to afford a car; the U.S. population increased by 55% from 1960 to 2000, but the number of licensed drivers more than doubled over the same period. This also highlights the selective enforcement of this and other Nostalgia Filter-related tropes. Though there are far more cars on the road, and far more miles driven, fatalities have remained level (fatalities-per-mile in the U.S. have decreased by 75% over the last 50 years), although mostly due to legal enforcement of safety measures and tighter laws on some subjects (e.g. mandatory seat belts and lower alcohol limits for drunk driving).

Houses are another good example. Sometimes after a major disaster- like a hurricane- all the houses built before a certain date will have survived with minor damage, while newer houses are destroyed. This shows something of a selection bias; the older houses had to survive the previous hurricane, leaving only the most durable to face this one (this applies to cars as well). Due to the evolution of building codes, sometimes the newest houses also survive. In flooding situations, barring really record-breaking floods a rather similar selection process will take place, though in this case it's more a case of where the houses are built; the locations least at risk from flooding will be built upon first, with development spreading into more vulnerable areas as the town grows, or, again, the old houses on the floodplain were destroyed in the previous flood.

Another housing example is the old breezeway. Older houses were built with a breezeway to take advantage of prevailing winds to cool the house in the summer. Newer houses have air conditioning and so the builders don't bother with the breezeway. Guess which is cooler if the power goes out in the summer?

For large structures like bridges, this is caused by a combination of factors. Good engineers realized their knowledge of materials and engineering techniques was incomplete, and tended to make things much stronger than calculations called for (the Brooklyn Bridge is over-engineered by almost an order of magnitude). At the same time, less well-designed structures have collapsed or been replaced.

Another factor is (steel reinforced) concrete. Most building materials have a "shelf life" of several millennia unless some rather unusual things happen to them - after all, they are stones that survive being exposed to the elements in nature as well. The big exceptions are limestone (which cannot handle acids), concrete (some types of which decay and degenerate under certain conditions) and steel (which rusts). Steel reinforced concrete structures only last a century or so without maintenance before the rust starts popping apart the concrete and weakening the structure beyond repair. There is nothing keeping the Roman aqueducts from lasting another millennium (baring human intervention) because there is nothing in them that could rust, degrade or fall apart.