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Why Markets Settle for Mediocrity—and What That Means for a Post-Growth Future

“The market buys bug-filled, inefficient software about as well as it buys pristine software. And one of them is the cheapest software you could make.” — caseyy, Hacker News

This quote nails a bitter truth: quality doesn’t win in competitive markets — cheap does. This isn’t just about code; it’s about the operating logic of the growth economy.

Software, like most goods, lives in a lemon market: users can’t distinguish quality upfront, so companies are incentivized to lower costs (often by sacrificing quality), since the buyer can’t see the difference until it’s too late. Result? A stable equilibrium of mediocrity.

And yet, productivity keeps increasing. Theoretically, we could all be working 20-hour weeks, right? But that surplus doesn’t flow to leisure—it flows to cost-cutting, shareholders, or the next “growth hack.”

This is where post-growth thinking flips the script. In a system not obsessed with infinite growth, surplus productivity isn’t a threat to profit margins, it’s an invitation to rest, repair, and reimagine quality.

A post-growth world doesn’t mean doing less with less. It means doing better with enough. If the system wasn’t demanding every marginal gain be turned into a race to the bottom, we could choose durability, openness, repairability—FLOSS/FLOSH values—not because they're righteous, but because they make sense in a world where value isn’t extracted but retained.

In a post-growth economy:

Quality becomes viable again when we stop feeding the hunger for growth. And that’s not a utopia. That’s just turning off the lemon juicer.


This Post is build upon in Mainstream Mediocrity: How the AAA Games Industry Exposes the Limits of Capitalism


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