... CONTINUES.

5) An inherent obsolescence which creates inferior products immediately due to the need to stay “competitive”. This little recognized attribute of production is another example of the waste which is created in the market system. It is bad enough that multiple companies constantly duplicate each others items in an attempt to make their variations more interesting for the sake of public consumption, but a more wasteful reality is that due to the competitive basis of the system, it is a mathematical certainty that every good produced is immediately inferior the moment it is created, due the need to cut the initial cost basis of production and hence stay “competitive” against another company... which is doing the same thing for the same reason. The old free market adage where producers “create the best possible goods at the lower possible prices” is a needlessly wasteful reality and detrimentally misleading, for it is impossible for a company to use the most efficient material or processes in the productions of anything, for it would be too expensive to maintain a competitive cost basis. They very simply cannot make the “strategically best” physically it is mathematically impossible. If they did, no one would buy it for it would be unaffordable due the values inherent in the higher quality materials and methods. Remember people buy what they can afford to. Every person on this planet has a built in limit of affordability in the monetary system, so it generates a feedback loop of constant waste via inferior production, to meet inferior demand.

In a sustainable society, goods are created to last, with the expansion and updating of certain goods built directly into the design, with recycling strategically accessed as well, limiting waste. You will notice the term “strategic best” was used in a statement above. This qualification means that goods are created with respect to state of affairs of the planetary resources, with the quality of materials used based on an equation taking into acct all relevant attributes, rates of depletion, negative retro-actions and the like. In other words, we would not use TITANIUM for every single computer enclosure made, just because it might be the empirically “strongest” materials for the job. That practice could lead to depletion. Rather, there would be a gradient of material quality which would be accessed through analysis of, again, relevant attributes, such as comparable resources, rates of natural obsolescence for a given item, statical usage in the community, etc. These properties and relationships could be access through programming, with the most strategically viable solution computed and output in real time.

TO BE CONTINUED ...

Author: Peter Joseph ; Source: The Zeitgeist Movement - Newsletter July 1st, 2010