"Improved" is a relative term and says nothing of the associated costs. Could we maybe reduce costs and still "improve" at a slower, more sustainable pace? It's worth exploring the notion without turning to the dogma of efficiency at any cost.

Exactly. "At any cost" should only apply to long-term full-scale survival threats. With every other problem, you should only ever except "at reasonable cost."

And in order to know what cost is reasonable, you have to do some kind of rational analysis. There are few things less efficient than an ideology without an understood purpose.

And most likely exacerbated the negative externalities. Each pencil company wants to sell as many pencils as possible, just because. Most organizations try to grow not shrink.

How is that a bad thing? And how would it be improved by everyone making their own pencils?

That's a straw man. It's a good thing that there is specialization for tasks (automation is even more efficient) but with that comes other consequences. The organization always seeks to grow and expand, to create demand even if there isn't any. That is a consequence of the fact that the money it gets is more valuable to it than the services, since it can be spent on anything. Meaning it is more widely accepted so trading services for money is a net gain, and the more they do it the better for them. However on the collective level, this results in exploiting any externalities that they can including people's attention, free time, the planet's resources, polluting etc. The incentive is always to expand at the expense of the environment, until ecosystem collapse is threatened (see for example logging forests, etc. or yeast making beer). In short, the tragedy of the unmanaged commons.

Thanks for asking, I don't think I've been able to tie it all in under one overarching picture so clearly before.

Externalities and long term planning are known issues. They can be managed by the government to some extent.

Really it all comes down to managing incentives. Obviously capitalism isn't perfect, but I doubt there is a better alternative. Any other system will have the same issues and complexities. Even trying to solve issues with government like I did above isn't necessarily better, since governments create their own messy web of incentives and complexities.

Maybe there is no solution. For billions of years populations have wanted to expand and been kept in check by eventual predators and death etc. We humans may be driving towards the same fate.

You make a qualitative argument, while OP makes a quantitative argument. You rightly argue that division of labour boosted productivity tremendously, but that point doesn't affect OP's argumentation at all. Why not keep division of labour and try to make it less wasteful?

Nothing in the OP's argument was quantitative. Both are qualitative arguments.

The OP raises some good points that deserve serious thought, but I find his argument sketchy and hand-wavy. The crux of the argument is this:

> "Our mainstream economic system is oriented towards maximal production and growth. This effectively means that participants are forced to maximize their portions of the cake in order to stay in the game. It is therefore necessary to insert useless and even harmful "tumor material" in one's own economical portion in order to avoid losing one's position. This produces an ever-growing global parasite fungus that manifests as things like black boxes, planned obsolescence and artificial creation of needs."

Everything else in the post is either analogy or following the assumptions in that paragraph to their conclusions. But the sheer amount of reasonable objections that are ignored or dismissed in that paragraph is staggering.

If today's capitalist systems have systemic issues that result in gross misuse of resources, I don't think it's for any of the reasons that the OP suggested. For that reason, I am skeptical of his proposed solutions.