[barrkel]

These moves are also a bet on the future: a bet that the future cost of disposal stays high, so that increased costs earlier in the lifetime are justified.

The future is discounted for a reason, however. The future is probably wealthier, has better technology, and can reap the reward from investment today. It takes not just political good will, but a leap of faith to make the bet on spending now instead of later.

For planned obsolescence: here's another way to look at it. For a designed lifetime, we can coordinate across all the inputs to a product and select the right tradeoff between cost, quality and longevity. If we don't have a designed lifetime, the actual lifetime will only be as long as the shortest-lived part that can't be economically replaced. Making everything economical to replace means compromising on design, and often quality: a phone that plugged together like Lego would be substantially worse than our current integrated devices in weight and size.

(The idea of building something without a designed lifetime seems a little bit crazy to me, from an engineering perspective. It frames a whole bunch of decisions and trade-offs. I think it's better to put stuff into more people's hands rather than keep things expensive and exclusionary, which would undoubtedly be a side-effect of outlawing designed lifetimes.)

[paulryanrogers]

"The future is probably wealthier, has better technology, and can reap the reward..."

For how long can this be true when there are finite-easily-accessible resources?

[barrkel]

Don't underestimate how many resources there are. There's a lot of stuff in the Earth's crust, and the sun is going to be shining for a while yet.

[minimuffins]

We can make a moral distinction between making practical tradeoffs and intentionally engineering a product to fail so its user has to buy another one.

> It takes...a leap of faith to make the bet on spending now...

That's some incredible pretzel logic, framing the practice of creating extra garbage to make a quick buck as "investing in the future."

[floatrock]

> and select the right tradeoff between cost, quality and longevity

That's the crux of the matter. What's the "right" tradeoff?

With things like waste disposal an externality, often times the "right" tradeoff is one that encourages frequent replacement. At best, this encourages a materialistic (wasteful) culture. At it's most cynical, this is a way of padding corporate profits by encouraging recurring revenue.

Don't get me wrong -- this is the rational choice when all incentives are towards maximizing shareholder value. I think the question is what principles do we want guiding the choice of the right tradeoff?