pstarr wrote:So industrial efficiency is bad? We should go back to sticks and digging tools?
Efficiency in free market capitalism is motivated by increased profitability. That is, businesses will invest in efficiency only because it will lead to more production given the same cost (or lower). This is important because they are in competition with each other (which is what takes place in free market capitalist systems) and need to gain more market share. This is also why their employees are under constant pressure, e.g., to meet quotas and sell more goods and services each time while business investors want the best returns.
At the same time, markets have to keep expanding because they may soon be saturated, which is why businesses also spend a lot on marketing while banks extend more credit to consumers (which is what they have to do anyway as that's their business). More credit also has to be extended to extract resources that are becoming more difficult to obtain because they are deeper, require more processing, etc.
Meanwhile, together with marketing businesses have to introduce "new and improved" products because they need consumers to constantly buy in order to ensure a steady flow of revenues. That means at some point products that they bought should become obsolete or even break down.
Finally, many of these goods and services include middle class conveniences, such as smart phones, ICE and EV passenger vehicles, and services like trips to local beach resorts and vacation spots and shopping sprees abroad, because the profit margins for these are high.
Hence, industrial efficiency takes place because of promises of higher returns and profits, which in turn involves increased production and consumption of goods and services through combinations of overproduction and planned obsolescence. Results include increasing levels of ecological degradation and pollution, CO2 emissions, and higher energy costs as more oil, etc., is needed to obtain material resources that are more difficult to obtain due to diminishing returns.
In which case, at some point the world will probably go back to something like sticks and digging tools, and only because it will have no choice, as the combined effects of limits to growth (including peak oil), environmental damage (together with the effects of global warming), increasing debt, etc., take their toll on the world population.