Planned Obsolescence

Post-Scarcity Worldview

In this section, basic statistics and trends will be presented to show how we can, as a global society, achieve a “post-scarcity”^[35] social system. While scarcity in absolute terms will always be with humanity to one degree or another in this closed system of Earthly resources, scarcity on the level of human needs and basic material success is no longer a viable defense of the market system's allocation methods.^[36] As a brief aside, a common defense of the price system and the market is that if any scarcity exists, it makes void any other approach. The argument goes that since not everyone can have xyz, xyz is scare and hence people need money (or have a lack thereof) to filter out who gains xyz and who doesn't.
The problem with this assumption is that it ignores how certain resources and hence goods have more relevance than others when it comes to public health. Comparing the scarcity of a very expensive, luxury car which draws status satisfaction from its owner more than its basic purpose as a mode of transport - with the scarcity of food, which is a core life requirement for health, is not legitimate in real life terms. The former interest, while perhaps important to the ego satisfaction of the owner who likely already has his or her basic needs met to afford such a product, is not equivalent to the latter interest of those who have little or nothing to eat and hence cannot survive. One cannot arbitrarily conflate such “needs” and “wants”, as though they are simply the same, in theory. Sadly, this is how the market system behaves.
Likewise, with great wealth and material imbalance,^[37] comes inevitable social destabilization. Virtually every large-scale public dissent and revolution we have seen in the past couple hundred years have had some economic basis, usually revolving around societal imbalance, exploitation and class separation.^[38] The same goes for the roots of crime, terrorism, addictions and other social problems. Virtually all of these propensities are born out of deprivation, whether absolute or relative and this deprivation is inherent to the nature of a society based on competition and scarcity.
So, to simply reduce our economic reality down to mere trade, coupled with the claim that any degree of scarcity justifies the use of the market, price and money for allocation, is to ignore the true nature of what ensures social harmony, stability, and public health. Would it seem reasonable to forgo the technical ability to, say, elevate 80% of humanity to the material capacity currently held by only 10% today, simply because “not everyone can own a 500 room mansion”? Again, the absurdity of this objection is quite clear when a system perspective is taken with respect to what underscores true public health and social stability.
That aside, below is a list of current life support realities available to the global population that have gone unharnessed due to inhibiting factors inherent to the market economy. Each point will be addressed in its own sub-section.

1. Food Production: Current production methods already produce more than enough food to feed all human beings on earth. Furthermore, current trends toward more optimized technology and agricultural methods also show a capacity to further increase production efficiency and nutrition quality to a state of active abundance, with minimal human labor and increasingly less energy, water and land requirements.
2. Clean Water: Desalination and decontamination processes currently exist to such a vast degree of application that no human being, even in the present state of pollution levels, would ever need to be without clean water, regardless of where they are on earth.
3. Energy: Between geothermal, wind, solar, and hydro, coupled with system-based processes that can recapture expelled energy and reuse it directly, there is an absolute energy abundance which can provide for many times the current world's population.
4. Material Production/Access: The spectrum of material production, from buildings to transport to common goods, has experienced a powerful merging of capital goods, consumer goods and human labor. With proper system incorporation of each genre of production, coupled with optimized regeneration processes and a total transformation from the use of property rights to a system of access rights, it is clear that all known good functions (in the form of product) can be utilized by 100% of humanity, on a per need basis, in access abundance. 

http://p2pfoundation.net/Post-Scarcity_Trends,_Capacity_and_Efficiency#3.29_Inefficiency_inherent_to_the_competitive_practice_is_removed