>This realization goes beyond medicine, and is key to understanding why we live in an 'economy' that produces masses of landfill junk while our technology and manufacturing processes keep on improving.

This is the crux of the problem. The current system optimizes for things that are not improving people's lives. It optimizes for waste, unsustainable consumption of resources, wasteful competition rather than cooperation, self-prepetuating inequalities at small and large scale, hyper-optimized psychological manipulation (i.e. advertising) for raw amount of useless shit being sold, etc.

We didn't reach the pinnacle of perfection in systems of wealth distribution with 18th century capitalism. We can do better. We can do a lot better.