Hello again! I'm back for more comments and, hopefully, some constructive discussion.

The substitution of work posts by machines will undoubtedly be an ever growing social challenge. Existing social and governmental structures are not unaware of this issue and the debate on how to address it is actively going on. One of the most popular proposals is UBI (universal basic income). My point is that RBE is not the only alternative to deal with the challenges that are upon us.

Next, you speak about exponential growth in the monetary system. While this is more or less accurate, you fail to mention that with monetary inflation, each unit of money is effectively worth less in terms of real purchasing power. So, there an exponential growth in money supply is not synonymous with an exponential growth in production and consumption. Now, of course consumption has been growing and is, in many instances, very inefficiently organized, taking its ecological impacts into little consideration. However, you cannot reduce economic activity and consumption to products. There is a substantial part of economic growth which is due to an increase in services, not products. Services are, for the most part, based on human resources and not on material ones, having a much lighter impact on the overall increase on natural resource exhaustion. The point is that you cannot simply take the inflation of the monetary ecosystem and establish an equivalence with an exponential growth in resource exploitation. This is a crude oversimplification.

Planned obsolescence is an interesting issue. I don't dispute its practice by many manufacturers, but I believe that many times this is not as much "planned" as it may appear. Products in the market must attract purchasers, which in turn need to have purchasing power. Making a more durable product usually means higher production costs, which lead to higher market prices and, consequently, a smaller public with purchasing power. There are plenty of quality products out there; it's just that many people don't have the means to buy them or simply prefer to buy cheaper ones. This has more to do with income inequality than with resource management. There are a number of available political strategies to balance income among the population, while the material issue may be addressed by having wider and more efficient recycling and reusing platforms. My point is that it is possible to achieve higher levels of efficiency by regulating the existing markets, without the need to radically change its nature. Also, education may play an important role in promoting conscious consumer behavior in all respects, from human rights to ecological impact.

Surveying the world's natural resources is not a special feature of a RBE; it is already done in the current model. All institutions, ranging from national governments to corporations, invest to some degree in this activity, which is a basic logistic practice. It may not be undertaken in a fully globalized fashion, because there is undoubtedly a logic of competition behind it. Still, as far as surveying the available natural resources goes, all institutions with direct responsibility over it already do it.

The issue of the sustainability of renewable natural resources is also constantly addressed by the previously mentioned institutions. There are a lot of scientific and policy studies already taking place regarding both environmental impact and sustainability of resource exploitation. Again, it may all boil down to informed governmental regulation gradually limiting unsustainable and environmentally hazardous practices, while developing educative policies for raising scientific literacy and ecological awareness among the population. Many governments are actively working on both fronts.

I don't see any substantiation of the statement that "cost efficiency is inverse to technological efficiency". The costs of something are a way to reflect the amount of labor, energy, materials, time, etc., that something takes to be produced. Of course, this reflection is highly skewed from country to country, especially due to lack of regulations and their enforcement (again), but also due to differences in economic performance. For example, labor is paid very differently in different places, which might lead to the same product having very different production costs in different places. However, consumers still have a choice between buying stuff which is provably manufactured according to high social an ecological standards, or keep buying the cheaper products whose manufacture does not take these standards into account.

Basically, the existing market system provides a high degree of freedom to its actors. Producers and providers of services are more or less free to introduce their products and services into the market. Consumers are more or less free to demand from the market according to their tastes and needs. Somewhere along the intersection, this system establishes how much should be produced of what. A RBE would require a centralized "scientific committee" establishing by itself how much people need of what, without any clear way to take into account people's freedom to choose among alternatives, nor for people to freely develop new concepts of products and services. You propose that a RBE is the answer to sustainability problems, while I observe in the existing social and economic structures a growing movement in the direction of ecological awareness, environmental protection, social justice, resource sustainability, etc...