What to base a future economy around

Yes, I know that sounds a little odd. But here’s the thing. From a Green perspective, we want to be producing less—producing less waste, fewer goods, using less energy. But from a simple human perspective, we want to live well, right? I mean, a simpler lifestyle would be cool to an extent, but I think those (and there are a few) who want to see a return to effectively medieval or earlier technology are nutbars. And we want some leisure in our lives. All this working more and more hours for the same—or less--return even though technology keeps marching on is bunk. So what we want to do is get as much useful results as possible from as little work, production and energy and material inputs as possible. The overarching concern is that any time one does some work, it should be very useful, and if it produces something that something should be just what is wanted and last a long time so we don’t have to make another one. What we want is planned nonobsolescence.
You could argue that this isn’t laziness, but efficiency. Efficiency, though, is a very vague term. It usually means pushing to maximize something, but what actions count as efficient are vastly different depending on just what is being maximized. Under capitalism it normally means maximum dollars out per dollar in, measured over a short timespan. But when programmers talk about laziness, they mean thinking things through, and building stuff robustly so that when things change you can expand its function and maintain it with a minimum of effort. So for instance, talking about housing. Nowadays, most dwellings are built using the skimpiest possible building material (within code, mostly). Such a dwelling does not age well. After a while, it starts to kind of sag. And its electrical system turns out to be inadequate for future needs. And so does its infrastructure for telecommunications. And it leaks heat like a sieve. It requires a bunch of maintenance, but is hard to maintain. And so on and so forth. Stretches of suburbia built in mid-century or later are already dying, which may not be such a bad thing given that they maybe shouldn’t have been built in the first place. But we’re going to have to replace those—build them all over again. Meanwhile, in Europe centuries-old houses often are still doing just fine. It may seem like a lot of work to build a home to last, with some serious thought put into maintainability and energy efficiency and livability. But if you do that in the first place, hopefully you won’t need to fuck with it all the time, nor will you have to tear it down and build a new one, nor will you have to go running around finding new energy resources to exploit just to keep it livable. Thinking longer term, that’s the lazy way to do it. Similarly, I own a waffle iron that belonged to my grandmother. It’s not what you’d call sophisticated—you plug it in to start it heating up, and you pull out the plug when it gets too hot. There’s a little dial that shows you how hot it is. But it makes really great waffles, and has been doing so for something like sixty years. The teflon crap you get nowadays makes lousy waffles and lasts what, five years? More likely you throw it out because it makes lousy waffles and then in five years buy another when hope triumphs over experience. The lazy way says make the blasted thing to last sixty and you don’t have to make and shop for twelve freaking waffle irons over those sixty years. Nor do you have to mine the metals to make them, or spend the time and gas to drive the car to do the shopping to buy them and on and on. In a Green economy, that’s called saving the environment. And in an economy controlled by people, where work is distributed fairly evenly, getting rid of unnecessary work by doing things right in the first place would mean we all have more time to do what we want to do, rather than meaning some people work their tails off and others are unemployed. Call it laziness, parsimony, whatever, but my point is that if we concentrated on doing things that needed doing (as opposed to advertising, say, or happy meal toys), and tried hard to do them really well, we could live as well as we do in quality of life—better, really, because saner--at far less cost in both environmental damage and effort.
How to arrange an economy so that incentives push towards that kind of behaviour rather than towards maximizing dollar throughput is another question. I really don’t think such an economy is compatible with capitalism.