All good questions. I am not going to pretend I know the answers here. I'll share my thoughts though.
> How do I as a consumer know if a product will last or not?
You, yourself, wont know. Not unless you are an expert on the product, which most people are not. The manufacturer may know what they are selling you is terribly engineered and will break, but you will not. So how can we overcome this imbalance of knowledge? I think the automotive industry is a good example of this being addressed. If I want to buy a car, how do I know that it is going to be reliable? I don't. Even if I were an expert, I don't have the luxury to buy the car, inspect its mechanics, and return it if I don't like it. But yet, even when situated with this predicament, I can still make a well informed decision that will give me a great chance of obtaining a reliable car. Why? It's because there is a plethora of institutions I have access to to evaluate what brand I should go with. The IIHS, NHTSA, Kelly Blue Book, J.D. Power, Edmunds, Motor Trend, Consumer Reports, my local car mechanic, and more. As great as these institutions may be, I believe it only part of the solution. The second is there needs to be a *demand* for reliability. The demand for automotives exists because the price of not having it is costly. Failure can mean major surprise repair bills, a ruined vacation, stranded on the side of the road for hours, etc. Such a price doesn't exist for the failure of my little toaster. But perhaps this can be artificially made with a disposal tax as I suggested in my post.
Perhaps this could be more elegantly solved by making companies pay for the cost of disposal. That way, the business will be incentivized to optimize down the cost because otherwise they'll have to bake the cost into the product, which disincentivizes consumers from buying it through higher prices. It also gets rid of the information asymmetry because the company definitely knows and is incentivized to know their overall quality so they can account for it.
> How do I as a consumer know if a product will last or not?
You, yourself, wont know. Not unless you are an expert on the product, which most people are not. The manufacturer may know what they are selling you is terribly engineered and will break, but you will not. So how can we overcome this imbalance of knowledge? I think the automotive industry is a good example of this being addressed. If I want to buy a car, how do I know that it is going to be reliable? I don't. Even if I were an expert, I don't have the luxury to buy the car, inspect its mechanics, and return it if I don't like it. But yet, even when situated with this predicament, I can still make a well informed decision that will give me a great chance of obtaining a reliable car. Why? It's because there is a plethora of institutions I have access to to evaluate what brand I should go with. The IIHS, NHTSA, Kelly Blue Book, J.D. Power, Edmunds, Motor Trend, Consumer Reports, my local car mechanic, and more. As great as these institutions may be, I believe it only part of the solution. The second is there needs to be a *demand* for reliability. The demand for automotives exists because the price of not having it is costly. Failure can mean major surprise repair bills, a ruined vacation, stranded on the side of the road for hours, etc. Such a price doesn't exist for the failure of my little toaster. But perhaps this can be artificially made with a disposal tax as I suggested in my post.