A fair summary of some wide ranging issues:
An often underappreciated aspect of our economic future is the imperative of rationing resources. Part of that underappreciation is due to how such a perspective requires effective leadership stronger than (and despite) the backlash to it.
The previous link looked some at rationing contexts, and the following link clarifies further some economics:
Another recent discussion on how we might apply ourselves to much of these issues, for our consideration:
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It’s good to see and hear that people are getting some successes in creating socioeconomic justice. The ideas are excellent, the vision is clear, there is obviously growing support as well. Unfortunately I believe the phrase ‘power concedes nothing’ is the reason there hasn’t been more movement.
They covered all the logical issues and resolutions, and I’m glad they discussed the problem of how to get government to budge on policy. The illogical and emotional nature of fear and greed are what really stand in the way, and the elite have almost completely separated themselves from society, while also gaining near total control over our government. This may be more true of America than other nations, but I don’t believe many major countries are far off.
We need more economists and visionaries like these women. We’re also going to need a way to force the concession of power. I had hoped education would be the great equalizer, but in the US we’re staring down the barrel of the end of public education now because of the lack of education in the past.
We need more entertaining TikTok and Instagram educational content I guess, can’t force people to learn anything.
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It’s gotta be a new one if we are to survive as a species. Based on a public ledger built on a block chain and a cryptocurrency backed by units of energy on a renewable energy grid. Of the current practices of governments, obviously the Scandinavian democratic socialism model is best. I would only try to account for immigration controls and offering of jobs in the country the overflow of immigrants come from via mutually beneficial agreements between countries. Of course, i am basing this on the assumption that the rest of the world would rush into the renewable energy grid race once they saw the USA cut it’s war budget and invest it all on renewable energy tech just leaving enough of a budget for war that if anyone attacks us we have our nuclear program able to deliver.
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Thanks for the good reading everyone, i just caught up with the chat on this topic. I think I have been thinking about the same lines as most with my ideas on how to go about saving the species. I only wish we had spent more money on trying to find a plan B planet just in case. I wanted to add that we should probably consider that we might not beat the climate change challenge and/or the perfect economic model to bring about world peace challenge. We should start planning on how to leave behind self sufficient AI tech for a billion years from now when the planet is recovered and the aliens land, they might yet find DNA sequences to clone humans and bring us back. 
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I think looking for another planet is for the billionaires. With this, they can attempt to colonize the Universe. Besides, if we can essentially make another planet Earth-like and human-friendly, why can’t we do it here?
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Right. I think that the Green New Deal should be the vehicle we use to terraform earth to an environment that can sustain us a bit longer. Still for the species to survive for another 10,000 years, and to tackle the over population problems we should consider anything from orbiting colonies to galactic exploration.
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You bring up a great point about entertaining educational content… and it reminds me of this recent interview, on entertaining political education content:
Some of the approach to content creation discussed in this video (above) also reminds me of the video discussion over on this thread…
I’ve also been thinking about how I might design a 4x game, to entertainingly simulate (and educate) the intersections of geopolitics, ecology, economy, etc. But, probably most people wouldn’t play such genre, though other games could also educate on a narrower set of such things.
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For our consideration, a discussion on the thermodynamics of economic degrowth:
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For our consideration, here is a good video essay on economic and ecological intersections with our agricultural practices:
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And, here is a discussion on those issues as well:
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There isnt one single system you can say is better for society.
A society that does not have a lot of resources would need the government to run the means of production.
on the other hand if you have a society where people have decent amount of wealth, capitalism is great.
The question of morality doesn’t have to do with what the system of economic is but how it is implemented.
corporate tyranny can be just as damaging to a society as maoist dictatorship for example.
Rights of people, equity, inclusion etc are different from economic systems. And depending upon the rest of the rules by which a country is run any economic system can be moral or amoral
I don’t know what a 4x game is, but I’d love to hear about it!
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Howdy 
apologies for my absence
4x games, (short for “explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate”), are kind of grand strategy games, like playing a civilization (often empire) simulation. A reason I like the idea of designing this type of game is that it can impart an intuitive understanding of complex issues altogether, eg: economy, innovation, investment, technology, science, society, culture, history, diplomacy, geopolitics, ideology, religion, war, ecology, etc. Many such nuanced aspects within games are very simplified. Designers project and condense their understanding of complexities (such as those) into the ways they simplify their game designs, and then players may subliminally absorb those simplified models of understanding (and/or may mindfully examine them). Such a game carefully designed with intent could demonstrate our human predicament, and would illuminate our real world situation to the players.
(An interesting historical example of education in games is Monopoly; previously The Landlord’s Game.)
Basically all 4x games have victory conditions for players to win by. For example, you could direct your economic and scientific investment to grow your military strength, conquer your neighbors, exploit their lands, enslave their people, quell your dissent, propagandize or draft for enlistment, etc, and eventually be the last empire standing to win the game. But there are also many other ways of playing and winning, such as: simply defending your homeland, appeasing your population, and achieving some pinnacle of scientific wonder (eg space ark) to win the game; or perhaps ally with some empires, hire mercenaries to sabotage, plunder, shape, and control trade networks with plausible deniability, spy on and influence or even coup your trade partners into fighting your enemies for you, and essentially amass ungodly amounts of wealth and economic control (eg oligarch) to win the game; or world peace and prosperity to win together; or maybe no one empire actually achieves a victory condition despite all such combined efforts, and your empire just survives until the game timer runs out; etc etc.
What I haven’t seen is a 4x game which imparts a sufficiently accurate intuitive understanding of our human predicament; ie, I haven’t seen realistic victory condition design. As an analogy, if all the 4x games I’ve seen were “Monopoly” games, then it would be as if those “Monopoly” games always neglected to impoverish all but one player; such “Monopoly” games would impart an inaccurate intuitive misunderstanding of actual monopoly upon players. Similarly, 4x games are imparting an inaccurate intuitive misunderstanding of our human predicament upon players.
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I would argue an accurate educational 4x simulation should kind of game-theoretically entrap competitive players into a mutually assured destruction of ecological overshoot, by requiring them to waste their civilization/life-enabling natural resources on arms races and wealth concentration in order to resist being conquered by other players. In essence, it would be more like a civilization survival game, where to survive in the long run a player’s civilization would need to steward both: their environment and their culture in order to, both: endure long-term economic and ecological sustainability, and to resist the pandora’s box of alleviating your society’s hardships with short-term economic sufficiency (at ecological expense); all in a context of requiring short-term economic sufficiency (and ecological sacrifice) in order to not be conquered by other players seeking to alleviate their own society’s hardships with the natural resources your society may be attempting to steward for the long-run.
But, my biggest issue with such a design is that civilization does not actually have the locus of control a player does in such a simulation. If control was accurately simulated, then it would basically leave no room for any decisions whatsoever, (let alone meaningful decisions), by the player; (ie, it would not actually be a game). Because, if players did have such unrealistic agency and also understood the metagame, then they could in fact coordinate to avoid the multipolar trap; however, society is not nearly so mindful, to say the least, and so such a design may risk naively implying that our actual society could also potentially coordinate to avoid the trap. (But, perhaps I’m being too pessimistic about that possibility, and maybe since the potential is uncertain, then the bigger risk is actually in not implying that possibility; perhaps implying the possibility enables it).
Currently I’m wondering about a mercenary company simulator, with those 4x grand strategy elements mostly idlily auto-simulated as a shared game setting, with limited setting-agency from players, as if they were indeed a mercenary company only capable of influencing the ways in which various civilizations inevitably collapsed. This could accurately simulate the game-theoretic multipolar trap of our human predicament without naively implying a society could simply selflessly follow the sustainable path, (at least not as simply as one set of players could so choose in a typical 4x simulation); and then it would also be a game with player agency, (despite that there is no way for the players to enable large civilizations to survive in the long run).
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Hey, how have you been? I hope you’re doing well! Thank you for getting back to me about the game, it sounds fascinating!
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Thank you! I’m doing fairly well. Just lots of little life things, altogether. I mostly needed to take a break for a while, and limit my focus on other things. I was studying more, and also am now working on organizing in Oregon for a constitutional amendment on our right to a healthy environment; it should greatly empower cases where people sue our government for environmental violations.
Yeah, the game idea reminds me of the phrase, show don’t tell. The medium of games as art have unique potential in providing complex experiences, and conveying complex messages.
How have you been? And what would you think of such a game?
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On the outlook of our economy and society, this is interesting:
… the permanent loss of 15% of oil supply per year could raise oil prices by more than 400%. … Within 10 years, unemployment rates would likely reach 30%. That’s higher than during the Great Depression …
(source: https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/-/media/global/files/global-outlook/2024/global-outlook-executive-summary.pdf)
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On that 15% per year rate of decline given our “unconventional sources” while maintaining “investments in existing fields”:
… this shows how investments in existing fields maintains the 15% per year decline of production levels, (into potential economic depression).
(source: They're Not Making Oil Like They Used To: Stealth Peak Oil? | Art Berman)
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I’ve been good and not-so-good, but I’m still here. 
I think the game idea sounds great. Not only does it have the potential to become popular, but it could also educate people without their needing to put in much effort to learn. A total win/win! I’m really interested to hear more about the amendment.
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