I think it is absolutely essential that we have a vision of where we are going, otherwise there is no guidance on our choices. It seems to me that the human condition beginning with hunter -gatherers is to feed ourselves and we have gone through agriculture and empires and wars as an unfolding of that initial condition. As the climate is in  difficulty many areas will cease to provide food. Indeed we are already seeing this.

A few footnotes as essential background:

 The word economy for the Greeks meant eco home nomos laws of or management.. But the earlier form of nomos in yet earlier Greek was neiman, meaning equal distribution.  In fact throughout history maintaining equal distribution has been the ethical press against concentration of wealth and power.

The word capital comes from Latin for head, as in a new head of cattle. Early civilizations were basically Argentinian cattle ranches the meat distributed through sacrifices maintaining and I think if not a complete reality of equal distribution. The idea that capital comes from the birth of new cattle seems to me very suggestive of what we are working with and how we might evolve.

To me the obvious thing  is to create an environment for growing healthy interesting people taking into account of the human life cycle and its needs of different ages. I have been calling this  Garden World and thinking through the politics of how to get there. GardenWorld is both productive and aesthetic and is the place for growing people. I have been drafting the book toward that end called GardenWorld Politics. The core idea is that since most of us want to live in some combination of civilization and nature why don’t we use our wealth go there? It has to be an intent, not a plan, because we don’t know  enough for planning. Everyone will have to figure out their place in such a transition. Decentralization is probably key, by centralized systems of some kind are probably necessary to keep solutions scaling. Imagine a focus on improving your watershed.

Our current system has failed us because it is killing us. We talk about raising people out of poverty in the underdeveloped world without being aware that we are moving them by force off of the land for other economic uses and placing them in high rises where perhaps their income is up by factor of three but  the costs are up by factor of five. We have  some basic thinking to do and then get on with the project. The basic thinking has to do with how we choose elites and reward them, do we expect to save everyone? What do we do about migrations and the pressures on all asset prices?

The world can be beautiful but we are not organizing ourselves to realize it. I love what David Hockney says in his new book, the history of pictures,” After money for necessities there is nothing to spend more money on except beauty.”

rethinking jobs is crucial and I admire the effort here. I think I proposed last year that, under conditions of transformation/collapse there will be five main categories of work to skill and organize

1, Green everything, economic and aesthetic (design will be crucial)

2. Take care of those hurt by the transition (well-fare on a huge scale)

3. Manage 1 and 2 (a huge management task, way beyond the Manhattan Project and maybe building on Herbert Hoover’s experience feeding Europe after World War I)

4. The education to do 1,2, and 3

5. The arts and sciences to support 1 through 4.

Governance will be important. to create the conditions for voluntary not wage work that is cooperative, experimental, interesting and develops people.