I am not the first to point out that our issue is not the lack of resources, but the inability to direct them in a meaningful way. The idea that free-market dynamics will create the best resource allocation is just hard to believe. People will say that "well other system do we have!?" which to me is defeatist, assume the worst from human race kind of approach. There are people out there doing much research on coordination, new ways to have a democracy, novel voting systems (say, quadratic voting). We need to believe that we can do better.
> Like all good mystical experiences, it happened in Vegas. I was standing on top of one of their many tall buildings, looking down at the city below, all lit up in the dark. If you’ve never been to Vegas, it is really impressive. Skyscrapers and lights in every variety strange and beautiful all clustered together. And I had two thoughts, crystal clear:
> It is glorious that we can create something like this.
> It is shameful that we did.
> Like, by what standard is building gigantic forty-story-high indoor replicas of Venice, Paris, Rome, Egypt, and Camelot side-by-side, filled with albino tigers, in the middle of the most inhospitable desert in North America, a remotely sane use of our civilization’s limited resources?
A seminal article on the failure of the chaotic human coordination to-date is "Meditation on the Moloch". https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Here's a passage I liked:
> Like all good mystical experiences, it happened in Vegas. I was standing on top of one of their many tall buildings, looking down at the city below, all lit up in the dark. If you’ve never been to Vegas, it is really impressive. Skyscrapers and lights in every variety strange and beautiful all clustered together. And I had two thoughts, crystal clear:
> It is glorious that we can create something like this.
> It is shameful that we did.
> Like, by what standard is building gigantic forty-story-high indoor replicas of Venice, Paris, Rome, Egypt, and Camelot side-by-side, filled with albino tigers, in the middle of the most inhospitable desert in North America, a remotely sane use of our civilization’s limited resources?