Putting this behind the paywall, as it is definitely not ready for prime time…

Subscribe now

<https://classes.berkeley.edu/content/2024-fall-econ-135-001-lec-001>

Share

How a group of jumped-up monkeys more-or-less accidentally became first a band-wide, then a continent-wide, and then a global-wide anthology intelligence, and then hunted frantically for formal and informal organizational and cultural institutions to make that work…

Along the way, we fell into a Malthusian Trap of dire poverty, in which we turned aside from societies of cooperation to societies of domination…

Then we developed the institutions of modern economic growth, which made us rich at a dizzying rate…

Unfortunately, that rate of progress and transition was much too fast for any process of gradient-descent societal institutional evolution to cope well…

Plus we are still marked by our long history under the harrow of the societies of domination…

Now we face what turns out to be the truly big problem: that of building institutions for managing us as a prosperous species, given that we are a very imperfect anthology intelligence and desperately need a society that will actually enable us to live wisely and well…

Read more