The ethical alternative is one that balances innovation and entrepreneurship with ecological and social responsibility.
You can use resources, invent stuff, and organise people to work on it, but you only get to do it if Reality-Based Accounting rates the project as a net positive for the planet, and you have to share some of the benefits.
And if you can't make it happen without being consistently cruel and exploitative to some individuals, groups, or locations, you don't get to do it again.
This is not trivial to organise. But it's far more likely to lead to an R&D explosion than the current myopic and manic-depressive comic book version of "the economy" we're all supposed to have irrational faith in.
nothing to spur innovation like panning every idea through a global counsel of magicians who know what's best for the planet.
aside from global consensus on ideas like 'the planet', it'd require mass labor force control and government assignment, two ideas i'm not thrilled about.
I could see it working in a sci-fi novel, but I have a hard time closing the gaps between them and us.
How is aggressive centralized gating supposed to lead to R&D when history shows freedom leads to innovation and prosperity? You don’t need to have faith in anything. The economy exists and is all around us providing great value.
This is so theoretical it will never work in an acceptable way.
Because of who will decide is responsible and on what grounds?
What will come of it will most likely be analogous to the Communist system where just a central committee was in charge of making all the decisions. and to be quite clear: this system failed utterly and completely. Without the capitalist west there would have been famines in DDR and the east.
On what I agree is, that we need a strong state factoring in stuff like ecological consequences via taxation- so the decision to buy or make stuff is distributed.
You can use resources, invent stuff, and organise people to work on it, but you only get to do it if Reality-Based Accounting rates the project as a net positive for the planet, and you have to share some of the benefits.
And if you can't make it happen without being consistently cruel and exploitative to some individuals, groups, or locations, you don't get to do it again.
This is not trivial to organise. But it's far more likely to lead to an R&D explosion than the current myopic and manic-depressive comic book version of "the economy" we're all supposed to have irrational faith in.