What If We Could Rebuild Society?

What do you say we do an exercise in imagination today? What if we reinvented society and human civilization? Obviously, this can only be a theoretical exercise, because in reality things are much more difficult to change, and neither you nor I have any real power to do something like this.

In my imagination everything can be changed very easily.. I don’t necessarily think being a dreamer is a bad thing. I have been like this my entire life. When I was in kindergarten, I used to imagine what my life would be like in school and later in high school. During medical school, I would visualize my residency and what it would mean to become a well-trained doctor. now I visualize the next ten years with Laura and Luca.

I am trying to nurture the same imagination in Laura, and it seems to be working. Some time ago, I came across a quote — I don’t remember exactly where: “Logic takes you from A to B. Imagination takes you everywhere.” Now I try to repeat the same idea to my children. Laura is very receptive. Luca is still far too young to understand any of it. At three months old, his imagination takes him only from boob A to boob B, and that’s about it.

Like any ability that can be developed rather than simply being innate, the more we exercise our imagination, the better we become at using it. And what better exercise could there be than rethinking the world we live in? Are you ready?

First of all, this cannot be about creating a utopia. We cannot simply imagine a world where everyone is healthy, happy, and rich. Perfection — or the quest for perfection — can exist only in an imperfect world. It is only by recognizing the imperfections around us that we can begin to outline something better. Imagine that we wanted to end world hunger. But without knowing what hunger is, how could we ever have such a mission? In a world where everyone always has enough to eat, nobody would fight for a mission like that.

In the same way, we could argue that if everyone were healthy, nobody would be motivated to improve healthcare systems. This discussion could go on forever, but the logic that emerges from it is relatively simple: utopia automatically destroys the desire for perfection or improvement. So if we want to preserve our desire to change society for the better, perhaps we should not aim to abolish every problem. Instead, we should aim to improve the tools available to us for solving those problems.

So we first need to identify some of society’s needs and think about what we could change in the current system. What exactly are those needs? I think we can divide them into two categories: individual needs, which are experienced differently by each person, and the collective needs of society. Among the most basic individual needs we could include food, water, and oxygen. If we climb a little higher, we reach housing, income, security, healthcare, and social integration.

Although oxygen is readily available, food and water are not equally available everywhere. Water itself is actually abundant on Earth, but unfortunately around 97% of it is salt water. Although the technology to desalinate seawater already exists, in many regions the problem is still one of money. In many places, it is simply cheaper to dig a well than to desalinate seawater. But if we removed cost from the equation, the necessary technology already exists. Of course, we could argue that we cannot desalinate water in the middle of the Sahara Desert, but that isn’t the point.

So in places where freshwater is scarce, it could help to build desalination plants or wells — probably with money we don’t currently have available — and somehow build and manage them in such a way that they cannot later be controlled by governments, terrorist organizations, criminal groups, or anyone else who could use access to water as a way of suppressing the population. Great! So, to improve the world’s water problem, apparently we need more money and fewer conflicts. We’re off to an excellent start.

But what about food? How do we improve that? First of all, I think the globalization of food is destructive to the planet. We should consume far more local products. What we do today — transporting millions of tons of bananas, avocados, and countless other foods from one side of the planet to the other just so each of us can have avocado toast in the morning — is incredibly resource-intensive. Some of those resources could instead be used to solve more fundamental problems, such as improving access to water.

Once we move beyond basic needs and start looking at housing, income, security, healthcare, and social integration, things become considerably more complicated. Here, individual needs begin to partially conflict with the needs of society.

Housing, in my opinion, is closely connected to income. Why do we constantly hear that there is a housing crisis? Do we lack the workforce required to build houses? No. Future generations will continue to be physically capable of constructing buildings. Is it a shortage of construction materials? Not really. Those exist as well, and some of them — wood, for example — are even renewable. So what exactly is the problem with housing? Ah, yes. The cost.

We have a housing problem because everything has become incredibly expensive. But once we connect housing to income, we realize that not everyone has a housing problem. A small part of the population can still comfortably afford it — at least for now. If you ask Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk about the housing market, they would probably tell you housing has never been better. So why do we have a problem with costs? Why haven’t incomes kept pace? Why do costs seem to rise faster than people’s incomes?

One simple explanation would be that income is strongly connected to productivity, while rising prices are influenced by inflation. Productivity is difficult to increase dramatically. For a company to double the salaries of all its employees without changing anything else, it would somehow need to generate substantially more revenue, sell to many more customers, radically improve its production process, or dramatically reduce its costs. None of those things are easy.

Another problem is that the development of new technologies capable of significantly increase productivity is almost always associated with enormous initial costs. Because of this, part of the future economic advantage is already consumed before the benefits even appear. Most often, these innovations are developed to create a competitive edge and give a company a temporary advantage over its competitors.

A version of this kind of competitive strategy could be seen among some Chinese companies. They were able to produce certain goods at prices that competitors elsewhere found extremely difficult to match, sometimes even accepting losses in order to gain market share. So if productivity cannot increase quickly enough to guarantee equally rapid growth in income, how do we make sure prices don’t simply keep rising with inflation?

Security is closely connected to quality of life. The more basic needs a population has covered, the lower crime tends to be. But again, we are not trying to create a utopia. Some degree of crime will probably always exist. What society could do, however, is create laws with consequences strong enough to discourage dangerous behavior. How many of you are already grumbling?

Healthcare is an enormously complex subject, and so is social integration. Both deserve their own separate posts. So apparently, after all this thinking, improving society comes down to two wonderfully simple things: tougher rules and more money. Except perhaps money itself isn’t really the problem. The problem is the way its purchasing power is gradually eroded by inflation. If money did not continuously lose value, prices would face less pressure to rise simply because the currency itself was worth less. Food and energy costs could become more stable, while housing could benefit from greater stability in the cost of materials and labor. A stable economy with low unemployment could also indirectly contribute to greater security.

Inflation, then, may be one of the central problems we need to understand if we want to think seriously about improving society. But what would a zero-inflation society actually look like? And would it even be possible to create one? What if we solved the problem of money and inflation? What if we could afford to address water and food shortages? And what if we had laws strict enough to bring crime close to zero, protecting everything we had managed to build?

Even then, individual needs would eventually come into conflict with the needs of society. Why would someone in Europe pay for wells in Africa? Society seems to be becoming increasingly divided, and that division encourages individualism. The further apart we grow, the easier it becomes to ask ourselves: why should I pay for someone else’s problem? But in my opinion, society is becoming divided precisely because the differences between social classes are growing larger and larger. So once again, we come back to money and economic inequality. Somehow, no matter which direction I take this thought experiment, I seem to end up discussing money as the foundation of so many of our problems.

Just imagine any low-paying job that requires long hours and hard work. Think about the people doing those jobs. Imagine their stories, their lives, and all the turns their lives took before they ended up where they are today. Perhaps some of them deliberately sabotaged their own opportunities along the way, but surely others were simply forced onto that path by circumstances. Maybe their parents couldn’t afford to offer them anything different. Maybe the opportunities were never there in the first place. Economic inequality can very easily become geographical inequality. Think about a mechanic born somewhere in Africa who cannot afford to buy enough food for his children. How is he somehow worth less than a mechanic born in Switzerland who can afford to go on a hunting safari once a year? What is the fundamental difference between these two people?None. Zero.

The work and effort you put into your life certainly matter, but you also need to be born into an environment that gives you the possibility of making certain choices in the first place. If you want to study medicine, for example, you need to live in circumstances that allow you to spend six years studying instead of being forced to work simply to survive. And somehow, we have arrived back where we started: money.

So, if we could solve the problem of money, we could reduce economic and geographical inequality, reduce conflict, and increase global security. Do you have any idea how we could actually do that?