The Ministry for the Future: A Novel

Our systems are what drive history, not our tools.

A just civilization of eight billion, in balance with the biosphere’s production of the things we need; how would that look? What laws would create it? And how can we get there fast enough to avoid a mass extinction event?

Having debunked the tragedy of the commons, they now were trying to direct our attention to what they called the tragedy of the time horizon. Meaning we can’t imagine the suffering of the people of the future, so nothing much gets done on their behalf. What we do now creates damage that hits decades later, so we don’t charge ourselves for it, and t

For quite a long time, a century or two, this “prosperity for all” goal had been the line taken; that although there was inequality now, if everyone just stuck to the program and did not rock the boat, the rising tide would eventually float even the most high-and-dry among them. But early in the twenty-first century it became clear that the planet

The market needs the state healthy, to back money itself. The state needs the market healthy, to keep the economy liquid. But state and market aren’t working hand in hand. Or they are hand in hand, but only because they’re arm wrestling! Struggling for control of the situation they comprise together.

So what we have now, I would say, is not money (very short), nor freedom (we are still registered as Ausländer), but dignity. And this is what I think everyone needs. After the basics of food and shelter that we need just as animals, first thing after that: dignity. Everyone needs and deserves this, just as part of being human. And yet this is a ve

economics was above all a system of quantified ethics and political power that depended on measurement.

Even if market and state were two parts of a single system, that single system was ruled by law; and the laws were made by the nation-states; they could therefore change the laws, that was sovereignty, that was where seigniorage and legitimacy and ultimately social trust and value resided. The market was constructed by, and parasitic on, that struc

Taxes are interesting.