Read 2025-06-13
I had high hopes for this book, and didn’t quite like is as much as I thought. The first 2/3 is very full of names of economists that I didn’t know about, with a lot of quotes and constant sprinkles of their philosophies and teachings without explaining it well enough for a newbie. Most of it went over my head, and I started skimming a bit at times because I got bored/frustrated. It felt all a bit inside baseball.
Interesting ideas though, but painfully unrealistic. We can’t actually rewild half the Earth and live a planned socialism life with drastically reduced power consumption quotas, right?. The last chapter is a glimpse into a Half-Earth Socialism future, but it felt somewhat unappealing. Communal living and centrally planned economy… mhhh.
The idea that I perhaps I liked most in the book, and that felt also somewhat achievable with AI in the future, is that you feed different conditions and desired outcomes into “the supercomputer” and it suggest a few different paths to get there, e.g. “rewild 30% and have a 1200 W power quota per person” or “everyone go vegan and no individual car ownership, but use as much electricity as you like”, etc. ⭐️⭐️⭐️