This is pretty much all I think about anymore. It's so easy to understand both from a secular and religious standpoint that helping the bottom helps everyone. But since the trickle-down economics era started in the 1980s, pretty much all of the economic gains have gone to the top. Wealth inequality has reached such a brutal level that I would argue that the American Dream ended sometime between 2001 and 2008. Everything since has been rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Now rents and home prices are so high vs incomes that most Americans never get out from under the yoke, they just work until they die. And politicians openly call for malarky like raising the retirement age, rather than working towards actually solving problems.

So assuming we can all agree on how bad things have gotten (we can't/won't heh), the solution becomes pretty obvious:

We need to shift from profit to residual income and recurring resources.

For example, a learning center in my city offers free electric car charging which I used just yesterday. Most places would charge a fee per kWh. But it's conceivable that a solar battery station could be mass-produced for under $5,000. It could be priced a nominal amount to pay itself off, perhaps $1/kWh, put out 5 kWh per day, and pay itself off in about 1000 days or 3 years. Then provide free charging to everyone for perhaps 20-30 more years. Then it becomes in everyone's best interest to own a station, so amortization loans/grants would become available where basically anyone can get a near-0% interest, $5,000 loan and get a station immediately, speeding rollout. The cost of true innovation approaches free, that's why we're trained not to see it.

We could repeat this societal investment process with automatic dishwashers, Roombas, Gardyn/Rise hydroponic indoor gardens, that in-home pick and place OK-Robot that was on HN the other day, electric scooters/cars, and eventually vans and tiny homes. Everyone could transition from monthly bills to an automated lifestyle where most basic needs are provided by robots or UBI within a social contract akin to solarpunk. This is essentially FIRE or F-U money, but where primary expenses are provided scalably at an individual level so they can't be taken away by concentrated wealth.

The reality I came from prevented all of this. When I was in my early 20s, fresh out of watching Fight Club and 8 Mile and The Fast and the Furious, the US had just voted for GW Bush instead of Al Gore in an effort to astroturf Peak Oil out of the public eye. We invested trillions of dollars into McMansions and SUVs to fight a War on Terror for 20 years and offshore 100,000 US factories, doubling down on globalization policies like NAFTA. When I mentioned even the most primitive cost-saving alternatives like solar thermal hot water heaters and heat pumps, I was met with scorn. That lasted until 2013 when Obama's reelection gave enough confidence to the auto industry that stuff like the Nissan Leaf and Tesla (maybe model S?) ushered in MVP electric vehicles. Which was great, but keep in mind that lithium-ion batteries were invented in the 1990s. We could have had a moonshot to get them to today's densities by 2000 and saved about 15-25 years.

So in a very real sense, the private sector delayed the rollout of sustainable solutions for decades, especially considering that a similar moonshot could have happened for solar panels and keystone tech like blue LEDs, mRNA/CRISPR, basically all of the "ubiquitous" tools we take for granted today.

I bring that up because Gen X remembers being ostracized for trying to make things better, and we have no loyalties towards worshipping ignorance. We're in the midst of the Fourth Turning, and when anyone younger than us takes the reins of government, it will be a watershed moment for sustainability. I think the rise in authoritarianism and proxy wars is about derailing progress long enough that minority rule can maintain control through sabotage until the New World Order can be cemented. So the most important things we can do are resist doublethink and not pay into systems of control. Which basically means looking at stuff like austerity with a critical eye to see how it stifles innovation and props up the status quo, under the guise of saving money which only flows to the top anyway.