The Architecture of Abundance

A Path to a Democratic Economy Banana Edition!

The news was cause for celebration. Reports for the Autumn cycle had been finalized and were now being read and listened to around the world. Global poverty: down 93% since 2020. Every climate target hit this year, with three unexpectedly surpassed. Topsoil is the healthiest it has been since 1920. At the same time, average work hours had been reduced another 18 minutes to reach 19.2 per week, with 100% employment of those able and willing to work. And perhaps most hearteningly, average global self-reported life satisfaction was up 2% year over year.

Felicia considered the reports as she walked out into the warm evening. She was greeted by the quiet of the city, broken only by the sound of human voices, cicadas, and songbirds. A bittersweet feeling washed over her.

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On the one hand, she felt enormously proud of her contribution and relieved that her service on the regional Citizens’ Council was over. It had been painstaking work, a year-long crash course in ethics, ecology, and sociology. Weeks of debating and ultimately collaborating with people with whom she initially seemed to have little in common. Difficult tradeoffs to weigh, always. But ultimately they had done their part, as had thousands of other local, regional, and global councils — the mistakes of some compensated for by the wisdom of many others. And the results spoke for themselves: the will of the people made manifest in a world that was better today than it had been a year earlier.