Executive Summary

• The key incentives to align to direct our efforts intelligently towards the key goals we want to achieve
• The specific national policies Peak Prosperity advocates
• Common sense guidelines for ecological sustainabilty, social justice, and addressing wealth inequality
• Adding your ideas to this list

If you have not yet read Part 1: Deconstructing The Green New Deal, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

At Peak Prosperity we’ve outlined a very large set of the problems (which have solutions) and predicaments (which only have outcomes to be managed intelligently or otherwise) that our socitey increasingly will have to grapple with over the next few decades.

Given the late stage of the present set of circumstances, we strongly believe that everybody should attend first and foremost to their own resiliency efforts. It means donning your oxygen mask before helping others get theirs on.

Everyone reading this should take the steps outlined in our book Prosper!: How to Prepare for the Future and Create a World Worth Inheriting to get your own house in order.

Done that? Then move onto helping those around you: your friends, your wider family, and your fellow community members. 

But what happens after all that? What are the critical steps we as a society should take to sufficiently and sustainably deal with the problems and predicaments facing us?

Here's what we propose.

Align the Incentives (Stupid!)

Bill Clinton famously said “It’s the economy stupid!” during his 1992 campaign run. When in a battle you have to fall back on the simplest thing that will work and when it comes to getting humans to do one thing instead of another the simplest, most robust statement we can rely on is “it’s the incentives, stupid!”

Incentives includes rewards and punishments. It’s about having a choice between this or that and trusting that people will (almost) always choose the thing that benefits them the most.

Warren Buffet’s right-hand man, Charlie Munger, once said:

Well, I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it.