The Economic Game Plan
What do we mean by “we might be able to do better than solve things”? How can one culturally engineer a civilization?
As explained at the beginning of this book, we expect that cities and suburbs will largely cease to be safe places to raise kids (the economic models on which they are built don’t function in states of rapid decline, as Detroit’s recent history demonstrates—see “Detroit as a Model for Collapse” in the Appendix on page 678 for more detail). In addition, a world of rapidly collapsing population makes stock markets and debt instruments systematically unsafe places for money. What happens in this world? Who wins? Where will savvy investors put their money?
In a world with rapidly declining populations, the only smart investment is in communities with populations that are still growing and economically interacting. These groups will continue to generate wealth in a society that is, on the aggregate, collapsing. Most of these communities will feature hard cultures and thus be caustic to mainstream society. These enclaves will also likely cut themselves off from larger society, creating isolated havens: Small, culturally isolationist, economically viable groups (Simone likens these to medieval cities).
While these communities will feature a range of cultural structures, the evidence to which we presently have access implies that those which form organically will tend to be religious, xenophobic, and fascist—or otherwise dictatorially hierarchical. Given that these communities offer rare opportunities for wealth appreciation, they will likely be well-funded (and if our data on those who have more kids is correct, they will also be well-armed).
The goal of this book is to plant the seeds of as many culturally aligned havens as possible while beginning to build an inter-haven network—a network of growing, economically flourishing enclaves (be they distributed communities, city-states, or something in between) that, while different, culturally recognize that they share a common goal and have a framework for interacting despite their cultural differences.
Eventually the situation will right itself. Psychological tendencies that make people open to new cultural ideas, and thus vulnerable to the cultural supervirus and other pop cultures, will be systematically bred out of most human populations. We are already seeing this rapid shift take place in post-demographic collapse populations. As mentioned earlier, researchers have quantitatively demonstrated that over just the period between 2004 to 2018, differential fertility rates increased the number of U.S. adults opposed to same-sex marriage by 17%, from 46.9 million to 54.8 million.[[94]](#_ftn94)
This sociological market correction will create a new “type” of human—one that is dramatically more inclined toward dictatorial fascism, phobic toward free speech, and likely to dehumanize women and outsiders. One goal of the Index is to ensure that that is not the only type of human left. We aim to create mechanisms that enable prosocial populations that are open to new ideas and tolerant of other cultures to stay well above replacement rate, grow as populations, and ultimately defend themselves when necessary.
If we can achieve this goal while also fostering cultures whose communities and industries present viable investment opportunities in a collapsing world, we will be able to concentrate wealth, power, and technology, making a bounce back from the dark age much faster and less painful.
The Index is intended to function as a harmonious cultural transfer mechanism, allowing for evidence-based lateral exchange between cultures within the society we rebuild. Cultures that descend from this network will be dramatically more robust and intentional than those of the existing social order, which has thus far evolved almost entirely organically. The coming generations face a worthwhile challenge for our species to overcome—one final trial before taking to the stars.
The above scenario is just what we see as most likely given the evidence to which we have access. We pride ourselves on creating a cultural network that can adapt to changing conditions rapidly. We already radically updated our model of what the future may bring when we encountered evidence suggesting humanity’s future will be defined more by a concentration of bigotry than religious fervor and we expect our model to shift several times more. We lay out this scenario less as a concrete road map of the future and more as one scenario worth consideration.