The goal, of course, is not to throw 23 million people out of work, but to refocus their talents on productive activities. If each of these individuals contributed $148,000 to the economy, rather than zero, GDP would increase by roughly $3.4 trillion. That gain, if achieved in equal increments over the next ten years, would add nearly 1.6 percent to annual productivity growth, which would more than double the 1.3 percent rate turned in between 2007 and 2018. Achieving similar gains across the OECD would add $10 trillion to global output.

The principal purpose, however, has been to loosen the claw-like grasp that scarcity economics has held over our working lives, and to diminish our corresponding and unsustainable preoccupation with economic growth. For by recognizing that many of the core assumptions that underwrite our economic institutions are an artifact of the agricultural revolution, amplified by our migration into cities, frees us to imagine a whole range of new, more sustainable possible futures for ourselves, and rise to the challenge of harnessing our restless energy, purposefulness, and creativity to shaping our destiny.

The fact that our time is so unusual gives us an outsized opportunity to make a difference. Few people who ever live will have as much power to positively influence the future as we do. Such rapid technological, social, and environmental change means that we have more opportunity to affect when and how the most important of these changes occur, including by managing technologies that could lock in bad values or imperil our survival. Civilisation’s current unification means that small groups have the power to influence the whole of it. New ideas are not confined to a single continent, and they can spread around the world in minutes rather than centuries.

Here are two reasons why this might happen. First, perhaps, as political economist Benjamin Friedman argues, people are more morally motivated in times of economic growth. When the economy is growing, everyone can be better off than they were in the past. This means, Friedman argues, that citizens will worry less about how their life compares to the lives of people around them and will be more supportive of generous, open, and tolerant social policies. And if you look at the historical record, he claims, countries tend to make moral progress—becoming fairer, more open, and more egalitarian—during higher-growth periods, and they tend to morally regress during periods of stagnation.

A second reason ties back to our earlier discussion of cultural evolution. When technological innovation is possible, there are great economic gains to be had from critical thinking and scientific inquiry; and since economically successful cultures gain more members, cultural evolution currently selects for traits conducive to science. As a side effect, so this argument goes, we apply our critical capacities to moral issues, too, and therefore make moral progress. In a stagnant world, the economic reasons to engage in critical thinking and scientific inquiry would be much weaker. Instead, other values would be selected for, such as those favouring hierarchy and conformity, which have guided so many societies in the past.

You can’t say how much information a human being is taking in and reacting to at any given time, but you can easily observe the difference between a human being that is coping and one that is overloaded. That’s my diagnosis of what led to the series of connected political eruptions between the financial crisis and the pandemic. The hypothesis set out as early as 1970 by Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shock turned out to be correct: the number of people who were no longer able to cope with the modern world reached a critical mass.