Thank you for that soberly optimistic assessment of where we are at. I agree to an extent with Lees’s Response: the nexus of innovation and personal material gain has fundamentally contributed to a certain willful blindness to the existence of the potential costs involved with those new ideas.

As it happens, I have developed a better approach to the economic system. (If it matters, I have an M.A. in economics; my Thesis was in political economy, where philosophy and economics intersect.)

Everyone who was an employee of any entity in business or government would be paid the same income. (That income would also be paid to retirees and adults too incapacitated to work any job.) The total of that income would be the supply of money for the economy. To retain incentives, different positions in those entities would provide different (negotiated) benefits (in-kind only, not monetary allowances). People could also work as singularly self-employed individuals and in partnerships (where all involved negotiated among themselves their remuneration), earning whatever amount of remuneration their efforts and the market would allow. Incentives for imagination would still exist, in the form of royalties paid to holders of patents and copyrights, but those would not be a means of enriching others.