Pressing World Issues

Global Grand Challenges

Hint: Disclaimer: This page is a work in progress, and items are not listed in order of importance. The meaning of some of the following items may be different than what you may think, so please limit your assumptions. Further explanations will be provided and published in a forthcoming book, after being vetted and peer reviewed for general consensus and best practices

1. General ecocide (Whole World issue)
2. Disparity of wealth. High Gini Coefficient
3. Fractional Reserve Banking with high leverage ratios providing for instability
4. Desertification
5. Deforestation
6. High Cost of Living, preventing honest pursuit of Self-Determination by most people (a First World issue)
7. Standing armies
8. Genocide
9. Enforced Mediocrity
10. Political Ponerology, or promotion of evil within institutions
11. Medicine for Profit
12. Resource scarcity - water rights, clean air, clean food (Whole World issue)
13. Patent system and other legal fictions for enclosing public knowledge
14. Lack of public access to published journals. Solution possibility: cross subsidization or institution only pay for the service
15. Limitation of liability (ie, fundamental unaccountability baked into the operation of enterprise)
16. Biodiversity loss
17. Alienation from work (related to high Cost of Living
18. Access to healthcare
19. Illiteracy, and especially collaborative illiteracy
20. Innumeracy and Scientific Illiteracy
21. Corporate funded research which encloses the intellectual output of public institutions
22. Pollution, especially water pollution
23. Corrupt institutions
24. Economic system based on proprietary development as opposed to open source product development
25. Training as opposed to education
26. Disciplinary thinking, as opposed to systems thinking which acknewledges that things are connected.
27. Agricultural monoculture
28. Fossil fuel energy instead of renewable energy
29. Global supply chains via cost extrernalization
30. Externalization of social, environmental, and lifetime costs
31. Slavery, including wage slavery
32. Consequences of Colonialism + Neocolonialism
33. Depression
34. Insurance Racket
35. Corrupt Officials and Bribes

Causes

1. Fear

Human Structures

1. Financialization

Psychography of Macrosocial Phenomena

This is an entertaining take on the relationship between nature and the power flows of society. We think that this is a brilliant encapsulation of the human psychology that makes the world what it is today. In particular - that both the cause and the solution is within each of us - we have the ultimate responsibility, not some 'tyrant on high'.

Universal Solutions

1. Universal access to education (upgrading the operating system in peoples' heads)
2. Circular Economies
3. Open Source Product Development
4. Transparency
5. Ethical Economics
6. Distributed Production - Distributed Manufacturing - and especially Distributive Enterprise
7. Democracy
8. Transparency
9. Afforestation - planting trees. For example, transitioning from fossil fuels to biofuels can be accomplished by repurposing wasteland and other use to Integrated Polyculture biomass production
10. Agricultural perennial polyculture
11. Renewable energy
12. Regenerative development of land
13. Economics based on full cost accounting
14. Building of (Renewable and self sustaining) Economies + Medical Systems + Infastructure in Developing and/or Island countries, Or rural areas of ones that do not fit those prior conditions, yet face similar problems
15. Unlimited Liability Company
16. Termination of Public Offering which separates agency from the executive role, ie - enforces conflict of interest between owners and operators. (this is a longer discussion)
17. Just Internet - for Web 3.0, we need to start considering libre hardware chips. The internet runs on hardware. That hardware is proprietary and non-transparent. Step 1 for an open internet is open source hardware for the internet. This way, there are no back doors, as you can examine what everything does.

Prizes

Solving pressing world issues is noble work. Here is a list of prizes that honors such work.

1. Berggruen Prize

Other Viewpoints of a Better Future

• WEF prediction - [1]

Links

• Sustainable Development Goals - embody a large portion of OSE's goals.
• Andre Gunder Frank - seminal thinker on the topic
• Structural Evil on wikipedia - [2]