Citing a New Scientist article, Anders ruminates on steps to a better world.

1. Evidence based politics
2. Drug legalisation
3. Keep everybody's DNA profile
4. Measure non-wealth progress
5. Research into geoengineering
6. Real carbon taxes
7. Use genetic engineering
8. Stop the current ocean harvesting
9. Pay people for uploading green power onto the grid
10. Four day work weeks

I think some of these are very sensible (like shifting to a harm reduction approach for drugs, doing proper geoengineering, use of genetic engineering, sensible ocean management and to price carbon realistically). The big problem is that many of the improvements are based on very strong assumptions about the government . .

I would probably add methods of improving government transparency and accountability to the list. The greatest threats to human flourishing today seem to come directly or indirectly from bad governance, corruption and closed societies. Finding ways to overcome that would do a great deal of improving the ability to fix other problems. . .

That's always the problem with utopian schemes: they assume that some sort of bureaucracy can function competently and altruistically, though all of the evidence indicates that this is a fantasy at best.

Human beings aren't like that. This is a feature, not a bug, and institutional arrangements need to explicitly address human nature in order to function usefully. The very worst thing that we could do would be to enable more powerful government. It is a mistake to look to government for useful responses to the problem set. The ideas from the list that seek to reduce government activism - such as ending drug wars and prohibitions against genetic engineering - help. The ideas that increase government activism, such as taxing carbon emissions and "redistributing" the proceeds to poor people, are idiotic.

That doesn't mean that there are no useful regulatory functions. Requiring testing and scrutiny of engineered life forms makes sense. Requiring utilities to work both ways, to accept power inputs as well as withdrawals from the grid, is simple good sense.

But it should not be restricted to supposed "green power". This is where governments go wrong and become part of the problem rather than the solution. A multi-fuel CHP system that used some biomass, some fossil natural gas and had co-products such as biochar and ammonia might well generate power above local needs which could be input to the grid for use by others, but good luck getting such a system labeled as "green". It's not the right question.