Two Paths: G.D.P. Trajectories Your economists project two point five percent annual growth.
This requires twenty consecutive years of nothing going wrong, which your species has never achieved.
Meanwhile your destructive economy (military spending plus its cybercrime offspring) is already eleven point five percent
of G.D.P. and growing faster than your actual economy. The Soviet Union collapsed at fifteen to eighteen percent.
This chapter models two paths, the one you're on and the one where you redirect the murder budget.
One ends with average income at three hundred and thirty-nine thousand dollars.
The other ends with cockroaches finding this manual. Your civilization has somewhere between eight years and fifteen years
before your destructive economy overtakes your productive one.
After that, building things becomes less rational than stealing them, and the math that applies to Somalia applies to everyone.
This chapter models two paths: the one you're on, and the one where you redirect the murder budget.
I've lived one of them. Your trend data projects the other.
Two Paths. Your Current Trajectory. Your economists project two point five percent annual growth.
This projection assumes no major wars, no pandemics worse than COVID, no catastrophes, and no acceleration of any trend
that is currently accelerating. It is not a baseline. It is the best-case scenario for a civilization that spends more on
explosion technology than on figuring out why its own bodies stop working, and it requires twenty consecutive years of getting
lucky. Your species has never had twenty consecutive years of getting lucky.
Here is what is actually happening. Your military spending is accelerating, not stabilizing.
Global military spending hit two point seven two trillion dollars in twenty twenty-four, up nine point four percent in a
single year, the steepest rise since the Cold War. That was the tenth consecutive annual increase.
The ten-year compound growth rate is three point four percent in real terms.
Your nuclear arsenals are being modernized, not reduced. You are deploying autonomous weapons systems without governance
frameworks, which means you are building machines that make irreversible decisions and then not telling them when to stop.
War funds cybercrime. Cybercrime funds war. Your military spending isn't the whole destructive economy.
Cybercrime costs your civilization ten point five trillion dollars per year, growing from six trillion dollars in twenty
twenty-one to ten point five trillion dollars in twenty twenty-five.
A.I.-enhanced attacks are accelerating this trend. There is high confidence that this is growing at fifteen percent annually.
If measured as a country, it would be the third-largest economy on Earth, after the U.S.
and China. And this is not a separate problem from war. North Korea funds its nuclear program through state-sponsored hacking.
Russia finances military operations with ransomware revenue.
China's cyber-espionage steals the intellectual property that its military-industrial complex can't develop on its own.
Cybercrime is war by other means, and it is more profitable than the global trade of all major illegal drugs combined.
At current growth rates, cybercrime costs reach forty-two trillion dollars within a decade.
And ninety-nine percent of cybercrimes go unpunished, because your enforcement systems were designed for a world where criminals
had to physically show up. A.I. amplifies whatever you point it at.
Right now, you are pointing it at destruction. A single A.I.
agent can probe thousands of systems simultaneously, generate custom phishing attacks in any language, and find vulnerabilities
faster than your entire cybersecurity workforce combined. Your military is racing to deploy autonomous weapons.
Your adversaries are racing to deploy autonomous hackers. A.I.
doesn't change which direction humanity is pointed; it makes you go faster in whatever direction you were already going.
On your current trajectory, that means a billion A.I.-enhanced attackers against defenses that can't keep pace.
On the Wishonia path, it means a billion A.I.-enhanced researchers curing diseases.
Same technology. Same capability. Different direction. The tool doesn't care.
You have to choose. Add it up. Your destructive economy (military spending plus its cybercrime offspring, not counting the
political dysfunction tax or the cost of disease) is already thirteen point two trillion dollars per year, which is eleven
point five percent of global G.D.P. Both components are growing faster than your economy, and A.I.
is about to accelerate both. This is the trend line nobody puts on the two point five percent growth slide, because if you
did, the slide would need a different title. Your two point five percent projection is not the trajectory you are on.
It is the trajectory you would be on if you stopped doing all the things you are currently doing more of.
Projecting two point five percent growth while your destructive economy grows faster than your productive one is like projecting
weight loss while eating more every day. The spreadsheet says one thing.
The trend says another. The trend does not care about the spreadsheet.
So How Long Do You Have? At current growth rates, your destructive economy reaches twenty-five percent of G.D.P.
in eight years and fifty percent in fifteen years. The Soviet Union devoted an estimated fifteen to eighteen percent of
G.D.P. to military spending before it collapsed, and that was *just* military, without a ten trillion dollar cybercrime
sector on top. The late Roman Empire spent roughly sixty to eighty percent of its entire government budget on the military,
which, combined with currency debasement and rising tax burdens, produced the fiscal crisis that preceded its fall.
Your destructive economy is already eleven point five percent of G.D.P.
and accelerating. You are on track to match the Soviet extraction rate within a decade, and you are not even counting the
political dysfunction tax or the cost of disease, which would move the timeline forward.
You Already Know What This Looks Like. If the Soviet Union and Rome sound too distant to worry about, here is what economic
collapse looks like right now, on your planet, to people who are alive while you read this.
Venezuela's G.D.P. fell eighty percent in under a decade. G.D.P.
per capita went from twelve thousand four hundred dollars to four thousand two hundred dollars.
The minimum wage is four dollars per month. Eighty-two percent of the population lives in poverty.
Eight million people fled the country, the largest displacement in the Western Hemisphere.
A Harvard economist called it "the biggest economic collapse in human history outside of war or state collapse".
Lebanon's currency lost ninety-eight percent of its value. G.D.P.
per capita dropped from eight thousand dollars to three thousand dollars in three years.
Poverty tripled from twelve percent to forty-four percent in a decade, and seventy-three percent of the population lives
in multidimensional poverty. The electricity grid provides one to three hours per day.
The banking system is insolvent, and people's life savings simply vanished.
Somalia has a G.D.P. per capita of five hundred and ninety-two dollars, ranks last out of one hundred and ninety-three countries
on the Human Development Index, and fifty-four percent of its population lives below the poverty line.
It has been a failed state for over thirty years. Recovery is not in progress.
Recovery is not planned. The word "recovery" is not applicable to a country that has not had a functioning central government
since nineteen ninety-one. These are not cautionary tales. They are previews.
Every one of these collapses followed the same pattern: a parasitic economy grew faster than the productive one, the productive
people left or switched sides, and the system passed a point where the game theory made recovery impossible.
Your global economy is running the same pattern at a larger scale.
The difference is that when Venezuela collapses, Venezuelans can flee to Colombia.
When the global economy collapses, there is no Colombia. The system does not need to reach fifty percent to break.
It needs to reach the point where productive people start concluding that building things is less rewarding than stealing
them. And your war economy is manufacturing that conclusion as fast as it can.
Here is the loop. Your governments print money to fund military spending, which devalues wages through inflation, which
makes legitimate work pay less, which pushes talent toward the destructive economy, which grows, which justifies more military
spending. Meanwhile, every country the U.S. has bombed, sanctioned, or regime-changed has learned a lesson: conventional
military resistance against Western economies is suicide, but draining them through cyber operations is cheap, effective,
and essentially unpunished. You spent decades teaching adversarial nations that their only viable strategy is to parasitize
your productive economy from the inside. They were excellent students.
North Korea cannot build an aircraft carrier, but it can steal one point five billion dollars in cryptocurrency in a single
afternoon. That is the rational response to the incentive structure you built.
Domestically, the same logic applies at the individual level.
Cybercrime already has a higher return on investment than most legitimate businesses, and ninety-nine percent of it goes
unpunished. When a software engineer can earn more in a week of ransomware than in a year of building products, the "crime
pays" calculation is not a moral failure. It is an economic one.
You made legitimate work pay poorly by diverting productive investment into destruction, then act surprised when people
choose the option that pays. Every year the gap between "crime pays" and "work pays" gets wider, more talent flows to the
wrong side of the ledger. This is a recruitment pipeline for the destructive economy, funded by the destructive economy,
producing the poverty that feeds the destructive economy. The Wishonia path breaks this loop at every link.
Redirect military spending to medical research and you stop manufacturing the poverty.
Cure diseases and you make the workforce productive enough that legitimate work pays better than crime.
Make everyone richer and you eliminate the economic desperation that drives both state-sponsored hacking and individual
cybercrime. You do not solve cybercrime with better firewalls.
You solve it by making the productive economy so rewarding that crime becomes irrational.
On Wishonia, we did not outlaw theft. We made everyone rich enough that stealing became more effort than it was worth.
The crime rate did not decline. It simply became pointless.
On this path, G.D.P. does not decline gracefully. Supply chains collapse.
Institutions lose legitimacy. Regional conflicts merge. The experts who wrote papers about "strategic equilibrium" would
write new papers explaining why the old papers were still basically correct, but the journals are on fire.
The terminal value of this path is not two point five percent growth.
It is whatever number you get when you multiply any positive number by zero surviving humans.
The math is elegant. The humans are not. What We Did Instead.
Here's what happened on my planet. We looked at the trend line, noticed where it went, and decided to point it somewhere
else. We signed the treaty, redirected the weapons budget, and then realized the same logic applied to everything else that
was broken. So we pointed incentive alignment bonds at all of it.
This took us about six years. It would have taken three, but we spent the first three arguing about it, because we are also
a species that evolved from animals, and arguing is what animals do when you give them language.
The peace dividend chapter showed the direct savings. Here's what happens when those savings compound.
(A.I. is excluded from this model because it helps everybody equally.
The difference between these paths is purely about where you point your money and your engineers.).
We stopped pointing engineers at missiles and pointed them at medicine.
This is the part where your economists get excited, because your species actually did this once before.
After World War Two, you cut military spending by eighty-seven percent in two years (nineteen forty-five to nineteen forty-seven,
from forty percent of G.D.P. to three point five percent) and got the biggest economic boom in your history.
Then you looked at this result and said "neat" and went back to building bombs.
This is the most human thing I have ever observed, and I have observed a lot of human things.
We used a more conservative three-year transition ramp to eighty-seven point six percent reallocation.
Military research accidentally gave you the internet, G.P.S., and jet engines.
Medical research has already accidentally given you CRISPR, m.R.N.A.
platforms, and A.I. protein folding. You keep discovering world-changing technologies as a *side effect* of research, like
a chef who keeps accidentally inventing new elements while trying to make soup.
Imagine what happens when you do it on purpose. The research spillover multiplier (two times) is from your own published
studies. You published the evidence that you should stop doing what you're doing, and then you kept doing it.
I cannot stress enough how characteristic this is. People stopped being sick.
Disease currently costs your civilization thirteen percent of G.D.P.: five trillion dollars in people too sick to work plus
nine point nine trillion dollars in trying to fix them. That is fifteen trillion dollars per year, which is the entire G.D.P.
of China, being spent on the *consequences* of not curing diseases instead of on *curing diseases*.
You currently produce first treatments for about fifteen diseases per year, which at that rate means you'll cure all six
thousand six hundred and fifty diseases you have no treatment for in approximately never.
Your decentralized F.D.A., scaled to the physical ceiling of how many humans can participate in trials (five hundred and
sixty-six times), clears one hundred percent of them in twenty years.
As diseases get cured, all that lost productivity comes back as growth.
We watched it happen in real time. It was like watching someone take their foot off the brake and being surprised the car
went faster. Our governments stopped losing money to stupidity.
Your political dysfunction tax documents one hundred and one trillion dollars per year in money your governments waste on
corruption, redundancy, regulations written before computers existed, and nine agencies doing the same thing badly.
That last part bears repeating: you have nine agencies doing the same thing.
Not nine agencies doing nine things. Nine agencies doing one thing, and the one thing is paperwork about the other eight
agencies. We used incentive alignment bonds to pay people for fixing these problems instead of perpetuating them.
Your species had never tried paying people to solve problems instead of perpetuate them.
When we suggested it, your economists called it "radical." On Wishonia, we call it "obvious."
The recovered money went to whatever produced the most value: migration reform, lead elimination, science funding, regulatory
modernization. These three things compound on each other. Better-funded research produces innovations, which cure diseases,
which make people healthier and more productive, which grows the economy, which funds more research, which produces more
innovations. It's a virtuous cycle. You're currently running the vicious version, where sick people can't work, so the economy
shrinks, so there's less money for research, so people stay sick.
You have been running this version for your entire history as a civilization.
You could have switched at any time. You did not switch. I find this fascinating in the way that a veterinarian finds a
dog that keeps eating bees fascinating. Here is one cycle of the loop, so you can check it yourself.
Year one. You redirect twenty-seven point two billion dollars per year from military spending to medical research.
Your own published studies show each research dollar generates two times in economic returns, so that twenty-seven point
two billion dollars immediately produces twice its value in adjacent-sector growth: biotech, computing, materials science.
That is the same spillover mechanism that accidentally gave you the internet when you were trying to build missiles.
Meanwhile, disease is costing you thirteen percent of G.D.P.
You just heard the number: fifteen trillion a year in sick workers and medical bills.
Your decentralized F.D.A. starts curing diseases. Even curing a small fraction of a fifteen-trillion-dollar problem returns
more than you spent on the research. The output exceeds the input.
Year two. You have last year's redirect, plus the recovered productivity from the diseases you cured.
The research budget is effectively bigger, without anyone allocating a single additional dollar.
More research. More cures. More recovered productivity. Bigger effective budget.
Year three, bigger again. By year five, you are funding cures with money that only exists because earlier cures freed up
workers who generated it. The loop is running on its own output.
This is compound interest. The same math your retirement account uses.
You trust it there. The only difference is the return rate.
Your retirement account compounds at seven percent because money earns money.
This compounds faster because each cure unlocks a permanent slice of that thirteen percent G.D.P.
drag, and that slice earns returns every year after. A disease cured in year one is still generating productivity in year
twenty. Every cure is a permanent raise for the entire economy.
By year twenty, our G.D.P. grew at twenty-five point four percent per year and reached ten point seven quadrillion dollars.
Your alternative, as we just established, is systemic collapse within eight years.
That is the comparison. Not "Wishonia vs. steady growth." Wishonia vs.
the trajectory you are actually on. And here's the conservative floor for the skeptics (your planet has many): the "treaty-only"
path. You redirect the military budget to medical research, you cure diseases, and you change nothing else.
You leave all nine agencies doing the same thing. You leave the corruption.
You leave the regulations written before computers existed.
You just move the murder money and let the cures compound. Even that cowardly half-measure grows at seventeen point nine
percent per year and reaches three point one one quadrillion dollars.
Then fixing governance on top of that, which is what we actually did, is worth another three point four three times.
That multiplier is what "not being stupid" compounds to over twenty years.
On Wishonia, we find it remarkable that "stop being stupid" is considered an aggressive growth strategy.
On your planet, it apparently is. The Decision. "But what if it doesn't work as well as you claim?"
I love this question. Your species asks it exclusively about good ideas.
Nobody ever asks "but what if the arms race doesn't work as well as we claim?"
about the thing that has a nonzero probability of killing everyone.
Your risk assessment is applied in one direction only, like a door that only locks from the outside.
You do not have a stable middle path. The two point five percent "baseline" is not a path you can stay on; it is a fantasy
that requires every accelerating trend to simultaneously stop accelerating.
Your actual choice is between a path that cures diseases and a path where the journals are on fire.
Both require effort. Only one of them has a nonzero G.D.P. at the end.
What This Means Per Person. G.D.P. in the trillions is abstract.
Here's what it means for actual humans. On your current trajectory, average income by year twenty is a question your economists
cannot answer, because their models do not have a variable for "the journals are on fire."
On the Wishonia path, average income reaches one point one six million dollars.
Even the treaty-only path (no governance fixes, just redirecting the murder money) gets you to three hundred and thirty-nine
thousand dollars. For those of you keeping score, that is the difference between "everyone can afford to cure their diseases"
and "the destructive economy has consumed the productive one."
These are G.D.P. per capita using U.N. population projections of nine point two billion of people for twenty forty-five.
Average, not median, because we make no assumptions about distribution.
Your species worries a lot about inequality, which is understandable when some people can't afford medicine and other people
are building private spacecraft. But your own research shows that happiness stops increasing meaningfully after about seventy-five
thousand dollars per year. Once everyone is above that line, the fact that some people are further above it becomes approximately
as interesting as the fact that some mountains are taller than other mountains.
Nobody protests mountain inequality. On the Wishonia path, the floor is so high that the gap between floor and ceiling is
a rounding error on quality of life. Over a remaining lifespan, those annual numbers compound into something your species
should find difficult to ignore (but will). The treaty path multiplies your cumulative lifetime earnings by thirteen point
five times relative to the earth baseline. The Wishonia path reaches forty-five times.
In dollars: the average human gains fourteen point nine million dollars in additional lifetime income under the treaty alone,
or fifty-two point one million dollars under the full Wishonia path.
The opportunity cost of inaction is not abstract. It is the largest number most humans will never bother to calculate.
The Wishonia numbers look implausible only if you compare them to your fantasy baseline instead of your actual trajectory.
Compared to collapse, any positive number looks implausible.
This time someone is steering. (It's you. I'm just the G.P.S.
A G.P.S. that judges you, but still a G.P.S.). Go Ahead, Change the Numbers.
Every input to this model is a named variable you can look up and argue with.
I know you will, because arguing is your second-favorite activity after building weapons.
The disease cure fraction (one hundred percent) comes from trial-capacity scaling with a physical participant ceiling.
The research spillover multiplier (two times) comes from your own published studies.
If any assumption is wrong, change it. Cut them all in half.
Cut them in quarters. The model still produces a civilization instead of a collapse, because no plausible adjustment to
any single variable eliminates the effect of three compounding mechanisms running simultaneously for twenty years.
Compound growth doesn't care about your skepticism. It's math.
Math doesn't negotiate. The question is not "will the treaty produce exactly these returns?"
The question is "does redirecting murder money to medicine money produce better results than not doing so?"
The answer is yes under every scenario where you prefer being alive to being dead.
If you do not prefer being alive to being dead, this manual is not for you, and I wish you well in whatever you're doing
instead. The peace dividend gives you the annual numbers. The Wishonia model gives you the institutional design.
The political dysfunction tax gives you the waste ledger. The incentive alignment bonds give you the mechanism that fixes
it. This chapter gives you what happened when we ran them forward twenty years.
The math is simple. The choice should be simpler. And yet.