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Worldbuilding: Coming up with a Better Future by DataPacRat

I'm starting to get that old itch to start writing again...

I'm trying to identify a pile of details for a setting where the people are notably better off than in the present, but can still be recognized as being a future iteration of present-day society. (I may not know how any of these would actually be accomplished, but I can still write Star Trek fanfiction even without knowing how to build a warp drive.) Not a paradise, but somewhere a good number of people from today's first-world societies might consider immigrating to.

Given the general shape of the points I've jotted down so far, can you think of any important aspects I'm forgetting?

  • Some bad things happened. People fought back, and tried various ways to keep them from happening again, with varying levels of success and side-effects. The more successful approaches led to those groups becoming wealthier and more militarily effective, thus gaining international prestige, thus leading less-successful groups to try to emulate them.
  • Standard economies include:
    • a Basic Universal Income (plus whatever further tweaks are needed to avoid any rampant inflation or other problems therefrom);
    • single-payer health-care (including dentistry, prescriptions, psych, etc);
    • effectively free tuition;
    • widespread unionization;
      • Possibly: Lots of worker-owned businesses?;
    • national ministries of ombudsmen, embedded into the other ministries and able to accept complaints about them, without those complaints getting lost in internal processes that never find any fault by the bureaucrats;
      • police held accountable for their actions by non-police-dominated investigations;
    • significant surveillance of the finances of politicians and elected officials;
    • political tweaks to prevent regulatory capture, gerrymandering, capturing of courts by political parties;
    • strong anti-trust legislation;
    • rules against vulture capitalism;
    • externality costs that are currently offloaded onto the general public by capitalist corporations reloaded right back onto them, so that they can't extract private profit by making the world worse for the public as a whole;
    • actually-effective money-laundering prevention, even when dealing with international shenanigans (such as corporations claiming to be headquartered in Ireland when nearly-to-all of their business is conducted elsewhere);
      • collapse of real-estate bubbles propped up by international investors wanting to convert their dirty assets into 'clean' registered land holdings; thus bringing down the price of home ownership to an achievable goal for most of the general population;
    • a fairly low number of people earning more than, say, ten times the average salary of skilled professional engineers, doctors, or generals, and a near-total lack of billionaires;
    • personal privacy protections for average citizens at least as good as Europe's current GDPR, including effective anti-tracking regulations on the ad insdustry;
    • better understanding of how brains work, more widespread acceptance of neurodiversity (including diversenesses that we of the present-day are unaware of);
    • architecture generally including the principles of handicap/disability-focused design (much like how subtitles and wheelchair ramps have improved the lives of more than people with deafness and paraplegia);
    • To a much better extent than in present, improvements made to the lives of various marginalized groups, to the extent that they're effectively not really marginalized anymore. (Eg, in Canada, getting around the political problems and finally coming to generally-mutually-acceptable solutions for First Nations reconciliation, treaties, and other disagreements.)
    • copyrights lasting no more than 15 years (as has been mathematically demonstrated to be the longest term that can provide more good than harm);
    • penal systems focused on rehabilitation and recompense to the harmed rather than gratuitious punishment or corporate-owned-prison profiteering;
    • Possibly: Widespread application of future-prediction market techniques to improve various proposed plans?;
    • Marginal tax rate of 90% on annual incomes over, say, $3M in today's dollars (ie, the rate the US had from 1944-1963)

Worldbuilding: Coming up with a Better Future

DataPacRat

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