Adrian, I am talking about the whole world. The rot began in in a few places, in antiquity, when class society began. That is, ony part of the population got the best slice of the pie. It's difficult for some of us who live in the 1st world (I live in the 3rd) and never saw what it is abject poverty. Sure, in absolute terms, indeed things improved, because there is internet, antibiotics, for most. But improving is not enough, because that's not human nature to accept inequality, despite the existence of hierarchies. This was never the case in our evolution and those who are higher in power had actually to personally respond to their community the reason of why they are there.
The higher the rate of inequality, the more you will have a tendency to have violent society or the number of people in jail. It doesn't matter if you prohibit drugs or not, if you control weapons or not, that's just all red herring. The one who are poor, for generation, will always be in revolt and attempting violent acts against the ones who are better off. If you deregulate or regulate something, that won't matter for them, they will just change the type of weapons or what is used to get stuff in "the easy way". There is a tendency for people to be leaders, to collectively own some items (pieces of land become such items when society becomes sedentary). There is a tendency to fight for things which are important, to the point of death, specially where there is scarcity. But, there is no justification for greed. Some people are good managers or some have some type of talent, and eventually ends up making other people to work for them. The product of such work,that is money, ends up being owned by whoever commands the employees(it could be master/slave, lord/serf, large share owner/employee). There is a systematic to think that this is normal. But it is not. This is herd behavior akin to the dismissal of cold fusion. It is a cultural domino effect. I will give you a perspective of how things are progressively worse, on relative terms, which leads to worse unsolvable contradictions. For the 170 years, there has rational justification for scarcity. When European colonial powers laid down the telegraph under the oceans, they were able plan and to enforce the extraction of raw materials in any part of the world. Before that, that could only be done within the Americas, which was much closer, inhabited by people with a much lower level of technology, in general. But this was the beginning of a major contradiction, that is, it was possible to actually plan the economy in a global level, an utopia could be actually built. Instead, the opposite happened, an arms race started, large business were integrated to governments because technological levels raised to a point when even mowing down opponents was profitable enough to be justifiable. This kept going until keeping colonies was too costly, after WWII, and the awareness of the exploitation characteristic of colonization became too apparent and fragile. But not without a rather small elite in each of this countries appear. Unlike the 1st world, these were rather small and in absolute terms, their middle class are in general at a poverty level of the 1st world. If AI becomes powerful enough, there will not be anywhere to relay menial jobs. To make matters worse, it seems clear that the sovereignty of any country can only be maintained with a large barrage of nuclear weapons. I will give you an example, in 1960, USA could assemble a nuke every few hours. Since 1991, neither Russia nor USA get rid ofno more than 5 or 10% of the total fissile material at the peak of cold war (fusion material is comparatively easier to obtain, the difficulty is in design). There is enough right now to assemble 80,000 war heads. Probably much more, as warheads become more sophisticated and yield decrease. You can send many more in a single missile, and do much more damage. The way I see it, is that we are living in the eye of a hurricane, as tensions grow more and more. Cold fusion is the only way I see to ease all that, as it would allow the discontents with the civilization, as it is now, to live well in relative isolation.
