The paper presents a comprehensive political‑economy framework that reinterprets contemporary crises—wealth concentration, ecological degradation, social fragmentation—as outcomes of rent extraction, institutional misallocation, and thermodynamic waste rather than inevitable material scarcity. Drawing on heterodox, ecological, and thermodynamic economics, developmental psychology, collective intelligence, and emerging digital coordination tools, the author proposes a transition to a post‑scarcity civilization built on five core principles: (1) rent‑extraction as the pathological organizing logic of current economies; (2) a post‑scarcity threshold where basic human needs can be met without significant labour or resource input; (3) cooperative coordination enabled by AI, blockchain, and privacy‑preserving computation; (4) needs‑based provisioning and contributive value as the basis for economic activity; and (5) competence‑oriented, liquid‑democratic governance at the city‑state scale. Central to the transition is the “AI Journal”, a personalised, zero‑knowledge‑proof‑enabled AI companion that supports self‑reflection, value clarification, developmental guidance, child safeguarding, and large‑scale social matching. The paper outlines how AI Journals, guild‑based contribution systems, and DAO‑governed credentialing can replace extractive institutions, and how networked post‑national cities (5‑50 million inhabitants) can be organized around functional competence, voluntary association, and revocable delegated governance. Implementation is framed as a sequencing problem: early symbolic coordination via the One‑Earth badge, universal basic services/income, participatory budgeting, AI‑assisted developmental infrastructure, and pilot‑city experiments. The analysis integrates thermodynamic concepts (exergy optimisation, entropy waste) to argue that rent‑extraction economies are entropic, while post‑scarcity cities are negentropic. Objections (human nature, transition feasibility, elite resistance, technological readiness, cultural diversity, financial instability, risks of competence‑oriented selection) are addressed, and a phased timeline is provided. The conclusion stresses that the technical foundations now exist; the decisive factor is political will to redesign governance before extractive dynamics become irreversible.
Topics
Rent Extraction as the Core Pathology of Modern Economies
Defines rent extraction, traces its evolution from land rents to financial, intellectual, platform, and positional rents, and argues it is the dominant logic driving misallocation and inequality.