As proposed (excerpted) by Umair Haque:

“So here’s the question: if the challenge is raising societies up to higher levels of prosperity — meaningfully well lived lives — then what are the levers that are powerful enough to begin doing do so?

Here’s a quick take: six steps I believe advanced economies will have to take to make the quantum leap to 21st century prosperity.

1. Detox. While most advanced economies claim to be “post-industrial”, the plain fact is that capital-intensive, rapidly depreciating, high-maintenance, often downright self-destructive industrial age stuff still receives the lion’s share of subsidies: oil, water, big food (or food-like products, at any rate), “banking.” A transition can’t happen if you’re too busy propping the industrial age — hence a vital step is likely to be gracefully (or fractiously, whatever it takes) letting yesterday’s structure of subsidies subside.

2. Get a makeunder. Do you know what a makeunder is? When a person wearing way too much bad makeup takes it off — and looks a lot better for it. That’s pretty much the state our economy’s in: industrial age metrics like GDP are giant slabs lipstick, massive swathes of eyeliner, and gigantic dollops of foundation on the proverbial pig — they perpetually let us overstate real prosperity, as it matters in authentic human terms. When it comes to numbers, we (seriously) need an institutional makeunder: loads less desperately artificial less-than-attractive prettification.

3. Cut up the credit card. In most advanced economies, debt’s subsidized (through tax shield effects, and the like). The result is a structurally tilted playing field that incentivizes debt and accelerates bubbles and crises. A more eudaimonic approach is to limit debt subsidies, and, where markets fail, subsidize equity instead. Equity rewards joint effort, active engagement, fuels participation, and punishes disengagement. Our economy’s built on thin financial bedrock that limits and stifles productive economic interaction — in favor of a revolving door of once-cheap (and now suffocating) credit.

4. Hit the gym. It’s one thing to limit subsidies for centuries-old stuff. It’s another to reward groundbreaking breakthroughs — and I’d argue that most of our methods for doing that are grossly inefficient. Advanced economies will need to provide a range of 21st century public goods — which they currently suck at providing. Hence, I’d suggest a new workout regimen for the atrophying muscles of great achievement: not just subsidies for public “school,” but for public contests, tournaments, debates and intellectual battles, in cities and towns, large and small — all aimed at igniting and rewarding breakthrough thinking in every discipline. Let’s create social incentives to make sitting on the couch all day, banging down “food-like products”, and obsessing over Jersey Shore look like the waste of human potential it actually is.

5. Go to charm school. Let’s face it: our institutions need far sharper checks and balances if we’re going to prosper, for civil society’s been rendered as toothless as a kitten. Corporations should face real liability when they err, not just today’s wrist-slaps: hence, less regulation, but better enforcement of tougher regulation. Politicians should face sharper sanctions when they act like tantrum-prone infants: hence, structural reform of lobbying, replaced by more information, faster. And as “consumers” and “citizens,” too, people’s self-destructive disengagement and apathy should be punished: simple value added taxes for hyperconsumption, and, conversely, social incentives for basic civic engagement might be a simple, effective start.

6. Diet. Let’s simplify the onerous, socially pointless complex tax code. We all know it is the way it is to prop up rent-seeking, written by tax lobbyists for tax lawyers. Here’s a simpler, better approach: if it’s harmful to people, or useless to society, tax it. If it’s beneficial to people, useful to society, don’t. We can debate the precise calculus, but the principle’s straightforward: the former half would include stuff like carbon, banking, congestion, massive inheritance, dumbification, and obesity (as in food, not people) taxes. The point, of course, is to create socially productive incentives. Now, there are those who might argue that yesterday’s tax code was, once upon a very long time ago, written to do so — but I doubt there are many who believe it hasn’t become a cynically grotesque caricature of itself.

This list is just a very incomplete scratchpad of ideas. Every single one of the ideas above is probably deeply flawed, thoroughly incomplete, and a little bit of a simplistic caricature of a more nuanced, complex set of real-world problems. But it’s a stake in the ground — a place to start.”