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G. Hanappi:
"Alarm: The evolutionary jump of global political economy needed";
real-world economics review, 94 (2020), 2 - 26.

Several major crises are shaking the global political economy. Each had its peak of public
awareness in a certain year - finance (2008), migration (2015), climate (2019), corona virus
(2020) - but all of them did spread, and will spread over a long period of time. Each will leave
its distinctive mark on the working of the global political economy, on the way in which the
human species as a whole lives. The fact that these critical global challenges are not only
appearing in an accelerating speed but also are meeting at ever more helpless global political
agents is alarming. This paper sets out to propose not only the need for an evolutionary jump
of the global organization of the species - the unspecified outcry for change is already
common sense - but also spells out what major elements have to change in which way.
As every useful concept, "change" needs two components. First, its starting point, its location
in history, has to be determined; second, its direction, into which future it shall guide us, has
to be formulated.
1
These two elements are complementary since the apparent contradictions
of the current position influence the future direction of change as well as a vision of a future
position determined by a certain direction influences what is perceived as a current
contradiction.
A critical process is a compression of contradictory behaviours that is too fast to be controlled
by an externally acting entity representing the welfare of the human species. Of course, this
"welfare" is itself a problematic concept. For that reason, the first part of the paper deals with
the vision of a desirable future human society, i.e. with the direction in which change should
lead. This imagined secular paradise has to be as concrete as possible, since the speed-up of
time does not allow for painting a lean-back version of utopia in the style of Thomas Morus
500 years ago (More, 1516). After having described the immediate hallmarks of what the
species should aim at, it is straightforward to derive the corresponding pathways for a global
revolution, which either brings mankind closer to a feasible secular paradise - or fails, letting
the species disappear as just another evolutionary episode. Global revolution therefore is the
topic of the second part of this paper

https://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/publik_291982.pdf