Is everyone you've ever loved currently being slowly tortured, or at minimum scheduled to be slowly tortured and then brutally murdered by horrible diseases?
Do your governments waste money on enough nuclear bombs to cause 122 nuclear winters despite only having the one civilization to apocalypse?
If so, your planet may be eligible for optimization.
I'm Wishonia Love. CEO and President of Universe Optimization Services. I've been upgrading civilizations since before your sun ignited.
I started watching your planet in 1945 when you split the atom. "Atom" comes from your Greek word meaning "unable to be cut," so naturally, you cut it. This was very human of you. I assumed you were trying to unlock unlimited free energy. You can imagine my surprise when I realized you were just pointing it at each other! That's kind of like discovering fire and then immediately using it to set yourself on fire.
The second thing I noticed is that your planet is named "Earth," which means dirt. You named your planet.. dirt. Okay, if that's what you want...
I also noticed that you call your war building "The Pentagon" because it has five sides (this is like naming a hospital "Rectangle" or calling a school "Square").
However, the most fascinating discovery about your species is that you only do things when given small pieces of paper with presidents on them. These papers are called "money," which is pretend value that becomes real value if everyone pretends hard enough.
Without these papers, you won't:
- Save lives (requires many papers)
- Cure diseases (requires very many papers)
- Feed hungry people (requires papers, even though food grows for free)
But WITH these papers, you will:
- Build bombs (you love giving papers for this)
- Start wars (somehow this makes more papers)
- Destroy the planet (surprisingly profitable in papers)
In fact, your governments spend 604 papers on weapons for every 1 paper on testing which medicines work.
Humanity has created something magnificent:
- You print papers from nothing (called "monetary policy")
- You give these nothing-papers to weapons makers
- They make things that destroy everything
- This creates "jobs" which give people papers
- People use papers to buy food (which grows for free)
- This is called "the economy"
One downside of this system is that it has killed 310 million of you in your assorted wars.
On Wishonia, we skip the mass murder step and just give people food directly, but that's probably too advanced for you.
On Wishonia, we ended wars using this exact program 4,297 years ago. Before that we'd been fighting for 12,000 years, which now seems like quite a long time to do something nobody enjoyed. Your nations have been hitting each other for 10,000 years because the other one hit them last. This is the conflict resolution strategy of four-year-olds, except four-year-olds eventually get tired and take a nap. Your species invented naps and then refused to apply them to geopolitics. You can't just stop being illogical all at once. That would be like teaching a dog calculus before it learns to sit.
So this manual shows you how to bribe humanity into being less irrational gradually:
- Year 1: Move 1% of murder money to medicine money (baby steps)
- Year 2: "Hey, we didn't die! Let's do 2%!"
- Year 5: "Remember when we spent money on bombs? That was weird."
- Year 10: "What's a war?"
- Year 20: "We used to WHAT?!"
It's like weaning a baby off eating paint chips. You can't just take away all the paint chips at once. They'll cry. You have to gradually replace paint chips with food until they forget paint chips were ever an option.
When you suggest moving 1% of murder money to medicine money, other humans will have you committed. Most humans have been programmed by their news boxes to believe war is a law of nature, like gravity or weather. They will assume your brain is malfunctioning.
Here's what's funny about this: these same humans think curing disease is the less crazy goal. That's 37 trillion cells per human, breaking in 7,000 different ways, involving chemistry you don't fully understand, inside organs you can't fully simulate, fighting pathogens that evolve faster than your treatments. You're trying to debug all of it. At once. While your meat is walking around using itself.
That: sane. "Give 1% fewer papers to people who build murder machines": insane.
This is your planet's diagnostic criteria. I looked up the last person on your planet who went around suggesting universal love and peace. You nailed him to a piece of wood. So I consider it quite fortunate that I'm making this suggestion from several light-years away.
Anyway, here's what you tell the orderly when he slides your medication through the door slot:
Nobody accidentally builds an aircraft carrier or a nuclear bomb. War requires you to get millions of humans to work together to mine metal from the ground, refine it into alloys, build factories to shape the alloys into weapons, train millions of humans to operate the weapons, feed and clothe those humans, build ships and planes and trucks to move the weapons to where the other humans are, convince your population the other humans deserve it, and then vote to pay for all of this, annually, forever. It is the single largest coordinated effort your species undertakes.
Ending war simply requires NOT doing any of that stuff.
Building a nuclear bomb requires mass spectrometers, centrifuge cascades, and some of the most precise engineering your species has ever attempted. Not building a nuclear bomb requires nothing. Rocks do it every day. In fact, rocks have managed to live peacefully alongside different colored rocks for thousands of years.
But somehow "stop" is the unrealistic part.
Improvement is physically possible. "Stop" isn't the unrealistic part. Getting one billionaire to read a PDF is.
After 80 years of observation, I've decoded the paper-giving sequence. This manual will teach you the precise order:
Step 1: Get Some Papers from Rich Humans
You convince rich humans to give you papers by promising them even more papers later. This is called "investment," which is gambling but wearing a suit. You really only need one human with papers who prefers not dying of horrible diseases to dying of horrible diseases. There are approximately 2,800 billionaires on your planet. Statistically, at least one of them prefers living.
Step 2: Buy the Machine That's Making You Poorer and Deader
So it turns out your weapons companies sell tiny pieces of themselves to anyone with papers. Each piece comes with a vote. If you collect enough votes you get to pick who sits on the board of directors, and the board of directors tells the lobbyists what to say to your politicians. A twelve-person firm called Engine No. 1 spent $12.5 million and won 3 board seats at ExxonMobil, which is a $400 billion company. The stock went up. So you're doing that, except instead of "please stop ruining the environment" the ask is "please stop spending trillions on the redundant capacity to kill everyone 122 times over when you only have the one everyone."
Step 3: Sell 1% of the Bombs, Buy Biotechnology Companies
So the bomb company's board, which is now you, sells 1% of its bomb-making stuff and uses those papers to buy pieces of biotechnology companies. Biotechnology companies have net profit margins of 18.5%. Bomb companies have 4.99%. Selling things that keep people alive is 3.72x more profitable than selling things that make them dead. This should not have required a spreadsheet. The board members just gave themselves a raise. Also, fewer people die now, which is a pleasant side effect of the raise.
Step 4: Everyone Gets Richer (Including the Bomb Company)
The bomb company kept 99% of its bombs. But the 1% it sold and put into biotechnology companies is making more money than the bombs were, because biotechnology has 3.72x the margins of explosions. The whole economy grows because you stopped wasting resources on 122 spare apocalypses nobody needed. The board members' own shares go up. And the diseases that were going to kill the board members in twenty years, at which point their net worth becomes zero (unless their children bury them with all of their money, which, based on my observations of your inheritance disputes, seems unlikely), those diseases are now getting cured. So they live longer and they're richer. This is what your economists call a Pareto improvement and what everyone else calls "obvious."
Step 5: Do It Again
The biotechnology companies you bought are making money. You use that money to buy pieces of the next bomb company. That board also sells 1% of bombs, buys biotechnology shares, gives itself a raise, and stops dying. Each company you fix makes the next one easier because you have more papers and also a track record of making boards richer by not killing people. On Wishonia we call this a "positive feedback loop." On Earth you call it "going viral" but only when it's a video of a cat.
With over two billion humans suffering from disease, you'd have to be a complete psychopath to make the conscious decision to spend 604 times more on weapons than on helping them. But your leaders aren't monsters. They're just operating in a system that rewards the wrong things.
Your civilization's incentive structure is the psychopath:
- Weapons manufacturers give politicians papers
- Politicians use the papers to get people to vote for them
- Voting for them gives them the power to give more papers to weapons manufacturers
- Weapons manufacturers give them more papers
- It's circular, like a dog chasing its tail, except the dog is democracy and the tail is made of money and corpses
No individual human in this loop is evil. The loop is evil. Every politician in it is making the locally rational choice: take the papers or lose your job to someone who will. It's a machine that converts good intentions into missiles, and it runs automatically.
This loop does not even benefit the humans inside it. The weapons manufacturers get diseases. Their children get diseases. Everyone they love gets diseases. They live in the same economy that the loop is shrinking. If the loop breaks and the optimization happens, the board sells 1% of its bomb-making assets and buys biotechnology shares with 3.72x the profit margins, so the board is richer immediately. Then the economy grows to 1.43x its current size by year 15, so every diversified shareholder's portfolio scales with it. And the diseases that were going to kill the board members stop getting ignored. This is not a case where an entrenched industry rationally profits at the public's expense. There is no rational beneficiary of the current arrangement. Everyone in the loop is worse off, including the people running it. They just haven't done the arithmetic.
There's literally no voting your way out of this. It doesn't matter which political party is in power. Your "red team" and "blue team" argue about everything except the loop, because they're both inside it. They are all slaves to the same incentive structure, wearing different colored ties. Switching parties is like changing the wallpaper in a burning building.
This manual doesn't ask politicians to become better people (that's clearly out of the question). It builds a better loop. You give them MORE papers to do the OPPOSITE thing. Same dog, same tail, but now the tail is made of cured diseases and the dog gets reelected for chasing it.
What's most endearing about your species is it KNOWS it's being illogical:
- You have movies about how wars are bad (which you watch between wars)
- You have books about peace (that you tax to buy bombs)
- You give prizes to people who promote peace (funded by weapons manufacturers)
- You have a "Department of Defense" (that mainly just attacks people)
- You have a "Department of Health" (that apparently makes coronaviruses and has not yet produced any observable health)
It's like humanity is playing a game where the objective is to lose, but it is trying to lose as elaborately as possible.
But I digress. That's an Earth word I learned. It means continuing after you should have stopped. Like your military spending.
150 thousand humans permanently stop every 24 hours from diseases that are basically just bugs in your meat software. That's one Holocaust every 40 days, except with fewer Nazis and more insurance paperwork. That's also fifty 9/11s every single day, except nobody invades anyone about it because diseases don't have oil.
Your body is quietly falling apart. Right now, as you read this sentence, something inside you is breaking. You don't know which part yet. You won't know until a doctor sits you down and says a word that rearranges the rest of your life. Somewhere in you, right now, cells are copying themselves wrong, proteins are misfolding, tissue is quietly scarring. You are dissolving on a schedule you can't see.
You're a meat robot with worn-out parts. Every one of these failures is a solvable engineering problem.
You'd think humans would prioritize solving these problems. That thought would be incorrect.
95% of your diseases have zero FDA-approved treatments. This means your Food and Drug Administration has not administered drugs for 95% of food-and-drug-related problems. It's like having a Department of Transportation that hasn't gotten around to roads yet. Only 15 diseases get their first effective treatment each year. 6,650 diseases are still waiting. There is a queue to not die, and it is longer than any queue humans have ever voluntarily stood in, which is saying something because you invented Disneyland.
There are 9,500 known safe compounds, and 99.7% of their potential uses have never been tested. At the current discovery rate, finding treatments for all of them will take ~443 years. You personally will be dead within 80 years, which I mention not to be rude but because you seem weirdly calm about this.
Humans spend $2.72 trillion every year on stuff designed specifically to make humans stop being alive:
- 12,241 nuclear warheads (enough to end civilization 122 times, just in case the first 121 apocalypses don't take)
- AI murder-bots
- Invisible jets that cost more than hospitals
- Space Force (to fight the zero aliens attacking you)
- And some kind of earthquake machine (probably)
Since 1913, your governments have printed $170 trillion out of nothing and spent these nothing-papers on murdering 310 million humans and destroying many valuable things those humans spent their entire lives building. Consequently your paycheck now buys 97% less due to the aforementioned destruction. $170 trillion is equal to 38,000 years of government clinical trial spending. You bought the other thing.
Through compounding effects, if your governments had stopped spending on murder in 1900 you would be 23.2x richer today, and disease would not be stealing 10.1 years of your life. The average person would earn $333,636 per year instead of $14,375.
Today, government spending on clinical trials: 604 times less than military spending. Your chance of dying from terrorism: 1 in 30 million. Your chance of dying from disease: 100%.
If cancer had oil reserves, you would have cured it by 2003. Instead, you spent the repair money on murder tubes that cost more than countries and submarines that hide underwater, as if that's somehow useful when you live on land.
And that's just the official murder budget.
Cybercrime costs $10.5 trillion per year and growing at 15% annually. This is not a separate problem. North Korea can't build an aircraft carrier, but it funds its nuclear program by stealing $1.5 billion in cryptocurrency in a single afternoon. Russia finances military operations with ransomware. Cybercrime is war conducted through WiFi, and it pays better.
Combined, your destructive economy is $13.2 trillion per year, 11.5% of global GDP. Both are growing faster than the part of your economy that makes things. So the part that destroys things is winning. I'm told this is not considered an emergency. On your planet this is considered "Tuesday."
When the parasitic economy grows large enough relative to the productive one, the rational choice for any individual, company, or nation flips from "build things" to "steal things." Why spend years building a product when you can ransom a hospital in an afternoon? Why manufacture exports when hacking banks pays better? Once enough of your economy is extraction, producing anything makes you a target rather than a success. Production becomes irrational. Parasitism becomes the only means of survival.
You have a name for places where this already happened. You call them "failed states." Somalia, Libya, parts of Syria. The productive economy collapsed, the warlord economy replaced it, and nobody can restart production because anyone who builds something gets it taken. You've watched this happen to individual countries the way someone watches a neighbor's house burn down while storing gasoline in their own basement. Once it starts, you can't vote your way out, innovate your way out, or give a TED Talk about it. (You will try all three.)
At current growth rates, your destructive economy reaches 25% of GDP by 2033. The Soviet Union collapsed at 15% of GDP in military spending alone. They had worse technology, a smaller parasitic sector, and a plan. It was a terrible plan, but they had one. You are approaching their ratio with better technology, a faster-growing parasitic sector, and no plan. The Soviet Union's terrible plan beat your no plan, and the Soviet Union lost.
This is a loop, not a line item. Your governments print money to fund military spending, which devalues wages through inflation, which makes legitimate work pay less, which pushes talent toward cybercrime, which grows the destructive economy, which justifies more military spending. Every nation you've bombed or sanctioned has learned that parasitizing your economy is cheaper than fighting you conventionally. That's not crime. That's homework. You built the incentive structure and they did the math.
The treaty breaks this loop. Optimize the budget: move 1% of the war money to medical research, make the productive economy so rewarding that crime becomes irrational, and defund the war machine that manufactures the poverty that feeds the cycle. You don't outlaw the loop. You make it unprofitable.
Even the money you DO spend on medicine is mostly wasted, because the system that approves treatments is a smoke detector that works by mail.
Vioxx killed an estimated 55,000 people from heart attacks. The FDA approved it. When patients started dying, someone filled out a PDF form. A PDF. Then they faxed it. (Yes, in the 21st century.) Then a human read it. Five years and tens of thousands of corpses later, someone noticed a pattern. This is your safety system.
Your National Institutes of Health, the agency nominally responsible for finding cures, spends 3.3% of its budget on clinical trials. The other ~97% goes to basic research, administration, and buildings. It's like a fire department that spends 3% of its budget on water.
Then there's a 8.2 years delay between proving a drug is safe and letting dying humans take it. The drug passed the safety test. Everyone agrees it won't kill you. But you still can't have it because a committee needs to spend 8.2 years making sure it works well enough. You'd volunteer for the trials that would answer that question faster, but so would 1.08 billion other patients, and the current system has 1.9 million slots. That's a participation rate of 0.06%. It's like a lifeguard who confirms the life preserver floats, then locks it in a cabinet for years to study its buoyancy profile while a billion people drown in line for the two available life jackets.
Your regulatory system can make two mistakes: approve a bad drug (Type I error), or block a good drug (Type II error). Your FDA is terrified of the first mistake and completely ignores the second. I calculated the ratio: for every 1 person protected from a dangerous drug, 3,389 people die waiting for a safe one that's locked in the approval cabinet. Even if you assume a Thalidomide-scale catastrophe happens during post-phase 1 efficacy testing every single year (even though it wouldn't because Phase I safety testing actually caught it anyway), the deaths from just the efficacy delay still outnumber the deaths from bad drugs by 3,389 to 1. Your safety system's main product is dead patients.
Think about someone you love who is suffering right now. The treatment that would help them exists as an untested compound on a shelf, because the money was busy turning into a missile. That missile incinerated a child who might have grown up to discover the cure. You lose the treatment. You lose the scientist. You get the inflation. You get the tax bill. You get to pay for her murder.
This is suboptimal.
The good news: You already know how to fix this.
The bad news: It requires you to do something.
The weird news: You'll get rich doing it.
This is going to sound crazy. But you're going to use those papers to persuade the leader of every country on Earth to simultaneously optimize 1% of its military budget by moving it to clinical trials. That's it. That's the treaty. National security goes up because everyone has 1% fewer missiles pointed at them. The economy grows because you stopped wasting resources on the 122th apocalypse. Everyone gets richer and stops dying. It's not a cut. It's an upgrade.
After the craziness objection, the second objection every human has: "But if we cut our military budget, our enemies will invade us!" Everyone cuts 1% at the same time. Your national security actually increases, because everyone has 1% fewer missiles pointed at them. And if you still feel like doing war, you keep the capacity for 122 minus 1 nuclear apocalypses. Since 100 warheads is the threshold for ending civilization and you have 12,241, you are settling for 121 civilizational collapses instead of 122. This should be more than sufficient.
"But humans would never agree to a treaty!" you say. You already have. Multiple times. You banned chemical weapons (1993, 193 countries). You banned biological weapons (1975, 187 countries). You banned landmines (1997, 164 countries). You've signed treaties banning weapons you actually like using. This one just asks you to buy 1% fewer of them.
I've done this before. I've sent versions of this manual to 847 civilizations on 847 planets. Some listened. Some didn't. I kept the data. The ones that stopped spending resources on killing each other and started spending them on keeping each other alive stopped doing war and disease. The ones that didn't extincted themselves. The only variable was the percentage of the population that decided it sounded crazy without reading the next page. That is the same reflex that kept you from inventing antibiotics for 200,000 years while bread mold sat right there on your bread.
And you have two other advantages. One, the internet, which lets you coordinate with billions of other humans who also prefer not dying. Two, the machines that are making you poorer and deader are publicly traded companies, which means they sell tiny pieces of themselves to literally anyone with papers, including you, and each piece comes with a vote. This is like discovering that the machine slowly murdering everyone you love has an off switch, but the off switch is made of money, so nobody thought to check.
Your Decentralized FDA
On Wishonia, we built this with the funding from our version of the treaty, 3,000 years ago. Every treatment is tracked in real time. Every outcome is published. Every patient can participate. We don't have a word for "unapproved medicine" because we don't have a bureaucracy that sits on safe treatments while people die. You'd call our system a Decentralized FDA. Here's what yours would look like, adjusted for the fact that you require small pieces of paper before you'll do anything.
80% of the $27.2 billion will go directly to subsidizing patient participation in pragmatic trials at $929/patient instead of the usual $41,000. Patients will choose which trials to join; their subsidy will follow them. Treatment developers and providers will get paid for each participant. No grant committees deciding which diseases are fashionable this year.
Instead of testing drugs on 200 humans selected by pharmaceutical companies in clinical terrariums, you'll test on real patients in real hospitals. Where the diseases are. The whole thing will use your new decentralized FDA protocol, reducing trial costs by 44.1x and funding 23.4 million patients/year (versus the current 1.9 million patients/year). Remember that billion patients drowning in line for two life jackets? Your decentralized FDA will hand out 23.4 million.
This will increase the treatment discovery rate 12.3x, compressing that ~443 years wait to ~36 years. Two things will save lives. First, finding treatments faster: treatments that would have sat undiscovered for centuries will get found 204 years sooner on average. Second, eliminating the 8.2 years bureaucratic delay between proving a drug is safe and letting dying humans take it. Combined, treatments will reach patients 212 years sooner on average. That timeline shift will prevent 10.7 billion deaths. Those are individual humans who currently have plans for next Tuesday.
Remember Vioxx and the smoke detector that works by mail? Your new system will collect every side effect automatically in real time. You'll know "12% got headaches, 3% were severe" BEFORE you take the pill, not after the class action lawsuit. The FDA doesn't publish these numbers at all. They make you guess.
Currently, your doctor picks treatments based on: that drug rep who brought good donuts in 2003, something they half-remember from medical school, whatever the insurance company allows, and vibes. This is called "evidence-based medicine," which contains the word "evidence" the same way "grape soda" contains the word "grape."
Your decentralized FDA will rank every treatment by what actually happened to real humans who took it:
Food has nutrition labels. Cigarettes have warning labels. Drugs have 40-page inserts written by lawyers having seizures, which nobody reads, including your doctor.
Your television advertisements show a smiling human frolicking through a meadow while a voiceover lists ways the drug might kill you at auctioneer speed. The meadow human does not react to the word "stroke." Side effects include "death," listed between "constipation" and "mild rash," as if your organs failing is roughly as inconvenient as dry skin. The label says "individual results may vary," meaning outcomes range from "cured" to "deceased" (both technically qualifying). It also says "ask your doctor," but your doctor has 7 minutes per appointment and just Googled your condition in the hallway.
Your new system will produce Outcome Labels that tell you what actually happens when real humans take a drug. Not what a marketing department hopes happens. Not what a lawyer is comfortable admitting happens. What happens.
Your decentralized FDA figures out which treatments work. But your governments also need to know which policies work, how much to spend on what, which laws to keep, which to throw away. Your current method is to argue about it on television until someone wins by being louder. On Wishonia, the Optimitron handles this. It's an appliance. You plug in what 10,000 jurisdictions tried, it tells you which policies actually made people richer or less dead. Its Optimal Budget Generator does budgets; its Optimal Policy Generator does laws.
Unlike Everything Else Humanity Has Tried
Humans usually want "proof" before they stop doing something stupid, which is interesting because you never required proof before starting:
- The RECOVERY trial tested 6 treatments on 48,000 patients for $500 per patient instead of the usual $41,000 per patient. That's a 82x cost reduction. Not in theory. In reality. During a pandemic. While panicking. Your species does its best medical research when terrified and disorganized, which suggests your normal system is somehow worse than panic.
- After WW2, humans cut military spending by 87.6% in two years and stumbled into the greatest economic boom in history by running out of people to shoot at. You're now spending 30.6x the pre-WW2 baseline in inflation-adjusted dollars. You're asking for 1%. Even people who really, really, love exploding people should be able to handle 1%.
Even your own war heroes figured this out. Eisenhower, the human who won WW2, warned you that the weapons industry was eating your civilization alive: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." You gave him a standing ovation and then immediately ignored him for 65 years.
Remember the 212 years timeline shift? Treatments reaching patients that many years sooner means billions of people gain years of healthy life. Value each of those life-years at $150,000 (the standard economic valuation), multiply across the global disease burden over the acceleration window, and you get $84.8 quadrillion in total economic value. Divide that by the $1 billion campaign cost, and you get a return of 84.8 million to 1. Your calculator will display an error, emit a tiny electronic scream, and attempt to leave the desk. This is correct.
Cost-effectiveness: $0.00177 to save one year of healthy human life. Anti-malaria bed nets, the gold standard for keeping humans alive, cost $89. This is 50.3kx cheaper. It beats smallpox eradication (280 to 1) and childhood vaccinations (13 to 1), which were humanity's previous greatest hits in the "not dying" genre. Even if you assume only a 1% probability of the treaty actually passing (because you're you), the expected return is still 503x better than anti-malaria bed nets.
Saving Humanity While Making Everyone Obscenely Wealthy
On Wishonia, people do useful things because they're useful. On Earth, you need a financial incentive. Not because anyone rationally opposes curing diseases (they don't; see above), but because 150 thousand people die per day while the arithmetic propagates, and money is how you compress the timeline.
So your weapons companies have this design flaw. They sell tiny pieces of themselves to anyone with papers. Each piece comes with a vote. If you collect enough votes you get to pick who sits on the board of directors, and the board tells the lobbyists what to say to Congress. Like, $4.4 billion a year in corporate lobbying is what buys your legislation. That is less than you spend on pizza. Your entire government is controlled by an amount of money that would not buy enough pizza to feed your government. And you're not buying Congress directly, because apparently that's illegal even though the current system is just buying Congress with extra steps. You're buying the companies that buy Congress. Then you tell them to ask for clinical trials instead of cluster bombs.
Someone already did a version of this. In 2021, a twelve-person firm called Engine No. 1, twelve people, spent $12.5 million and won three board seats at ExxonMobil, which is a $400 billion company. They did not have more money than Exxon. They had data showing that Exxon's strategy was making Exxon's own shareholders poorer, and the big shareholders like Vanguard and BlackRock, who own like 60% of everything, looked at the data and went "oh, huh, yeah" and voted with the twelve people. The stock went up.
Earth Optimization Services does the same thing, except instead of making an oil company slightly less oily, you're buying the weapons companies that control your government's lobbying and telling their boards to sell 1% of their bomb-making assets and buy biotechnology companies, which have net profit margins of 18.5% compared to 4.99% for bomb companies, which is 3.72x higher. So the board members get richer. And then you tell their lobbyists to lobby for clinical trials instead of missiles, which the Optimitron has calculated will make everyone including the board members richer and also not dead, because the board members are currently lobbying for policies that will result in the board members dying of preventable diseases in about twenty years, at which point their net worth becomes zero regardless of how large it was, unless they arrange to be buried with all of their money.
EOS is what your lawyers call a mission-locked public benefit corporation. It is legally required to maximize how long you live and how much money you make. If a board member tries to do something else, you can sue them. On Wishonia we just call this "a company that works." On Earth it apparently requires special paperwork.
The Optimitron calculates which policies will actually make humans live longer and have more money. Right now the answer is mostly "more clinical trials" because you have a 443-year backlog of untested treatments and people are dying in line, and "fewer missiles" because you have 122 spare apocalypses of margin and zero spare civilizations to use them on. The corruption is capped at 20% and fully transparent. The other 80% goes directly to clinical trials through wishocratic allocation, where every human gets one vote on spending priorities. You drag a slider. On one end: atomic bombs. On the other end: high-efficiency pragmatic clinical trials. Your current system has the slider at 604-to-one in favor of the bombs. You, personally, get to drag it wherever you think it should go. And nobody with more papers gets more votes than anybody else, because on your planet the thing that happens when you let money buy votes is money buys votes and then the votes do what the money wanted, which is how the slider ended up at 604-to-one in the first place.
Remember when your grandparents funded WW2 by buying bonds? They got 4% returns and a world without Nazis (mostly). They also still died of cancer, because nobody used the money to fund clinical trials. You're doing a better version of this. Instead of lending papers to a government and hoping it does the right thing with them, you're buying the companies that tell the government what to do and making them do the right thing, and the right thing also happens to make everyone involved richer, because it turns out not slowly poisoning your own civilization is good for the economy.
- Dead Nazis (admittedly good)
- 4% returns on war bonds (barely beat inflation)
- Still died of cancer in 1987
- Dead diseases (objectively better than dead Nazis because diseases kill more people)
- 272% projected annual returns (because it turns out companies get more valuable when the civilization they operate in stops slowly killing itself, and the investors make more money, which makes them very enthusiastic about continuing to not kill the civilization, which is the first time in your history that greed and not dying have pointed in the same direction)
- Not dying from preventable meat failures (this is the big one)
- Also no Nazis (as a bonus)
This raises the $1 billion needed to fuel the rest of the bribery machine. Nobody in the machine is your enemy. The enemy is the clock.
Here's the part where humans usually stop reading because it involves following money through more than one step:
- Rich humans give papers to Earth Optimization Services. EOS uses the papers ($1 billion) to buy enough pieces of your weapons companies to win board seats.
- The board members don't get to use opinions. The Optimitron tells them which policies will make humans live longer and have more money. Wishocracy lets every human who owns a piece drag a slider between "atomic bombs" and "high-efficiency pragmatic clinical trials." Right now the slider is at 604-to-one in favor of the bombs. Every human gets to drag it. The board looks at this data, and then the board tells the lobbyists what to ask Congress for. This is not "sensible people making sensible decisions." Sensible people are bribable and also they die. This is a calculator that tells you the answer, plus a vote where nobody's papers buy them extra votes. Twelve people took three of ExxonMobil's board seats with nothing but opinions. You're taking board seats across the whole weapons industry with arithmetic and a legal obligation to use it.
- The board sells 1% of the bomb-making assets and buys biotechnology company shares with the proceeds. Biotechnology companies have 3.72x the profit margins of bomb companies (18.5% vs 4.99%). The board just gave itself a raise. The lobbyists are now lobbying for clinical trials instead of cluster bombs.
- The campaign succeeds. The treaty passes. $27.2 billion/year moves from the murder budget to clinical trials.
- EOS keeps 20% for the saving-your-civilization part. Half of that (10%) goes to investor dividends: $2.72 billion/year on a $1 billion investment. That's 272% annual returns. Your investors will think it's a typo. It's not. The other half (10%) goes to a Super PAC that spends $2.72 billion/year rewarding politicians who voted yes on the treaty and funding cushy post-retirement careers for them, which is how your species trains senators apparently.
The remaining 80% of $27.2 billion goes where it's supposed to: funding clinical trials that keep humans alive.
This is the entire trick. You use greed to buy the machine, greed to optimize it, and greed to keep it optimized. The money just circulates until diseases stop existing. None of this is overcoming opposition. There is no opposition. There are only humans who haven't done the arithmetic yet, and 150 thousand daily funerals that won't wait for them to finish.
So Eisenhower, the human who won your last big war, warned you about this thing called the Military Industrial Complex: weapons manufacturers give papers to politicians, politicians give papers to weapons contracts, the contracts give papers to the manufacturers, the manufacturers give papers to the politicians. A loop. It just goes around and around printing money and corpses. You've been watching it go around for 65 years. You're not fighting this machine. You are buying it and changing what it prints.
Make Humans Click a Button to Not Die
You need 3.5% of humanity to vote yes on: "Should your country move 1% of military spending to clinical trials?"
You are not creating support for not dying of horrible diseases and not mass murdering each other. Nearly everyone already supports not dying of horrible diseases and not mass murdering each other. You are proving it.
Everyone thinks this is crazy because everyone else thinks this is crazy. Your economists call it pluralistic ignorance, which is the polite term for eight billion people waiting for permission to want what they already want. On Wishonia we call this "the galaxy's longest game of you-go-first." Most species that start playing it don't finish playing it. If every human realized that nearly every other human would like a world without war and disease and an extra $518,879 in lifetime income, it would be done tomorrow and the world would be unrecognizable.
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Right now every human who wants less war and disease assumes they are the weird one. The referendum is the moment they find out they are everyone.
Why 3.5%? A political scientist named Erica Chenoweth studied every major political movement of the last century and found that none had ever failed after achieving 3.5% active participation. Not one. Every civil rights movement, every revolution, every regime change. Hit 3.5% and you win. Humanity discovered the cheat code for changing its own civilization and then never used it on purpose.
That's 280 million humans. Sounds like a lot until you remember that more than 10 times as many of you downloaded TikTok to watch people twerk. You can get 280 million to vote yes or no on the treaty. $250 million of the campaign budget goes to paid referral bonuses that make sharing their link to vote financially attractive. It's a pyramid scheme where the thing at the top of the pyramid is not dying from preventable diseases.
Professional Briber Conversion Therapy
So you own the companies now (Step 1). The board sold 1% of the bombs and bought biotechnology companies that make 3.72x the margin. The Optimitron told the board what policies will keep humans alive and not broke. The board told the lobbyists what to say. The lobbyists are the same humans in the same buildings having the same lunches with the same politicians, except now they say different words after the lunch. Military lobbyists currently get $1,813 back for every paper they invest in democracy corruption, so here's what their career upgrade looks like:
- Salary: $500,000
- Moral status: Somewhere between "arms dealer" and "the person who puts raisins in cookies"
- Legacy: "Here lies someone who made orphans"
- Same salary, but for lobbying politicians to fund clinical trials instead of cluster bombs
- Moral status: "Philanthropist" (but you get to keep the money)
- Legacy: "Accidentally saved humanity while getting rich"
They won't even complain. Lobbyists don't have beliefs. They have employers. The old employer paid them to lobby for policies that the Optimitron has calculated will result in the lobbyist dying of a preventable disease in a smaller economy. You, the new employer, pay the same salary to lobby for policies that will result in the lobbyist not dying in an economy that is 1.43x larger. This is not a career change. The lobbyist sits in the same chair and calls the same senator. The only thing that changed is that the sentence they say will not result in the lobbyist dying.
It's For Sale Anyway
So politicians need two things to keep their jobs: papers and votes. Currently, weapons manufacturers provide both. After Step 1, you own the weapons manufacturer, and your lobbyists are already saying different words. But you have observed that politicians are not primarily motivated by words. They are motivated by papers and by the fear of losing their job, which is the source of their papers.
Your explosion manufacturers used to spend $198 million/year buying politicians. Those lobbyists are already saying "clinical trials" instead of "cluster bombs" (Step 1). But you did not get this far by trusting humans to do the right thing without a financial incentive.
It's not corruption if you corrupt the corruption.
Remember that $2.72 billion/year from Step 1? EOS pours it into a Super PAC that rewards politicians based on how they voted on the treaty. If you voted yes, you get campaign support while you're running and a cushy fellowship when you retire. If you voted no, you get to watch your opponent receive all of that instead. No papers go directly to politicians, because apparently that's illegal, so instead the papers take a scenic route through a scoring algorithm, which is the only legal way to train a senator on your planet.
The NRA already perfected this technology. They give politicians a letter grade, and your senators are more afraid of a bad mark than a mass shooting. You're plagiarizing their system and replacing "guns" with "not dying from diseases."
This works for any problem where politicians need to do something good but haven't been paid to do it yet. On your planet, this is most problems. On Wishonia, we just call it "the government." But you seem to prefer the version that requires bribery, so here we are.
Everyone Gets Rich and Nobody Dies
Your treaty passes because money defeats morality, as is tradition.
The $27.2 billion/year money volcano erupts:
- Military Contractors: Kept 99% of their bombs, sold 1% and bought biotechnology companies with 3.72x the margins, so the board is richer, the stock is up, and their employees stop dying of the diseases nobody was bothering to cure because everyone was too busy buying the 122th apocalypse.
- Big Pharma: Instead of paying $41,000 for phase 2 and 3 trials, the treaty pays THEM for each patient that joins their trials.
- Insurance Companies: Healthy people file fewer claims than dead people (dead people file zero claims, which is the ideal customer except they also pay zero premiums, creating a revenue problem).
- Investors: 272% returns. Returns scale with every treaty expansion, so investors become the world's most aggressive pro-health and anti-war lobbying force. Not a sentence anyone expected to write.
- Lobbyists: Same job, same salary, but their Wikipedia page no longer needs a "Controversies" section
- Politicians: Getting reelected by living voters (a revolutionary strategy)
- Regular humans: Not dying from stupid things (priceless, but also free)
Nobody has to evolve morally. You just point everyone's greed at diseases instead of each other.
This manual contains:
- Pictures (because reading is hard when you're diseased and dying)
- Simple math (addition mostly, some multiplication)
- Exact amounts of papers to give to specific humans
- The order in which to give them (very important)
- Legal ways to call bribes other things
- An appliance that tells your governments which policies work (it doesn't have feelings, which is why it's better at governing)
- Templates for tricking politicians into saving lives
Everything is designed to work WITH human dysfunction, not against it. I'm not asking humans to be better humans. I'm showing you how to bribe humanity into not dying.
You just read five steps involving bonds, lobbyists, Super PACs, a decentralized FDA, and an appliance that optimizes government policy. The obvious objection: "Nobody can coordinate all of that."
Correct. Nobody coordinates a pencil either.
One of your economists held up a pencil on television and said: "There's not a single person in the world who could make this pencil. The wood comes from a tree in Washington. The graphite comes from mines in South America. The rubber comes from Malaya. The brass ferrule, I haven't the slightest idea where it came from. Literally thousands of people cooperated to make this pencil. People who don't speak the same language, who practice different religions, who might hate one another if they ever met. No one sitting in a central office gave orders to these thousands of people. No military police enforced the orders that were not given." [-]
A pencil costs 25 cents. Making one requires thousands of strangers across dozens of countries. Nobody planned it. Nobody runs it. Everyone involved just wanted money, and the price system turned their selfishness into pencils. Your species does this billions of times a day without noticing.
Now look at this cured disease.
There is not a single person in the world who could cure it. The researcher in Lagos who found the cheaper trial design does not know the lobbyist in Brussels who passed the directive. The lobbyist does not know the nonprofit in Manila that recruited a million voters. The voters do not know the bondholder in New York whose greed funded the campaign. The bondholder does not know the politician in Delhi who voted yes because the Super PAC funded her opponent last time she voted no. The politician does not know the factory worker in Dhaka whose clinical trial enrollment generated the data that proved the treatment worked. Literally millions of people cooperated to cure this disease. No one sitting in a central office gave orders. No military police enforced the orders that were not given. Two numbers on a Scoreboard and pieces of paper with presidents on them did what no committee, no charity, and no central plan has ever done.
The five steps above are the machinery. You do not need to build the machinery. You need to turn it on. Here is the switch.
A pool of money. Two numbers on a Scoreboard: how long people live, how much they earn. By 2040, if the numbers went up, Earth Optimization Points holders split the pool. If they didn't, depositors divide it pro rata (still beats your retirement account). You earn Earth Optimization Points by getting friends to play. Nobody loses. The only losing move is not playing.
Your job was never to understand the five steps. Your job is to vote and get two friends to play. Four billion humans whose payout depends on curing diseases will attract the lobbyists, researchers, and institutions who know how to do the rest. The greed handles it. It always has. You just never pointed it at anything useful before.
Now is the time to select one of the two paths for the remainder of your existence.
I modeled both paths for 20 of your years. Your economists project steady 2.5% growth, which requires every trend that is currently getting worse to simultaneously stop getting worse. Good luck with that.
If you stop spending papers on murder and start spending them on medicine, your meat lasts longer, your productivity compounds, and over a remaining human lifespan you earn 1.57x what you would have earned doing the thing that kills you. This is not a complicated insight.
- Year 2027: Still spending 604 times more on weapons than on testing which medicines actually work. Nobody finds this weird.
- Year 2033: Destructive economy hits 25% of GDP. The Soviet Union collapsed at 15%. You have better technology and worse planning.
- Year 2035: Your best engineers now work in ransomware because it pays better than engineering. Hospitals budget for extortion the way they used to budget for gauze. A nurse clicks a chart and gets a countdown timer instead of a medication dose. The people who could reverse this trend are the ones profiting from it.
- Year 2040: Parasitic economy hits 50%. AI agents file more fake court cases than real ones. Tax collection collapses because AI can evade faster than humans can audit. Your governments don't fall; they rot in place, like a body whose organs are still technically present but no longer speaking to one another. When Venezuela collapsed, Venezuelans fled to Colombia. When the global economy collapses, there is no Colombia.
- Year 2043: Water wars go nuclear. The survivors argue about whether this counts as a climate death or a military death, because the spreadsheet has separate columns.
- Year 2045: Cockroaches evolve intelligence.
- Year 2050: Cockroaches find this manual, very confused
- Year 2028: Treaty passes. Murder money becomes medicine money. Investors confused by returns that aren't a typo. Military contractors discover that alive customers buy more things than dead ones.
- Year 2032: First treatments from the accelerated pipeline reach patients. Diseases that would have waited centuries for trials are getting tested now. Nobody is cured of everything, but the queue is finally moving. Humans experience the novel sensation of progress. Several publish op-eds arguing it's happening too fast.
- Year 2035: Turns out when you stop spending money on destruction and start spending it on production, things get produced. Your economists publish papers explaining why this was obvious in retrospect.
- Year 2040: The compounding kicks in. Healthier people work more, earn more, spend more, fund more research, which cures more diseases, which makes more people healthier. Humans begin to suspect that not killing each other was the missing variable.
- Year 2048: The model projects everyone 56.7x richer than the path you're currently on. Your children ask what "war" means. You change the subject.
Communism was invented, took over half your planet, and collapsed in a SINGLE human lifetime. In a world without fax machines. It required mass murder and was a TERRIBLE idea. You have the internet and an idea that mainly requires people to click a button and then receive money. If you can't make this happen, I genuinely don't know what to tell you.
The twist: you're going to do this anyway. Not because it's right, but because you can't help it.
You are a selfish animal governed by incentives. This is not an insult. It's the premise of your entire economy, your political system, and every page of this manual.
- The rich humans want 272% returns (they're very greedy)
- The politicians want to keep their jobs (they're very vain)
- The voters want free healthcare (they're very sick)
- The explosion manufacturers want money (they don't care where it comes from)
I ran the numbers on your species' habit of ignoring good ideas. The institutionalization rate is 90%. Nine out of ten humans will dismiss this as crazy. That is fine.
There are 2,781 billionaires on your planet and 195 heads of state. The chain reaction model shows that even with 90% dismissal, approximately 3.48 of them will engage with this idea within 3 years. Not because they're brave. Because there are 2,976 of them, and the math doesn't need all of them. It needs one.
And here is the part that should bother you: the incentive structure makes acting the selfish move. If others act too, you get rich together. If nobody else acts, you still own a piece of the only serious attempt to fix the problem. Either way, you win. The only way to reject this is to identify which assumption breaks, and you are welcome to try.
Count the premises. Improvement is physically possible (not building a bomb requires nothing). The benefits compound (healthier workers produce more, which funds more cures). Politicians respond to money (that's the Super PAC). Rich people prefer not dying (that's the bonds). And the only bottleneck is humans in the chain choosing "later" over 30 seconds. Five premises. Each one is individually obvious. The conclusion is just what happens when you add them up.
That's the Logical Inevitability Theorem with numbers attached. Rejecting the conclusion means rejecting at least one of the five premises.
Forwarding this takes 30 seconds. At the global average wage, that costs you $0.06. If the treaty path works, your lifetime income goes up by $518,879. The ratio is 8.7Mx to one. For not forwarding to be rational, the probability of success has to fall below 1 in 8.66 million. Five obvious premises do not add up to a probability that low. Choosing "later" is the single failure mode the math can't route around.
You don't need to know a billionaire. You're six degrees of separation from one. Forward this to one person with more reach than you. They forward to one person with more reach than them. Even with 90% of the chain dismissing it, the model shows it reaches someone who can act within 3 years. Not because anyone in the chain is brave. Because each one is selfish, and the math rewards forwarding.
The same forwarding fuels Path B at the same time. Every human in the chain also votes at warondisease.org, and every vote counts toward the 4.13 billion that no government on Earth can politely ignore. You don't have to pick which chain wins. Your thirty seconds runs both.
This is a chain reaction, and it runs on greed.
Every person in the chain will do exactly what you're about to do, for exactly the same selfish reasons. Not to save the world. Because it makes them money.
Humans aren't stupid. You invented cheese, which is milk you left out until it went bad but in a good way. That's genius. You just need to apply that same innovation to not dying.
Here is what should scare you: if this works, the world becomes unrecognizable. Not slightly better. Unrecognizable. Disease eradicated, income quadrupled, your species freed from the thing that has been eating it alive since before you invented writing. That future is so good your brain can't render it.
::: {.delay-cost-callout.content-visible when-format="html"} Since an incentive-compatible way to end war and disease was discovered:
counting
people will be unnecessarily tortured and brutally murdered by diseases. Every additional day we refrain from ending war and disease, about 139 thousand more people are unnecessarily tortured and brutally murdered by diseases. This is unfortunate. :::
Go to warondisease.org and cast your vote in the largest referendum in human history. Get two friends to do the same. That's how the doubling starts. Every minute of delay, 104 humans permanently stop. Your vote saves 2.6 lives and prevents 468 thousand hours of suffering.
The universe is literally offering you infinite money and eternal life, and you're thinking about it.
This is why aliens don't visit.
6,650 diseases have 0 FDA-approved treatments. At current trial capacity (15 diseases/year), exploring the therapeutic search space takes ~443 years. Redirect 1% of military spending ($27.2 billion/year) to pragmatic clinical trials. Trial capacity jumps 12.3x. Search space explored in ~36 years instead of centuries. Average treatment reaches patients 212 years sooner. Timeline shift saves 10.7 billion deaths, valued at $84.8 quadrillion. Cost-effectiveness: $0.00177/DALY, 50.3kx better than bed nets. Even at 1% probability of treaty adoption, risk-adjusted cost-effectiveness remains superior to the best existing global health interventions. Benefit estimates are independent of how adoption is achieved; several specified adoption pathways are costed separately and the cost-effectiveness conclusion survives substituting any of them. For ceiling context, the Minimum Sustainable Trajectory (1% Treaty) reaches 1.71x the Earth baseline after 20 years, with average income at $34,972 and total output at $322 trillion. The Optimal Governance Trajectory reaches 56.7x the Earth baseline, with average income at $1.16 million versus $20,483 on the status-quo path and total output at $10.7 quadrillion (The Political Dysfunction Tax).
Your public servants used $170 trillion of their salary to murder approximately 310 million humans over the last century of their employment. The murdered included 930,000 doctors, 310,000 scientists, 620,000 engineers, and 102 million children who will never grow up to replace them. They spend 604 dollars on the capacity for orphan manufacturing for every one dollar spent on the trials that might cure what is actually going to kill their citizens. Someone you love is, at this moment, suffering from a disease because the treatment that would help them exists untested on a shelf, because the money that would have tested it was busy turning into a missile. This treaty requires the undersigned nations to be 1% more rational. Each signatory redirects exactly one percent of its military budget to pragmatic clinical trials, perpetual Incentive Alignment Bond returns, and a Political Incentive Fund that scores legislators on compliance. Every nation cuts equally, so no country gets weaker. Trial capacity scales 12.3x. The backlog of 6,650 untreated diseases drops from 443 years to 36 years. Treatments arrive 212 years sooner. 10.7 billion preventable deaths averted, valued at $84.8 quadrillion. The percentage can go up. It never goes down. The Treaty is the settlement offer for the liability established in Humanity v. Government, adjudicated through the Court of Humanity, with the economic case quantified in 1% Treaty Impact.
Ubiquitous Pragmatic Trial Impact Analysis: How to Prevent a Year of Death and Suffering for 84 Cents
Of 9.5 million combinations plausible drug-disease pairings, only 0.342% have been clinically tested. At the current discovery rate of 15 diseases/year, clearing this backlog would take ~443 years. A decentralized FDA integrating pragmatic clinical trials into standard healthcare at $929/patient (vs. $41,000 traditional) increases trial capacity 12.3x, reducing backlog clearance to 36 years. Combined with eliminating the 8.2 years post-safety efficacy delay through opt-in trial participation after Phase I, treatments arrive 212 years earlier on average. This timeline shift saves 10.7 billion deaths, averts 565 billion DALYs, and eliminates 1.93 quadrillion hours of suffering (YLD portion of 565 billion DALYs converted to hours) at $0.842/DALY, competitive with bed nets ($89/DALY) at vastly greater scale. Using standard health economic valuation ($150,000/DALY, the US cost-effectiveness threshold; conservative relative to EPA/DOT Value of Statistical Life estimates), full impact yields $84.8 quadrillion in cumulative value (565 billion DALYs cumulative DALYs over the 212 years timeline shift, not annual; 178 thousand:1 ROI).
Choose Your Own Earth: A World Without the Political Dysfunction Tax, or Terminal Parasitic Load in 15 Years
Your destructive economy (military spending plus cybercrime) is already 11.5% of GDP and growing faster than your productive economy. At current rates, it reaches the Soviet collapse threshold in 8 years and exceeds productive output in 15. This paper models two GDP trajectories: the optimized path under military-to-medical reallocation, and the default path to civilizational collapse.
Governments wrote laws making it illegal to sue them. The legal term is "sovereign immunity." It descends from "the king can do no wrong," which your species abolished in theory and preserved in practice. Governments waived it for slip-and-falls in federal buildings. They kept it for killing people through war, drug delay, and budget misallocation. This paper proposes the Court of Humanity: any human can file, any government can be sued, juries are randomly selected from the global population, and sovereign immunity is not recognized as a defense. Enforcement runs through bond markets, not armies: if the world's investors agree the defendants owe the bill, the defendants' borrowing costs go up whether they cooperate or not. The bill, calculated from the body count using the governments' own life valuations (), is larger than any government can pay. They can, however, settle. The 1% Treaty is the settlement offer.
Government spending correlates with lobbying intensity, not marginal societal value. Programs with benefit-cost ratios exceeding 100:1 (vaccines, e-governance) receive single-digit billions while programs with negative net returns (military beyond deterrence, fossil fuel subsidies) receive hundreds of billions. This paper introduces Incentive Alignment Bonds (IABs), financial instruments that realign politician incentives with net societal value optimization. IABs create a capital pool funded by treaty inflows (80% to pragmatic clinical trials, 10% to investor returns, 10% to political incentives) that rewards politicians (via campaign support and post-office career opportunities) for funding high-NSV programs over low-NSV alternatives. The mechanism requires no legislative change: existing PAC infrastructure, impact bonds, and prediction markets can deploy it today. Analysis of a proposed 1% Treaty redirecting $27.2 billion/year from military spending to medical research shows a conditional 272% annual return for bondholders while the treaty remains in force. The 90:1 capital asymmetry ($454 trillion in household wealth vs. $5 trillion for concentrated interests) means diffuse beneficiaries can outspend incumbent lobbies once coordination problems are solved. IABs solve that coordination problem by turning political change into an investable asset class. A dominant assurance contract mechanism solves the bootstrap coordination problem: investor participation is the strictly dominant strategy regardless of beliefs about other investors' behavior, closing the end-to-end incentive chain from citizen coordination through treaty passage. At system scale, the Optimal Governance Trajectory reaches 56.7x the Earth baseline after 20 years, raises average income to $1.16 million versus $20,483 on the status-quo path, reaches $10.7 quadrillion in total output, and recovers roughly $101 trillion/year in suppressed value (The Political Dysfunction Tax).
Historians count war deaths. Health economists count drug-delay deaths. Disease researchers count disease deaths. Nobody adds them up. This paper does. The governments of Earth are charged with three counts of negligent mass homicide: (1) killing 310 million people through war, conflict, and democide since 1900; (2) killing 102 million people by blocking access to drugs already proven safe, under the 8.2 years efficacy delay mandated since 1962; and (3) spending the money that could have cured diseases on weapons instead. The drug-approval system kills 3,389 people by blocking good drugs for every one person it saves by blocking bad ones. The defendants had the money. They spent it on missiles. The proposed remedy: move 1% of military spending to clinical trials. The remedy pays everyone involved, because that is the only kind of remedy that has ever worked on humans.
The companies that lobby your government into spending 604 dollars on missiles for every one dollar on finding out which medicines work are publicly traded. Their shares are for sale to anyone. For roughly $110 per human, you buy all of them. Then the Optimitron calculates the budget that maximizes median healthy lifespan and median after-tax income, the new board hands that budget to the $198 million/year lobbying operation, and the lobbyists go sell Congress on the math. Expected value per $110 contributed: 4,800x to 27,000x. Nobody loses. Existing shareholders get a better strategy. Employees keep their jobs. The board members live longer because the diseases that were going to kill them get funded instead of ignored.
Politicians' votes have near-zero correlation with citizen preferences (Gilens and Page, 2014). Elite preferences predict policy outcomes. No mechanism connects citizen preferences to electoral consequences for representatives. RAPPA: Millions of citizens answer simple pairwise questions ("How would you split $100 between these two budget categories?"). Geometric mean aggregation produces population-level preference weights from sparse individual responses. Unlike approval voting or ranked choice, RAPPA captures preference intensity, not just what people want, but how much they care. Compare aggregated preferences to each legislator's voting record. Publish Citizen Alignment Scores. Channel campaign resources to high-alignment candidates through Incentive Alignment Bonds. The mechanism achieves three properties no prior system combines: minimal cognitive load (~20 comparisons per participant yields statistical convergence), preference intensity capture, and approximate strategy-proofness. At system scale, the Optimal Governance Trajectory reaches 56.7x the Earth baseline after 20 years, raises average income to $1.16 million versus $20,483 on the status-quo path, reaches $10.7 quadrillion in total output, and recovers roughly $101 trillion/year in suppressed value (The Political Dysfunction Tax).
Governance dysfunction suppresses roughly $101 trillion in recoverable value each year. Under this paper's 20-year transition model, the Minimum Sustainable Trajectory (1% Treaty) reaches 1.71x the Earth baseline ($322 trillion), while the Optimal Governance Trajectory reaches 56.7x the Earth baseline, raises average income to $1.16 million versus $20,483 on the status-quo path, and reaches $10.7 quadrillion in total output. This paper is the project's canonical derivation of that ceiling from an explicit waste ledger, opportunity ledger, and source-linked parameter model. Incentive Alignment Bonds are presented as the adoption mechanism, and full formulas, uncertainty ranges, and sensitivity outputs appear in Methodology, Parameters, and Calculations.
A conditional schedule-shift model of state legislation that lets post-Phase-1 treatments finance their own evidence generation and accelerates treatments for global diseases and aging.
This study quantifies the cumulative mortality and morbidity costs associated with the Unitary Pre-Market Approval (UPMA) model mandated by the 1962 Kefauver-Harris Amendments. By enforcing efficacy testing prior to market entry, the current regulatory framework imposes an average "Efficacy Lag" of 8.2 years post-safety verification. Using data from the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development (CSDD) and the WHO Global Burden of Disease (GBD) database, we estimate two distinct mortality costs: (1) Historical mortality (1962-2024): approximately 102 million people died waiting for approved drugs during their approval delays, representing a lower bound excluding drugs never developed due to cost barriers; (2) Future timeline shift: an additional 416 million will eventually die because the disease eradication timeline has been pushed back by 8.2 years. Combined, these represent 8.77 billion Disability-Adjusted Life Years when adjusted for morbidity, with a cumulative economic deadweight loss of approximately $1.32 quadrillion (2024 USD), reflecting 8.77 billion DALYs valued at the standard WHO cost-effectiveness threshold of $150,000/DALY. The societal cost of Type II Regulatory Errors (delayed access to effective therapies) exceeds the averted cost of Type I Regulatory Errors (market access for ineffective therapies) by a factor of 3,389.
What is the maximum cost to achieve any policy change through legal democratic channels? We estimate $25 billion for the United States and $200 billion globally. These figures represent the upper bound of matching all opposition spending (campaign finance, lobbying) and providing career alternatives for affected legislators. For high net-societal-value policies, even these maximum costs yield extraordinary returns: military-to-health reallocation achieves a benefit-cost ratio exceeding 400,000:1, carbon pricing exceeds 1,000:1, and occupational licensing reform exceeds 2,000:1. The "political impossibility" objection thus reduces to a capital allocation problem. Political change is not impossible; it is merely expensive, and for valuable reforms, the price is trivial relative to the benefits. At system scale, the Optimal Governance Trajectory reaches 56.7x the Earth baseline after 20 years, raises average income to $1.16 million versus $20,483 on the status-quo path, reaches $10.7 quadrillion in total output, and recovers roughly $101 trillion/year in suppressed value (The Political Dysfunction Tax).
Quantifying the compound cost of war since 1900: 310 million dead, $1.48 quadrillion in historical costs, and a 23x income multiple lost to eight compounding channels of destruction.
Algorithmic Public Administration: A Protocol for Replacing Government Intermediaries with Deterministic Functions
Government agencies are largely chains of humans passing records to other humans, each checking whether the previous human filled out the right form rather than whether anyone was helped. In the United States alone, this intermediation destroys or diverts $4.98 trillion per year, or 17.3% of GDP. We describe a protocol combining five primitives (a transparent ledger, citizen preference aggregation, a cross-jurisdictional evidence engine, an identity layer, and rules-based monetary policy) that replaces specific mechanical functions currently performed by the Federal Reserve, Internal Revenue Service, Social Security Administration, Government Accountability Office, Congressional Budget Office, Office of Management and Budget, Federal Election Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, and Census Bureau. The protocol is deliberately neutral about policy ends. It preserves democratic control: citizens still decide resource allocation through evidence-informed pairwise preference comparison, and the algorithm executes those decisions without extracting value at each administrative layer. Whether the recovered value is returned as debt reduction, expanded public goods, a citizen dividend, or lower taxes is a choice left to voters, not embedded in the mechanism. We distinguish fiscal cash the protocol can route directly to citizens from broader societal gains that arrive as lower prices and higher wages, and we describe a phased implementation pathway that proves each component at bounded scale before the next is deployed.
This report applies systems engineering methodology to quantify allocative inefficiency in U.S. governance across four dysfunction categories: direct spending waste, compliance burden on the private sector, policy-induced GDP loss, and system inefficiency. Using Monte Carlo simulation across ten components with OECD benchmarking, we estimate an aggregate efficiency gap of $4.98 trillion annually and recoverable capital of $2.49 trillion if U.S. performance converges toward OECD median efficiency. This categorization distinguishes direct budget waste from broader economic dysfunction, each requiring different solution pathways. We also translate the efficiency gap into QALY and VSL-equivalent welfare terms for interpretability. For global ceiling context, the Optimal Governance Trajectory reaches 56.7x the Earth baseline after 20 years, raises average income to $1.16 million versus $20,483 on the status-quo path, reaches $10.7 quadrillion in total output, and recovers roughly $101 trillion/year in suppressed value (The Political Dysfunction Tax).
Optimocracy: Causal Inference on Cross-Jurisdictional Policy Data to Maximize Median Health and Wealth
Thousands of jurisdictions (municipal, state, federal, international) have exposed populations to different policies over decades. This cross-jurisdictional variation is a natural experiment. Optimocracy: (1) Apply causal inference to this historical policy data, (2) Identify which policies predict above-average median income and healthy life years, (3) Publish recommendations for every major vote, (4) Track politician alignment with evidence. Politicians still decide; the scoreboard just records what they decided and what it cost. Acting on the scoreboard is a separate problem, and this paper surveys the available mechanisms rather than assuming one. At system scale, the Optimal Governance Trajectory reaches 56.7x the Earth baseline after 20 years, raises average income to $1.16 million versus $20,483 on the status-quo path, reaches $10.7 quadrillion in total output, and recovers roughly $101 trillion/year in suppressed value (The Political Dysfunction Tax).
The Optimal Policy Generator: A Causal Inference Protocol for Maximizing Median Health and Wealth Through Public Policy
Centuries of public policy variation across thousands of jurisdictions (countries, states, cities) constitute a massive natural experiment. The data to identify which policies maximize welfare exists but has not been systematically harvested. The Optimal Policy Generator (OPG) applies causal inference methods (synthetic control, difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity) and Bradford Hill criteria to this cross-jurisdictional data, measuring policy impact on two terminal general-welfare metrics: real after-tax median income growth and median healthy life years. For any jurisdiction, OPG produces four categories of public policy recommendations: ENACT (evidence-supported policies the jurisdiction lacks), REPLACE (policies set at suboptimal levels), REPEAL (policies with net welfare harm), and MAINTAIN (policies aligned with evidence). Each recommendation includes expected effects on both metrics, confidence grades, and blocking factors including freedom and autonomy constraints. The framework is agnostic to which party enacted each policy, evaluating only whether it improved outcomes. Projected welfare gains for typical US states: 5-15% of GDP. At system scale, the Optimal Governance Trajectory reaches 56.7x the Earth baseline after 20 years, raises average income to $1.16 million versus $20,483 on the status-quo path, reaches $10.7 quadrillion in total output, and recovers roughly $101 trillion/year in suppressed value (The Political Dysfunction Tax).
Humanity spends 604x more on wars than testing which medicines work. The Earth Optimization Prize pays whoever fixes that. Two target numbers: healthy life years and median income. Hit them by 2040 and the pool goes to the people who recruited voters for the 1% Treaty. Miss them and depositors split the realized pool pro rata. The mechanism: deposit, recruit, and let compound interest do the rest.
The Optimal Budget Generator: A Causal Inference Protocol for Maximizing Median Health and Wealth Through Public Goods Funding
20-40% of public goods funding is misallocated relative to outcome-maximizing benchmarks, representing trillions annually in foregone welfare gains. Budget processes respond to lobbying intensity and historical precedent rather than causal evidence of effectiveness. The Optimal Budget Generator (OBG) applies causal inference, diminishing returns modeling, and cost-effectiveness analysis to determine optimal public goods funding levels that maximize two terminal general-welfare metrics: real after-tax median income growth and median healthy life years. For each spending category, OBG estimates an Optimal Spending Level (OSL) identifying where marginal returns equal opportunity cost. The Budget Impact Score (BIS) measures confidence in each OSL estimate based on study quality, statistical precision, and temporal recency of the underlying causal evidence. The result is a gap analysis showing which categories are over- or underfunded relative to evidence-based benchmarks, enabling systematic reallocation from low-return to high-return public investments. At system scale, the model's Optimal Governance Trajectory reaches 56.7x the Earth baseline after 20 years, raises average income to $1.16 million versus $20,483 on the status-quo path, reaches $10.7 quadrillion in total output, and recovers roughly $101 trillion/year in suppressed value (The Political Dysfunction Tax).
There's a non-zero possibility that hell exists, and that you and everyone you love is going to die and burn in it for eternity. As it is very hot in hell, this would be unfortunate. There's also a non-zero possibility that biotechnology lets you feel very good for an indefinitely long period of time. Expected value is the chance of a thing multiplied by the size of it, and if you multiply infinity by any likelihood at all, even 0.0000001%, it's still infinity. So the expected value of doing nothing is infinity bad, and the expected value of acting is infinitely good, even if there's an extremely low probability that any of this is true. The cost of acting is finite: roughly one share of a company that makes missiles. This paper argues that when one outcome is infinitely terrible and the other is infinitely good, any finite action that shifts the odds from the first toward the second is rational, and that the cheapest such action available is redirecting the resources your governments waste being really good at killing the taxpayers who pay for them. (They currently spend 604 times more on the military than on the clinical trials that would cure the diseases doing the killing.) It's Pascal's wager with the broken parts replaced: one hypothesis instead of a thousand gods, real evidence instead of none, an action that actually changes the outcome, and a stake of one share instead of your eternal soul.
Treatments that could save lives take an average of 8.2 years to complete clinical trials after discovery. Since 1962, these delays have contributed to an estimated 102 million preventable deaths. Meanwhile, only 1-10% of adverse drug events get reported to the FDA, and billions of people generate continuous health data through wearables and apps that remains unharvested. We present a two-stage framework that transforms this data into validated treatment recommendations. Stage 1 ($0.1/patient): aggregate millions of natural experiments and score causal confidence using the Predictor Impact Score (PIS), a composite metric operationalizing six Bradford Hill causality criteria. Stage 2 ($929/patient): confirm top signals through pragmatic trials embedded in routine care, 44.1x cheaper than traditional Phase III trials. Cost estimates derive from a meta-analysis of 108 pragmatic trials plus implementations like RECOVERY (which found a life-saving treatment in 100 days) and ADAPTABLE. A Trial Priority Score (PIS x DALYs x Novelty x Feasibility) determines which signals proceed to experimental confirmation. The framework produces three outputs absent from current pharmacovigilance: (1) "Outcome Labels," per-condition documents ranking all treatments by quantitative effect size (inverting the traditional per-drug FDA label); (2) precision dosing recommendations derived from optimal daily values (the predictor values historically preceding the best outcomes); and (3) a three-tier evidence grading system (Validated, Promising, Signal) combining observational and experimental effect sizes. Trial results feed back to calibrate observational models, creating a learning health system where accuracy improves continuously. High PIS signals warrant experimental investigation; low PIS does not rule out true effects. This framework complements traditional RCTs. Stage 2 pragmatic trials are required to establish validated causal claims.
A universal right to try, with evidence. The Act authorizes commercial access after initial human safety testing and makes every covered treatment use teach us something.
The Earth Optimization Prize is a pool of money. Two numbers on a Scoreboard: how long people live, how much they earn. By 2040, if global HALE reaches 79.4 years and median income reaches $4,381, Earth Optimization Points holders split the pool. If not, depositors divide the realized pool pro rata. Registration asks two questions: yes or no on the 1% Treaty, and how much military vs. clinical trials (with Optimitron evidence so the voter sees what each dollar actually buys). Anyone can start a second pool. It joins the network automatically, because all pools measure the same two numbers. That "automatically" requires six things this paper specifies: (1) verify each person is real and only counts once (identity layer with proof-of-personhood); (2) register pools so metric commitments are checkable, not promises (pool registry); (3) a vote, Earth Optimization Points, and deposit claims with rules that work across pools (token mechanics); (4) any verified voter can claim from any pool directly, no netting, no settlement (cross-pool claims); (5) every front-end shows the same combined voter count and pool size (scoreboard aggregation); and (6) an oracle that reads the WHO and World Bank reports and triggers treasury release when the numbers are met (terminal general-welfare metric oracle), with decentralized surveys as a cross-check. The goal is a protocol simple enough that a second pool can launch without asking the first pool's permission.
A Step-by-Step Guide to Optimizing Your Terrible Civilization
Drug development costs have increased approximately 105x in real terms since the 1962 Kefauver-Harris Amendment. This analysis uses the Baily (1972) academic study as the primary source, adjusts for inflation via Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI data, and validates the finding against six independent real-world price comparisons: generic vs. brand-name drugs, supplements vs. prescriptions, compounding pharmacies vs. FDA-approved products, veterinary vs. human drugs, orphan drug pricing, and historical antibiotic economics. Monte Carlo sensitivity analysis confirms the estimate is robust across plausible input ranges. The magnitude is consistent with independent estimates of 100-400x from multiple research groups.
This is a Quarto book project with Python-based parameter calculations.
# Clone and setup
git clone https://github.com/wishonia/disease-eradication-plan.git
cd disease-eradication-plan
python -m venv .venv
.venv/Scripts/activate # Windows
# source .venv/bin/activate # macOS/Linux
pip install -r requirements.txt
# Generate variables and render
python scripts/generate-everything-parameters-variables-calculations-references.py
quarto renderdih_models/parameters.py- All calculations and variables_variables.yml- Generated Quarto variables with tooltipsknowledge/- All content organized by topicCONTRIBUTING.md- Writing standards and style guide
See CONTRIBUTING.md for detailed contribution guidelines.