Solutions are dictated by problems.
With a rat's nest of problems like a massive government debt, inequality, climate change, and mass extinction (to name a few), it seems unlikely that tinkering around the edges is going to effectively address them; fundamental, structural change is required on the system.
The feature of our system that drives all of those issues is our need for growth. The growth imperative says that the economy has to keep growing or catastrophe will occur ("a personal disaster for every American," according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce). However, we're already using 1.5 planets-worth of resources. We're drawing down the planet's natural capital, we've been doing it for decades, and yet our leadership insists we continue to grow. Growth ends. Whether or not that is your personal disaster depends on when - and how - we transition to a non-growing economy. That's what Steady State Economics is designed to address.
Growth means growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP): an increase in the output of goods and services from the economy. By growing our GDP, we accelerate the rate at which the natural world is converted into stuff (GDP even includes the cleanup closts of oil spills and stuff that we blow up, like bombs). It would be bad enough if unsustainable resource depletion was done to lift people out of poverty, but that's not even the case. We grow the economy to give that growth to the top 1%. It's even worse than that, though: we've grown the money supply so fast that it's become decoupled from GDP, meaning that we've also committed to an enormous amount of resource depletion in the future (just like the carbon emissions in the ocean and atmosphere will lead to a delayed temperature rise that will kick in over decades).
I'm probably re-hashing a lot of what you already know, and we do that a lot: we talk about problems to get people's attention. We need to shift our attention to solutions. If perpetual growth is the problem, then the solution is to not grow - and do it at a "size" that fits on the planet. That means we consume within the Earth's capacity to provide us resources and absorb our wastes. So how do we do that?
How do you want to do that?
That question is not entirely rhetorical, because steady state economics is being invented right now. It's also called ecological economics, and the basic idea is to incorporate resource limits into our economy - but to do so in a way that distributes resources more fairly, translates productivity gains into dividends of leisure time (not more consumption), and still incentivizes ingenuity. The low hanging fruit is to eliminate resource hoarding by the top 1%, which can be done by reforms like: setting maximum pay differentials within a company; adopting local currencies; gradually phasing in a 100% reserve requirement for banks; and refocus our national economic goals on better metrics than GDP. Many of the strategies being promoted by steady state economists have been debated for a long time, but they're now being assembled into an interdisciplinary economic model that's neither capitalist or socialist (though it borrows from both). It's something different altogether. It's Steady State Economics.
Now before you dismiss these unconventional ideas as unrealistic, keep in mind that unconventional becomes possible in crisis, which is inevitable as we chase neverending growth:
“Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” - Milton Friedman
These are the ideas we want lying around, but they need to get beyond the academic world. Read up and pass it on.
(Share and Recommend!)
Enough Is Enough by Rob Dietz & Dan O'Neill
Supply Shock by Brian Czech
Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE)