Thank you for your essay, Ted. I appreciated it.
You might find my junior high school level math demonstration of how the monetary system causes suffering, and how being free eliminates suffering. It complements some of your ideas about the monetary system. It's here, as a video:
Also, as to your concerns about cheating and violence, in my experience as a teacher and counselor, I've found that understanding WHY individuals engage in harmful behavior and removing the CAUSES of such behavior is the best approach, rather than remaining ignorant, waiting until it happens, and then working in emergency (fight or flight) mode, and likely making things much worse (pushing people to feel the need to do even more harmful behavior, in response). Games theory, unfortunately, is not modeled on biology, and so it can't help us here - instead, we need to look to psychology, especially positive psychology, where we find theories such as Maslow's hierarchy of needs (motivations) that help us see what humans need, in order for them to behave most cooperatively/healthfully, and we can look to neurology, which helps us see when reward chemicals are triggered vs. when stress chemicals are triggered. Cheating and violence and hoarding and such are malfunctions, NOT inherent in the system, but symptoms of something bad going into the system, or something needed being prevented from getting into the system.
Which leads me to add that you're absolutely right, we really are "drowning in a flood of low-grade information", starting with a lack of clarity about what we humans really do need, to grow physically, emotionally, intellectually, and philosophically healthy. Without that knowledge, getting to at least the leaders of every possible group, we are destined to fail, because the success of everything we do is reliant on our brains and bodies working as well as possible, not malfunctioning. Yet most people are hopelessly misled about what they need to function well, and the few who do know are often lacking the knowledge about how to actually get what they need! (For example, it took me over 30 years to understand that my body absolutely needed to be on a raw food diet, but even when I figured that out, I still struggle to get the foods I need, because I don't have a consistent place to live where I can grow my own food, and the stores in my area sell very little of what I consider food, and instead sell addictive, empty calorie junk, and even when I do find foods that I think might be raw, it's not always easy to tell if they are, since corporations often don't say if their product has been cooked, and sometimes they lie and say it's raw when it absolutely isn't!)
So, yeah, lack of high quality information is definitely causing us to slow down our rate of success as a species.
