The problem with this being, we know neoliberalism isn’t stable long-term and therefore despite Stanislaw Lem having written a fictitious world where neoliberalism has won, it wouldn’t actually work like that. It's like H G Wells having written a novel about a world government called the New World Order governed by authoritarian technocrats before anyone actually tried that.
Top-down centrally planned economies don't work regardless of whether the central planner is a communist generalissimo or a capitalist billionaire who bought up everything and set themselves up as a feudal lord by renting their property to the rest of the population in exchange for labor using it. They always fail the same way, the guy in charge isn't actually capable of keeping the incredibly complicated system running properly, causing logistical cascade failures, which make the populace upset as their quality of life declines and leads to the system becoming oppressive and totalitarian to keep control.
All Hal Bregg needs to do to escape is continue riding that relativistic time machine, revisiting the solar system every few thousand more years to see if the world state has collapsed of its own incompetence yet.
See also, A World Out of Time by Larry Niven, which is basically the story of exactly that.
The goal of Hal escaping to the relativistic time machine and coming back in a few hundred or thousand years appears to be how the book ends. They're working on a new project, unfortunately they're the only ones. The rest of the population no longer sees a point to exploration or conquest as their every need is fulfilled and they're a completely coddled people. Best luck to Hal, I'd go with him.
The problem with this being, we know neoliberalism isn’t stable long-term and therefore despite Stanislaw Lem having written a fictitious world where neoliberalism has won, it wouldn’t actually work like that. It's like H G Wells having written a novel about a world government called the New World Order governed by authoritarian technocrats before anyone actually tried that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_World_Order_(Wells_book)
Top-down centrally planned economies don't work regardless of whether the central planner is a communist generalissimo or a capitalist billionaire who bought up everything and set themselves up as a feudal lord by renting their property to the rest of the population in exchange for labor using it. They always fail the same way, the guy in charge isn't actually capable of keeping the incredibly complicated system running properly, causing logistical cascade failures, which make the populace upset as their quality of life declines and leads to the system becoming oppressive and totalitarian to keep control.
All Hal Bregg needs to do to escape is continue riding that relativistic time machine, revisiting the solar system every few thousand more years to see if the world state has collapsed of its own incompetence yet.
See also, A World Out of Time by Larry Niven, which is basically the story of exactly that.
The goal of Hal escaping to the relativistic time machine and coming back in a few hundred or thousand years appears to be how the book ends. They're working on a new project, unfortunately they're the only ones. The rest of the population no longer sees a point to exploration or conquest as their every need is fulfilled and they're a completely coddled people. Best luck to Hal, I'd go with him.