Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman’s "Children of a Modest Star" is an extended meditation on planetary governance that I read as a piece of design fiction.

Today's essay is my response to their book.

I start with an old warning: the Gold Standard. A system that promised frictionless exchange ended up as monetary tyranny and long-distance control - sterling debt, devaluation, famine, and the casual cruelty of "liberal" empires. That history matters because it's exactly the fear that haunts any talk of "planetary institutions": a global Leviathan that crushes everyone with no hope of exit.

And yet: the planet needs to be governed as a planet, and we need institutions with teeth that can tackle planetary challenges at the only scale they can be tackled, namely, at the scale of the planet. Institutions that are sorely missing, for the present global system is "fundamentally not geared toward addressing planetary challenges like pandemics."

BG's challenge: "What would governance look like if our planetary condition was central rather than ancillary to our political self-conceptions?" Their answer: "a reconstructed governance architecture for the planet… guided by the principle of planetary subsidiarity"

More on "Children of a Modest Star" in today's essay; an immodest book in the best way possible.

PS: I have way too many notes on BG to cover it from end to end; I have focused my remarks on “Planetary Subsidiarity,” which is the most important contribution of the book IMHO.