Working Paper No. 2023-24 Recoupling The driver of Human Success

For example, during the COVID pandemic, the World Health Organization coordinated efforts to develop and distribute vaccines and treatments across countries, while governments of individual countries worked to slow the spread of the virus by implementing lockdowns, travel restrictions, and social distancing aided by the help of local groups and individuals. [...] The bidirectional arrows indicate that the variability in the scale of our challenges needs to be matched by the flexibility in the scale of our capacities in order for recoupling to occur. [...] Since the scope of our collective challenges keeps changing, scope recoupling involves reconfiguring the scope of our collective capacities in alignment with the scope of our collective challenges (as illustrated by the bidirectional horizontal arrows in the figure). [...] 1 See “sovereignty” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: 15 Decoupling the scope of our challenges from the scope of our capacities underlies many of the social problems that drive modern populist movements: the anger of the “left behind,” the mistrust of elites, the popular support for protectionism, and strict immigration controls. [...] Inequities and inefficiencies in the social sphere cannot be corrected through monetary compensation since the monetization of a social interaction changes the meaning and value of the interaction (as in the case of sex, for example).