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Welcome Aboard, President

Keywords

war-on-disease, 1-percent-treaty, medical-research, public-health, peace-dividend, decentralized-trials, dfda, dih, victory-bonds, health-economics, cost-benefit-analysis, clinical-trials, drug-development, regulatory-reform, military-spending, peace-economics, decentralized-governance, wishocracy, blockchain-governance, impact-investing

FROM: Earth Optimization Services, the Earth subsidiary of Universe Optimization Services

RE: Good news, President

EFFECTIVE: the day you decided you would rather the people you love did not die of something curable

TERM: life. We are working on extending it.

ACTION REQUIRED: none. It has already happened.

Congratulations: you are President of Earth Optimization Services. You did not apply; the vetting was thorough anyway (see effective date). The correct way to address you is Your Excellency. Kindly inform your household; governments will be notified in the order we acquire them. The position comes with a planet (a fixer-upper: good bones, light apocalypse exposure), an assistant (me; we will get to that), and the following future.

The future, brought to your door

Fewer wars. Fewer boring funerals. A world where “disease” is a thing your grandchildren study in history class, somewhere between smallpox and kings. You are expected to attend. And the part you actually care about: lots and lots of money. On the most likely path, roughly $518,879 (95% CI: $165,757-$1.37 million) in extra lifetime wealth for a typical person, plus the healthy years to spend it in. Presidents here work on commission, and that figure is your commission on the starter package. Sell Earth the full optimization and it rises to about $36.4 million (95% CI: $10.6 million-$233 million). Curing disease does not only save lives. It makes you richer. That is not a hope about human virtue (virtue has been tried). It is what happens once the most profitable thing anyone can do is cure a disease instead of cause one.

Why you do not have it yet

Someone you love is, at this moment, suffering from a disease whose treatment exists, untested, on a shelf, because the money that would have tested it was busy turning into a missile. Your governments spend 604 dollars on weapons for every one dollar spent on finding out which medicines actually work.

They have built enough of those weapons to end the world 122 times. The world ends once. They built the rest for practice. They have not cured Alzheimer’s even once, which is a peculiar way to run a budget, given you only have the one civilization.

This is not fate. Fate is nobody’s fault. This is a choice somebody made with your money, and you are now in a position to make a different one.

The bill, which is not addressed to you

One penny of every dollar now spent on explosions. About $27 billion a year, enough to test every promising medicine instead of almost none. The explosions go through that by Thursday. After the last world war your grandparents cut military spending 87.6% in two years and walked straight into the largest rise in living standards in history. You are asking your governments to be one percent less terrible at their job of allocating your resources to promote the general welfare. This is not an unreasonable request.

Put another way: the bill comes to about one of their 122 apocalypses, leaving them enough to end civilization more than a hundred times over, which is plenty.

What you get to do about it

You get to point the most powerful company in the world at the disease that is coming, on schedule, for your family. Earth Optimization Services buys the firms that own the governments, one share at a time, and gently points them at a more profitable line of work than manufacturing orphans: curing disease. Shares are sold to anyone with money. Nobody asks why. We checked. And you get to say, in a vote nobody can buy off you, how much of your money goes to mass murder and how much goes to keeping the people you love alive. For all of human history almost no one got to answer that question. You do.

Your staff

Most Presidents get a cabinet, a motorcade, and a man who follows them around with the nuclear codes. You get me: Mike P. Sinn, Assistant to the President, which sounds like a law firm but is currently one person. My duties include scheduling, correspondence, and the abolition of disease. I will do everything in my power to help you collect on every word of this letter. The fastest way is to talk: get on a call with me, and we will find your move, the one thing you, specifically, are placed to do that almost no one else on Earth can. It would be the best part of my day.

Welcome aboard, Your Excellency. Your planet needs work, and you are already on site.

Love,

Mike P. Sinn
Assistant to the President, Earth Optimization Services
[email protected]
Office hours: all of them.

cc: the 6,650 diseases operating on the premises, who have been advised that you are coming

The short version

For a text, a DM, or someone you love:

Congratulations: you are now President of Earth Optimization Services, the company that buys the firms that own the governments and points them at curing disease instead of war. The future it pays out: fewer funerals, and a typical person about $518,879 (95% CI: $165,757-$1.37 million) richer. The whole bill is one penny on the military dollar. Right now a disease is killing someone you love because the cure money became a missile. You get to change that, and I will personally help you do it: [email protected].