# Please Select an Earth: A) Everyone Gets Rich B) Somalia, but Everywhere
A World Without the Political Dysfunction Tax, or Terminal Parasitic Load by [2037](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-destructive_economy_35pct_year)
### Your Current Trajectory
Your economists project 2.5% annual growth. This projection assumes no major wars, no pandemics worse than COVID, no catastrophes, and no acceleration of any trend that is currently accelerating. It is not a baseline. It is the best-case scenario for a civilization that spends more on explosion technology than on figuring out why its own bodies stop working, and it requires 20 consecutive years of getting lucky. Your species has never had 20 consecutive years of getting lucky.
Here is what is actually happening.
**Your military spending is accelerating, not stabilizing.** Global military spending hit [\$2.72 trillion](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-global_military_spending_annual_2024) in 2024, up 9.4% in a single year, the steepest rise since the Cold War^([1](../references.llms.md#ref-sipri-milex-2024)). That was the 10th consecutive annual increase. The 10-year compound growth rate is [3.4%](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-global_military_spending_real_cagr_10yr) in real terms. Your nuclear arsenals are being modernized, not reduced. You are deploying autonomous weapons systems without governance frameworks, which means you are building machines that make irreversible decisions and then not telling them when to stop.
**War funds cybercrime. Cybercrime funds war.** Your military spending isn’t the whole destructive economy. Cybercrime costs your civilization [\$10.5 trillion](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-global_cybercrime_cost_annual_2025) per year^([2](../references.llms.md#ref-cybercrime-economy-10-5t)), growing at [15%](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-global_cybercrime_cagr) annually. If measured as a country, it would be the third-largest economy on Earth, after the US and China. And this is not a separate problem from war. North Korea funds its nuclear program through state-sponsored hacking, stealing \$2 billion in cryptocurrency in 2025 alone (up 51% from the previous year), accounting for 60% of all global crypto theft^([3](../references.llms.md#ref-chainalysis-crypto-theft-2025)). Russia finances military operations with ransomware revenue. China’s cyber-espionage steals the intellectual property that its military-industrial complex can’t develop on its own. Cybercrime is war by other means, and it is more profitable than the global trade of all major illegal drugs combined. FBI-reported cybercrime losses in the US alone grew 33% in a single year, from \$12.3 billion to \$16.6 billion^([4](../references.llms.md#ref-fbi-ic3-2024)). And 99% of cybercrimes go unpunished^([5](../references.llms.md#ref-cybercrimes-unpunished-96-pct)), because your enforcement systems were designed for a world where criminals had to physically show up.
Some of your cybersecurity analysts project this growth will plateau^([6](../references.llms.md#ref-cybersecurity-ventures-plateau-2026)), arguing the market is too large to sustain double-digit growth. This is the same logic as the 2.5% GDP projection: it requires every accelerating trend to simultaneously stop accelerating. The analysts projecting a plateau are selling cybersecurity products; their business model depends on the premise that defenses can keep pace. Meanwhile, their own customers’ actual losses grew 33% last year. The analysts’ spreadsheet says plateau. The FBI’s spreadsheet says 33%. The FBI’s spreadsheet is not trying to sell you a firewall.
**AI amplifies whatever you point it at, and right now it is pointed at a recursive loop.** A single AI agent can probe thousands of systems simultaneously, generate custom phishing attacks in any language, and find vulnerabilities faster than your entire cybersecurity workforce combined. But the real threat is not AI-assisted hacking. It is the feedback loop: steal money, buy compute, train better AI hackers, steal more money, buy more compute. Every component of this loop exists today. North Korea steals cryptocurrency, launders it through DeFi within weeks, and uses the proceeds to fund state capacity. The moment someone connects the steal-to-compute-to-steal pipeline end-to-end (and the incentive to do so is overwhelming for state actors with nothing to lose), cybercrime growth stops being linear and starts being recursive. AI-generated phishing is up 1,265% since 2022. Deepfake fraud is up 2,137%^([7](../references.llms.md#ref-wef-cybersecurity-outlook-2026)). AI-enhanced fraud is 4.5 times more profitable than traditional methods. Defense is structurally lopsided: defenders must protect every surface, attackers need one vulnerability. AI widens the gap, it does not close it.
Your military is racing to deploy autonomous weapons. Your adversaries are racing to deploy autonomous hackers. Under the Optimal Governance Trajectory, a billion AI-enhanced researchers cure diseases. Same technology. Same capability. Different direction. The tool doesn’t care. You have to choose.
**Add it up.** Your destructive economy (military spending plus its cybercrime offspring, not counting the [Political Dysfunction Tax](https://manual.warondisease.org/knowledge/appendix/political-dysfunction-tax.html)^([8](../references.llms.md#ref-political-dysfunction-tax-paper-2025)) or the [cost of disease](../../knowledge/problem/cost-of-disease.llms.md)) is already [\$13.2 trillion](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-global_destructive_economy_annual_2025) per year, which is [11.5%](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-global_destructive_economy_pct_gdp) of global GDP. Both components are growing faster than your economy, and AI is about to accelerate both. This is the trend line nobody puts on the 2.5% growth slide, because if you did, the slide would need a different title.
Your 2.5% projection is not the trajectory you are on. It is the trajectory you would be on if you stopped doing all the things you are currently doing more of. Projecting 2.5% growth while your destructive economy grows faster than your productive one is like projecting weight loss while eating more every day. The spreadsheet says one thing. The trend says another. The trend does not care about the spreadsheet.
### So How Long Do You Have?
At current growth rates, your destructive economy reaches 25% of GDP by [2033](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-destructive_economy_25pct_year) and 50% by [2040](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-destructive_economy_50pct_year).
The Soviet Union devoted an estimated 15-18% of GDP to military spending before it collapsed^([9](../references.llms.md#ref-harrison2003soviet),[10](../references.llms.md#ref-noren1995soviet)), but that was just the line item your historians noticed. Add the shadow economy (20-27% of GDP), the central planning waste, and the institutional rot, and total Soviet extraction was 40-50% of GDP when the system broke. The military spending did not kill it alone. The military spending killed it in combination with everything else that was eating the same host. The late Roman Empire ran a similar pattern: 60-80% of government expenditure on the military^([11](../references.llms.md#ref-scheidel2015fiscal)), plus currency debasement, plus rising tax burdens, plus a bureaucracy that existed primarily to feed itself. Your destructive economy is already [11.5%](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-global_destructive_economy_pct_gdp) of GDP and accelerating, and that counts only military and cybercrime. You are not counting corruption. You are not counting the [Political Dysfunction Tax](https://manual.warondisease.org/knowledge/appendix/political-dysfunction-tax.html). You are not counting the [cost of disease](../../knowledge/problem/cost-of-disease.llms.md). The Soviet Union was not counting either, right up until the counting stopped mattering.
### You Already Know What This Looks Like
If the Soviet Union and Rome sound too distant to worry about, here is what economic collapse looks like right now, on your planet, to people who are alive while you read this.
Venezuela’s GDP fell 80% in under a decade. GDP per capita went from \$12,400 to \$4,200. The minimum wage is \$4 per month. 82% of the population lives in poverty. 8 million people fled the country, the largest displacement in the Western Hemisphere. A Harvard economist called it “the biggest economic collapse in human history outside of war or state collapse”^([12](../references.llms.md#ref-hausmann-venezuela-collapse-2019)).
Lebanon’s currency lost 98% of its value. GDP per capita dropped from \$8,000 to \$3,000 in three years. Poverty tripled from 12% to 44% in a decade, and 73% of the population lives in multidimensional poverty. The electricity grid provides 1 to 3 hours per day. The banking system is insolvent, and people’s life savings simply vanished^([13](../references.llms.md#ref-worldbank-lebanon-poverty-2024)).
Somalia has a GDP per capita of \$592, ranks last out of 193 countries on the Human Development Index, and 54% of its population lives below the poverty line. It has been a failed state for over 30 years. Recovery is not in progress. Recovery is not planned. The word “recovery” is not applicable to a country that has not had a functioning central government since 1991^([14](../references.llms.md#ref-worldbank-somalia-ieg-2024)). Al-Shabaab collects approximately \$180 million per year from Somali citizens through a tax system more efficient than the federal government’s^([15](../references.llms.md#ref-mubarak-losing-game-2020)). Total extractive share: 80-90% of GDP. What remains of the productive economy is remittances from Somalis who left.
Zimbabwe’s GDP fell 50% between 1999 and 2008. The government was spending \$27 million per month on a foreign war in the Congo that it denied was happening, seizing productive farmland and handing it to political allies who did not farm, running a quasi-fiscal deficit of 25% of GDP through the central bank, and stealing an estimated \$2 billion in diamond revenue from the Marange fields^([16](../references.llms.md#ref-partnership-africa-canada-reap-2012)). Total extractive burden: 40-55% of GDP. Inflation peaked at 79.6 billion percent per month. The IMF documented a cumulative GDP decline of roughly 50% and quasi-fiscal activities by the Reserve Bank equivalent to 36% of GDP^([17](../references.llms.md#ref-imf-zimbabwe-2009)). This was the worst peacetime economic contraction in recorded history.
Argentina’s total extraction hit 35-40% of GDP by 2001: government overspending, provincial deficits, capital flight of \$29 billion in a single year (10% of GDP walking out the door), and an informal economy large enough to have its own GDP. Result: sovereign default on \$93 billion, unemployment at 25%, and banks freezing everyone’s savings^([18](../references.llms.md#ref-imf-ieo-argentina-2004)). The economy contracted roughly 20% in four years. The interesting part is that Argentina recovered, because the extractive share fell below the threshold after the crisis. Most of these countries do not recover, because the extractive share does not fall.
Haiti’s gangs control 80-90% of Port-au-Prince and significant territory beyond the capital^([19](../references.llms.md#ref-unodc-haiti-gangs-2026)). Every commercial transaction passes through extortion. The government collects 13% of GDP in taxes; the gangs collect more. \$3.8 billion in PetroCaribe funds was embezzled. Total extractive burden: 60-80% of GDP. GDP per capita: \$1,400. This is what terminal parasitic load looks like when the parasites ARE the economy.
The Democratic Republic of Congo sits on an estimated \$24 trillion in mineral wealth and has a GDP per capita of \$650. Over 100 armed groups control 20% of the territory and extract \$900 million per year from mining alone^([20](../references.llms.md#ref-world-bank-drc-scd-2018)). The informal economy is 42% of GDP. Total extractive share: 55-70%. The country has been “developing” for 65 years. It is not developing. It is being eaten.
### The Pattern
These are not cautionary tales. They are data points. Organize every collapsed economy by its total extractive burden, the combined share of GDP consumed by military spending, corruption, crime, misallocation, and capital flight, and three bands emerge.
**35-45%: the death spiral begins.** The Soviet Union (40-50% total extraction including the shadow economy), Yugoslavia (35-45% before dissolution, with the federal government spending 50-60% of its budget on the military alone^([21](../references.llms.md#ref-curtis-yugoslavia-country-study-1992)) and Serbia secretly issuing \$1.4 billion in credits to regime allies^([22](../references.llms.md#ref-hanke-yugoslavia-destroyed-economy-1999))), Argentina (35-40%), Zimbabwe (40-55%). At this level, productive people start running the numbers and concluding that the numbers do not favor staying productive. Brain drain accelerates. Capital flees. The economist Mancur Olson identified the mechanism: when extraction is fragmented among competing actors, no single extractor has incentive to limit their take, because the cost of their extraction is spread across the whole economy while the benefit is theirs alone^([23](../references.llms.md#ref-olson-power-prosperity-2000)). Olson called them “roving bandits.” Your civilization is manufacturing them at scale. Your military-industrial complex, your cybercrime syndicates, your corrupt institutions, each extracts independently. None internalizes the cost to the whole system. Total extraction exceeds the sustainable maximum not because any single actor is greedy, but because the structure makes restraint irrational.
**50-65%: collapse becomes irreversible.** Venezuela (60-70%), Lebanon (50-65%), Syria (45-65%, where one man’s crony network controlled 60% of the economy^([24](../references.llms.md#ref-ft-makhlouf-syria-economy-2011))), North Korea (50-60%, spending 22-24% of GDP on military alone^([25](../references.llms.md#ref-cia-world-factbook-dprk-military)) before counting total state extraction). Recovery at this stage requires not reform but replacement. The institutions that could fix the problem ARE the problem. The people who could fix the institutions have left.
**70-90%: failed state equilibrium.** Somalia (80-90%), Haiti (60-80%), DRC (55-70%), Libya post-2014 (70-80%, where oil accounts for 65% of GDP and 98% of government revenue^([26](../references.llms.md#ref-eia-libya-country-analysis-2024)), and militias decide who gets it). The productive economy is a rounding error. These countries are not “developing.” They have reached equilibrium. The equilibrium is misery. And it is stable, because the extractive structure is self-reinforcing: the worse things get, the more rational extraction becomes, which makes things worse.
The death spiral begins at 35%. Not 50%. The 50% number is where you end up after the spiral has been running for a while and everyone who could leave has left. By 50%, the patient is not sick. The patient is a skeleton that has not yet been informed.
Professional observers call 35% **terminal parasitic load**: the point where enough of the economy is devoted to extraction that the death spiral becomes self-reinforcing and recovery without external intervention becomes historically unprecedented. Your global economy is running the same pattern at a larger scale. The difference is that when Venezuela crosses 35%, Venezuelans can flee to Colombia. When the global economy crosses 35%, there is no Colombia.
The system does not need to reach 50% to break. It needs to reach a prior threshold, which we call the **rational crime threshold**: the point where productive people start concluding that building things is less rewarding than stealing them. The rational crime threshold is when stealing beats building for individuals. Terminal parasitic load is when enough individuals have crossed that threshold that the civilization cannot recover. The first is a temperature. The second is the fever that kills you. The historical evidence says the fever starts at 35% and kills at 50%. Your destructive economy (military plus cybercrime alone, not counting corruption, not counting the shadow economy, not counting the [Political Dysfunction Tax](https://manual.warondisease.org/knowledge/appendix/political-dysfunction-tax.html)) is at [11.5%](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-global_destructive_economy_pct_gdp) and growing faster than your productive economy. At that rate, even the narrow metric crosses 35% by [2037](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-destructive_economy_35pct_year). But that is the narrow metric. The real total, including all the things you are not counting, is higher. Every percent higher moves the timeline forward.
Here is the loop. Your governments print money to fund military spending, which devalues wages through inflation, which makes legitimate work pay less, which pushes talent toward the destructive economy, which grows, which justifies more military spending. Meanwhile, every country the US has bombed, sanctioned, or regime-changed has learned a lesson: conventional military resistance against Western economies is suicide, but draining them through cyber operations is cheap, effective, and essentially unpunished. You spent decades teaching adversarial nations that their only viable strategy is to parasitize your productive economy from the inside. They were excellent students. North Korea cannot build an aircraft carrier, but it can steal \$1.5 billion in cryptocurrency in a single afternoon^([27](../references.llms.md#ref-north-korea-bybit-hack-2025)). That is the rational response to the incentive structure you built.
Domestically, the rational crime threshold is already here. Cybercrime has a higher return on investment than most legitimate businesses, and 99% of it goes unpunished. When a software engineer can earn more in a week of ransomware than in a year of building products, crossing the rational crime threshold is not a moral failure. It is an economic one. You made legitimate work pay poorly by diverting productive investment into destruction, then act surprised when people choose the option that pays. Every year the gap between “crime pays” and “work pays” gets wider, more talent flows to the wrong side of the ledger. This is a recruitment pipeline for the destructive economy, funded by the destructive economy, producing the poverty that feeds the destructive economy.
The Optimal Governance Trajectory breaks this loop at every link. Redirect military spending to medical research and you stop manufacturing the poverty. Cure diseases and you make the workforce productive enough that legitimate work pays better than crime. Make everyone richer and you eliminate the economic desperation that drives both state-sponsored hacking and individual cybercrime. You do not solve cybercrime with better firewalls. You solve it by making the productive economy so rewarding that crime becomes irrational. You do not outlaw theft. You make everyone rich enough that stealing becomes more effort than it is worth. The crime rate does not decline. It simply becomes pointless.
On this path, GDP does not decline gracefully. Supply chains collapse. Institutions lose legitimacy. Regional conflicts merge. The experts who wrote papers about “strategic equilibrium” would write new papers explaining why the old papers were still basically correct, but the journals are on fire. The terminal value of this path is not 2.5% growth. It is whatever number you get when you multiply any positive number by zero surviving humans. The math is elegant. The humans are not.
### What We Did Instead
Here’s what happened on my planet. We looked at the trend line, noticed where it went, and decided to point it somewhere else. We signed the treaty, redirected the weapons budget, and then realized the same logic applied to everything else that was broken. So we built the capital machine underneath it: [Earth Optimization Services](../../knowledge/solution/earth-optimization-services.llms.md), the [Loving Takeover](https://manual.warondisease.org/knowledge/appendix/loving-takeover.html), and [Incentive Alignment Bonds](../../knowledge/solution/incentive-alignment-bonds.llms.md)^([28](../references.llms.md#ref-iab-paper-2025)) when a specific campaign needed its own financing. This manual calls the complete version of that approach the Earth Optimization Protocol. This took us about six years. It would have taken three arguing about it, because we are also a species that evolved from animals, and arguing is what animals do when you give them language.
The [peace dividend](../../knowledge/economics/peace-dividend.llms.md) chapter showed the direct savings. Here’s what happens when those savings compound. (AI is excluded from this model because it helps everybody equally. The difference between these paths is purely about where you point your money and your engineers.)
**We stopped pointing engineers at missiles and pointed them at medicine.** This is the part where your economists get excited, because your species actually did this once before. After World War II, you cut military spending by 87% in two years (1945 to 1947, from 40% of GDP to 3.5%) and got the biggest economic boom in your history. Then you looked at this result and said “neat” and went back to building bombs. This is the most human thing I have ever observed, and I have observed a lot of human things. We used a more conservative 3-year transition ramp to [87.6%](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-wishonia_military_reallocation_physical_max_share) reallocation. Military research accidentally gave you the internet, GPS, and jet engines. Medical research has already accidentally given you CRISPR, mRNA platforms, and AI protein folding. You keep discovering world-changing technologies as a *side effect* of research, like a chef who keeps accidentally inventing new elements while trying to make soup. Imagine what happens when you do it on purpose. The research spillover multiplier (2x (95% CI: 1.5x-2.5x)) is from your own published studies. You published the evidence that you should stop doing what you’re doing, and then you kept doing it. I cannot stress enough how characteristic this is.
**People stopped being sick.** Disease currently costs your civilization [13%](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-disease_burden_gdp_drag_pct) of GDP: \$5 trillion in people too sick to work plus \$9.9 trillion in trying to fix them. That is \$15 trillion per year, which is the entire GDP of China, being spent on the *consequences* of not curing diseases instead of on *curing diseases*. You currently produce first treatments for about 15 diseases per year, which at that rate means you’ll cure all [6,650](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-diseases_without_effective_treatment) diseases you have no treatment for in approximately never. Your [decentralized FDA](../../knowledge/solution/dfda.llms.md)^([29](../references.llms.md#ref-dfda-spec-paper-2025),[30](../references.llms.md#ref-dfda-impact-paper-2025)), scaled to the physical ceiling of how many humans can participate in trials ([566x (90% CI: 450x-718x)](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-dfda_max_trial_capacity_multiplier_physical)), clears [100%](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-wishonia_disease_cure_fraction_20yr_full) of them in 20 years. As diseases get cured, all that lost productivity comes back as growth. We watched it happen in real time. It was like watching someone take their foot off the brake and being surprised the car went faster.
**Our governments stopped losing money to stupidity.** Your [Political Dysfunction Tax](https://manual.warondisease.org/knowledge/appendix/political-dysfunction-tax.html) documents [\$101 trillion (90% CI: \$59.6 trillion-\$161 trillion)](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-political_dysfunction_global_opportunity_cost_total) per year in money your governments waste on corruption, redundancy, regulations written before computers existed, and nine agencies doing the same thing badly. That last part bears repeating: you have nine agencies doing the same thing. Not nine agencies doing nine things. Nine agencies doing *one* thing, and the one thing is paperwork about the other eight agencies. We used EOS ownership to buy into the companies whose lobbying already controlled the policy bottlenecks, then pointed that machinery at shareholder-positive reforms. IABs were the detachable tool for campaigns that needed a self-financing incentive layer. Your species had never tried paying the existing machine to stop damaging its own shareholders. Your economists call this “radical.” Your dictionary calls it “obvious.” The recovered money went to whatever produced the most value: migration reform, lead elimination, science funding, regulatory modernization.
These three things compound on each other. Better-funded research produces innovations, which cure diseases, which make people healthier and more productive, which grows the economy, which funds more research, which produces more innovations. It’s a virtuous cycle. You’re currently running the vicious version, where sick people can’t work, so the economy shrinks, so there’s less money for research, so people stay sick. You have been running this version for your entire history as a civilization. You could have switched at any time. You did not switch. I find this fascinating in the way that a veterinarian finds a dog that keeps eating bees fascinating.
Here is one cycle of the loop, so you can check it yourself.
Year one. You redirect [\$27.2 billion](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-treaty_annual_funding) per year from military spending to medical research. Your own published studies show each research dollar generates 2x (95% CI: 1.5x-2.5x) in economic returns, so that [\$27.2 billion](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-treaty_annual_funding) immediately produces twice its value in adjacent-sector growth: biotech, computing, materials science. That is the same spillover mechanism that accidentally gave you the internet when you were trying to build missiles. Meanwhile, disease is costing you [13%](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-disease_burden_gdp_drag_pct) of GDP. You just heard the number: fifteen trillion a year in sick workers and medical bills. Your [decentralized FDA](../../knowledge/solution/dfda.llms.md) starts curing diseases. Even curing a small fraction of a fifteen-trillion-dollar problem returns more than you spent on the research. The output exceeds the input.
Year two. You have last year’s redirect, plus the recovered productivity from the diseases you cured. The research budget is effectively bigger, without anyone allocating a single additional dollar. More research. More cures. More recovered productivity. Bigger effective budget. Year three, bigger again. By year five, you are funding cures with money that only exists because earlier cures freed up workers who generated it. The loop is running on its own output.
This is compound interest. The same math your retirement account uses. You trust it there. The only difference is the return rate. Your retirement account compounds at seven percent because money earns money. This compounds faster because each cure unlocks a permanent slice of that [13%](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-disease_burden_gdp_drag_pct) GDP drag, and that slice earns returns every year after. A disease cured in year one is still generating productivity in year twenty. Every cure is a permanent raise for the entire economy.
By year 20, our GDP grew at [25.4% (90% CI: 19.3%-31.6%)](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-wishonia_trajectory_cagr_year_20) per year and reached [\$10.7 quadrillion (90% CI: \$3.95 quadrillion-\$28 quadrillion)](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-wishonia_trajectory_gdp_year_20). Your alternative, as we just established, is systemic collapse by [2033](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-destructive_economy_25pct_year). That is the comparison. Not “Wishonia vs. steady growth.” Wishonia vs. the trajectory you are actually on.
If the treaty actually takes hold, it does not stay flat. The 1% proof of concept ratchets to 2%, then 5%, then 10% as the shareholder and political case becomes visibly profitable. In this chapter, that optimistic take-hold path is the Treaty Trajectory. It grows at [5.28% (90% CI: 3.85%-6.48%)](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-treaty_trajectory_cagr_year_20) per year and reaches [\$322 trillion (90% CI: \$245 trillion-\$404 trillion)](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-treaty_trajectory_gdp_year_20) by year 20, up from [\$115 trillion](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-global_gdp_2025) today and well above the flat 2.5% slide at [\$188 trillion](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-current_trajectory_gdp_year_20). Then fixing governance on top of that, which is what we actually did, is worth another [33.2x (90% CI: 12.7x-83.4x)](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-wishonia_trajectory_vs_treaty_trajectory_gdp_multiplier_year_20). That multiplier is what “not being stupid” compounds to over 20 years. “Stop being stupid” is apparently considered an aggressive growth strategy on this planet.
This treaty model now includes the major GDP channels your economists usually hide in footnotes: military-to-medicine spillovers, explicit avoided war-cost drag, cybercrime drag recovery as the destructive economy weakens, and lower disease burden from faster cures. It does **not** count the monetized value of life-years from eliminating existing-drug efficacy lag as GDP. That value belongs in health and welfare accounting, not in the output ledger. Earth keeps confusing ledgers, which is why it sometimes thinks a hospital bill is prosperity.
This is not the same counterfactual as the one in [The Cost of War](https://manual.warondisease.org/knowledge/problem/cost-of-war.html). That chapter asks what 124 years of abolished militaries since 1900 would have compounded to. This chapter asks what a forward-looking treaty starting at 1% in 2025 compounds to over 20 years if the treaty visibly works and expands. Same direction. Different horizon. Different intervention size.
## The Decision
“But what if it doesn’t work as well as you claim?” I love this question. Your species asks it exclusively about good ideas. Nobody ever asks “but what if the arms race doesn’t work as well as we claim?” about the thing that has a nonzero probability of killing everyone. Your risk assessment is applied in one direction only, like a door that only locks from the outside.
You do not have a stable middle path. The 2.5% “baseline” is not a path you can stay on; it is a fantasy that requires every accelerating trend to simultaneously stop accelerating. Your actual choice is between a path that cures diseases and a path where the journals are on fire. Both require effort. Only one of them has a nonzero GDP at the end.
## What This Means Per Person
GDP in the trillions is abstract, and GDP is not welfare. If you burn down a forest, then hire people to put out the fire, GDP may increase. The forest remains burned. Congratulations, the spreadsheet has eaten a tree.
So GDP should not be the public headline. It is a supporting diagnostic: can the economy produce more useful output after you stop paying so many people to destroy, defend, deny, delay, insure against, and clean up preventable damage? On the current model, yes. Under the [1% Treaty](https://manual.warondisease.org/knowledge/solution/1-percent-treaty.html)^([31](../references.llms.md#ref-1-percent-treaty-paper-2025)) ^([32](../references.llms.md#ref-1-pct-treaty-impact-paper-2025)) take-hold path, GDP per person reaches [\$34,972 (90% CI: \$26,587-\$43,903)](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-treaty_trajectory_avg_income_year_20) while total GDP reaches [\$322 trillion (90% CI: \$245 trillion-\$404 trillion)](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-treaty_trajectory_gdp_year_20). The status-quo GDP-per-person path reaches [\$20,483](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-current_trajectory_avg_income_year_20) before the destructive economy eats more of the productive one.
The better public target is **median after-tax inflation-adjusted income plus healthy life**. That is what humans experience: what can the median person buy, after taxes and transfers, in real purchasing power, while not being dead. So this chapter models it directly, anchored to the one measurement that exists: your pollsters surveyed 131 countries and found the middle human earning about [\$2,920 (95% CI: \$2,300-\$3,700)](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-gallup_global_median_income_per_capita) a year^([33](../references.llms.md#ref-gallup-global-median-income-2013)), roughly twenty cents of the average dollar. Every median number below is derived from that anchor, so you are arguing with a survey, not a vibe. The military’s slice of output is subtracted before anyone eats, because a missile is GDP to the spreadsheet and a tax to the median household; your economists built this correction in 1972, subtracting “regrettables” from output to measure welfare, then went back to GDP, because GDP was going up. Only the military slice is subtracted. Cybercrime loss estimates did not survive scrutiny (they count transfers and double-counted indirect costs; a stolen dollar still buys bread, for the thief), so crime lives in the collapse branch, where it belongs. And the median’s share of the pie is held flat as the best guess, not eroded for drama: the American wedge is real (productivity up 90%, typical pay up 33%^([34](../references.llms.md#ref-epi-productivity-pay-gap-2024),[35](../references.llms.md#ref-nolan-gdp-vs-median-income-2019))), but it is the extreme, not the world; globally the middle human’s share *rose* over the last thirty years, because a billion people got real jobs. The uncertainty range covers both directions.
Here is the median track. Today: [\$2,138 (90% CI: \$1,710-\$2,566)](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-global_median_after_tax_income_2025). Status quo at year 20: [\$3,033 (90% CI: \$2,402-\$3,716)](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-current_trajectory_median_after_tax_income_year_20); the median grows roughly as fast as GDP per person while the military slice drifts up on its measured trend. No mysterious decline. The honest baseline is mediocrity, not doom; doom is the separate branch where stealing starts to pay better than working, and it does not arrive smoothly; it arrives the way it arrived in Mogadishu. Treaty at year 20: [\$5,736 (90% CI: \$3,967-\$7,768)](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-treaty_trajectory_median_after_tax_income_year_20), which is [1.89x (90% CI: 1.42x-2.39x)](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-treaty_vs_current_median_income_multiplier_year_20) the status-quo median. The gain comes from three places you can audit separately: the economy produces more (the trajectories above), the military slice shrinks by the ratchet’s terminal 10%, and cures hand back the sick wages and doctor bills that today fall hardest on people at and below the middle; your own health agency counts half a billion humans pushed into extreme poverty by health costs^([36](../references.llms.md#ref-who-health-costs-extreme-poverty-2021)). The model claims nothing about redistribution: the median’s share of the pie is identical in both branches, so it cancels out of the multiplier. Full optimization at year 20: [\$194,130 (90% CI: \$70,137-\$507,535)](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-wishonia_trajectory_median_after_tax_income_year_20), and that is a floor, because it omits the wishocratic dividend entirely (an equal-per-person allocation is pro-median by arithmetic, but modeling it here would double-count gains already inside the trajectory).
Over a remaining lifespan, the per-capita averages compound into something your species should find difficult to ignore (but will). The treaty path multiplies cumulative lifetime earnings by [1.57x (90% CI: 1.24x-1.92x)](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-treaty_trajectory_lifetime_income_multiplier) relative to the current trajectory and adds [\$518,879 (90% CI: \$221,703-\$860,930)](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-treaty_trajectory_lifetime_income_gain_per_capita) per person. The Optimal Governance Trajectory reaches [41.3x (90% CI: 15.9x-106x)](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-wishonia_trajectory_lifetime_income_multiplier) and [\$36.4 million (90% CI: \$13.5 million-\$97 million)](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-wishonia_trajectory_lifetime_income_gain_per_capita). The opportunity cost of inaction is not abstract. It is the largest number most humans will never bother to calculate.
The Wishonia numbers look implausible only if you compare them to your fantasy baseline instead of your actual trajectory. Compared to collapse, any positive number looks implausible. This time someone is steering. (It’s you. I’m just the GPS. A GPS that judges you, but still a GPS.)
## Go Ahead, Change the Numbers
Every input to this model is a named variable you can look up and argue with. I know you will, because arguing is your second-favorite activity after building weapons. The disease cure fraction ([100%](../../knowledge/appendix/parameters-and-calculations.llms.md#sec-wishonia_disease_cure_fraction_20yr_full)) comes from trial-capacity scaling with a physical participant ceiling. The research spillover multiplier (2x (95% CI: 1.5x-2.5x)) comes from your own published studies. If any assumption is wrong, change it. Cut them all in half. Cut them in quarters. The model still produces a civilization instead of a collapse, because no plausible adjustment to any single variable eliminates the effect of three compounding mechanisms running simultaneously for 20 years. I checked.
The question is not “will the treaty produce exactly these returns?” The question is “does redirecting murder money to medicine money produce better results than not doing so?” The answer is yes on every version of the model, halved, quartered, or intact, as long as you prefer being alive to being dead. If you do not prefer being alive to being dead, this manual is not for you, and I wish you well in whatever you’re doing instead.
The [peace dividend](../../knowledge/economics/peace-dividend.llms.md) gives you the annual numbers. The [Wishonia model](../../knowledge/futures/wishonia.llms.md) gives you the institutional design. The [Political Dysfunction Tax](https://manual.warondisease.org/knowledge/appendix/political-dysfunction-tax.html) gives you the waste ledger. [Earth Optimization Services](../../knowledge/solution/earth-optimization-services.llms.md) gives you the capital engine, the [Loving Takeover](https://manual.warondisease.org/knowledge/appendix/loving-takeover.html) gives you the shareholder mechanics, and [Incentive Alignment Bonds](../../knowledge/solution/incentive-alignment-bonds.llms.md) give you a campaign-financing tool when one is needed. This chapter gives you what happened when we ran them forward 20 years. It required third-grade arithmetic. You have third grade.
1\.
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. [Trends in world military expenditure, 2024](https://www.sipri.org/publications/2025/sipri-fact-sheets/trends-world-military-expenditure-2024). (2025).
2\.
Cybersecurity Ventures. Cybercrime economy projected to reach \$10.5 trillion. *Cybersecurity Ventures: \$10.5T Cybercrime* (2016)
*Global cybercrime costs: \$3T (2015) → \$6T (2021) → \$10.5T (2025 projected) 15% annual growth rate If measured as country, would be 3rd largest economy after US and China Greatest transfer of economic wealth in history Note: More profitable than global trade of all major illegal drugs combined. Includes data theft, productivity loss, IP theft, fraud Additional sources: \ \| https://www.boisestate.edu/cybersecurity/2022/06/16/cybercrime-to-cost-the-world-10-5-trillion-annually-by-2025/*
.
3\.
Chainalysis. *Crypto Hacking and Stolen Funds in 2025*. (2026).
4\.
Federal Bureau of Investigation, Internet Crime Complaint Center. *Internet Crime Report 2024*. (2025).
5\.
CSO Online. 96% of cybercrimes go unpunished. *CSO Online: Why Internet Crime Goes Unpunished*
*Less than 1% of cybercrimes prosecuted (UK: 65 prosecutions vs 17,900 reported cases in 2018) 99% of cybercrimes go unpunished Perpetrators extremely difficult to identify and pursue Cross-national boundaries make prosecution nearly impossible Note: Rules of evidence and international jurisdiction make cybercrime possibly harder to prosecute than any other area of law enforcement Additional sources: https://www.csoonline.com/article/2618598/why-internet-crime-goes-unpunished.html \| https://informationsecuritybuzz.com/expert-comments/only-1-of-cybercrimes-prosecuted/*
.
6\.
Cybersecurity Ventures. *Will the Cybercrime Economy Plateau in 2026?* (2026).
7\.
World Economic Forum. *Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026*. (2026).
8\.
Sinn, M. P. *The Political Dysfunction Tax*. (2025) doi:[10.5281/zenodo.18603840](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18603840)
*Quantifying the gap between current global governance and theoretical maximum welfare, estimating a 31-53% efficiency score and \$101 trillion in annual opportunity costs.*
9\.
Harrison, M. How much did the soviets really spend on defence? New evidence from the close of the brezhnev era. *Warwick Economic Research Papers* (2003)
*Estimates of Soviet military spending as share of GDP ranged from 10-20%, with Harrison’s analysis settling on approximately 15-18% of GDP in the late Brezhnev era (late 1970s to early 1980s). Even within the Soviet Union itself, reliable figures were difficult to produce because the military budget involved multiple government ministries and official statistics systematically understated defense outlays.*
10\.
Firth, N. E. & Noren, J. H. *[Soviet Defense Spending: A History of CIA Estimates, 1950–1990](https://www.amazon.com/Soviet-Defense-Spending-Williams-Ford-University/dp/0890968055)*. (Texas A&M University Press, 1998).
*Comprehensive history of CIA estimates of Soviet defense spending from 1950 to 1990. Since the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union devoted between 15 and 17 percent of its annual GNP to military spending according to US government sources. Outside estimates ranged between 10 and 20 percent of GDP. Soviet official statistics had lied for at least a quarter century about the true size of the military budget, reporting only a small fraction of defense outlays. Defense expenditures rose 4-7% per year until the early 1980s, then slowed as GNP growth slipped to about 3%.*
11\.
Scheidel, W. [State revenue and expenditure in the han and roman empires](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/state-power-in-ancient-china-and-rome-9780190202248). in *State power in ancient china and rome* (Oxford University Press, 2015).
*Comparative analysis of state fiscal capacity in the Han and Roman empires. The Roman army accounted for 60-80% of total state expenditure, making it the dominant fiscal commitment throughout Roman history. Military spending was described as “massively redistributive in both spatial and social terms.” Both empires were essentially low-tax regimes (estimated 5-7% of GDP in taxes), but the Roman Empire allocated a far larger share of state revenue to its military than did the Han.*
12\.
Walsh, C. Understanding venezuela’s collapse. *Harvard Gazette* (2019).
13\.
World Bank. *Lebanon: Poverty More Than Triples over the Last Decade Reaching 44% Under a Protracted Crisis*. (2024).
14\.
World Bank Independent Evaluation Group. *World Bank Group Somalia: Country Partnership Framework Background and Context*. (2024).
15\.
Mubarak, M. *A Losing Game: Countering Al-Shabab’s Financial System*. (2020).
16\.
Partnership Africa Canada. *Reap What You Sow: Greed and Corruption in Zimbabwe’s Marange Diamond Fields*. (2012).
17\.
International Monetary Fund. *Zimbabwe: 2009 Article IV Consultation—Staff Report*. (2009).
18\.
Independent Evaluation Office of the International Monetary Fund. *The IMF and Argentina, 1991–2001*. (2004) doi:[10.5089/9781589063808.017](https://doi.org/10.5089/9781589063808.017).
19\.
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. [Explainer: Organized crime and gang violence in Haiti](https://www.unodc.org/unodc/frontpage/2026/January/explainer_-organized-crime-and-gang-violence-in-haiti.html). (2026).
20\.
World Bank. *Democratic Republic of Congo Systematic Country Diagnostic: Policy Priorities for Poverty Reduction and Shared Prosperity*. (2018).
21\.
Curtis, G. E. *[Yugoslavia: A Country Study](https://www.loc.gov/item/91040323/)*. (Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 1992).
22\.
Hanke, S. H. Yugoslavia destroyed its own economy. *The Wall Street Journal* (1999).
23\.
Olson, M. *[Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/power-and-prosperity-9780195144574)*. (Basic Books, New York, 2000).
24\.
Financial Times. The makhlouf business empire. *Financial Times* (2011).
25\.
Central Intelligence Agency. [The world factbook: Military expenditures](https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/military-expenditures/). (2021).
26\.
U.S. Energy Information Administration. *Country Analysis Brief: Libya*. (2024).
27\.
Federal Bureau of Investigation. [North korea responsible for \$1.5 billion bybit hack](https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber/alerts/2025/north-korea-responsible-for-1-5-billion-bybit-hack). (2025).
28\.
Sinn, M. P. *Incentive Alignment Bonds: Making Public Goods Financially and Politically Profitable*. (2025) doi:[10.5281/zenodo.18203221](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18203221)
*Government spending is optimized for lobbying intensity, not net societal value. Programs with 100:1 benefit-cost ratios get billions while programs with negative returns get hundreds of billions. Incentive Alignment Bonds flip this by creating a capital pool that rewards politicians (via campaign support and post-office opportunities) for funding high-NSV programs over low-NSV alternatives. The result: public good becomes private profit for both investors and elected officials.*
29\.
Sinn, M. P. *The Continuous Evidence Generation Protocol: Two-Stage Validation (RWE → Pragmatic Trials)*. (2025) doi:[10.5281/zenodo.18203375](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18203375)
*We present the Predictor Impact Score (PIS), a novel composite metric operationalizing Bradford Hill causality criteria for automated signal detection from aggregated N-of-1 observational studies. Combined with pragmatic trial confirmation (based on evidence from 108+ embedded trials), this two-stage framework would generate validated outcome labels at 44.1x lower cost than traditional Phase III trials. This enables continuous, population-scale pharmacovigilance and precision dosing recommendations.*
30\.
Sinn, M. P. *Ubiquitous Pragmatic Trial Impact Analysis*. (2025) doi:[10.5281/zenodo.18243914](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18243914)
*Only 15 diseases/year get their first treatment each year. With 6,650 diseases lacking effective treatments, the backlog would take 443 years to clear. Integrating pragmatic trials into standard healthcare increases trial capacity 12.3x, cutting that timeline from 443 years to 36 years. The average untreated disease gets a treatment 212 years earlier, saving 10.7 billion deaths at \$9.62 per year of healthy life saved.*
31\.
Sinn, M. P. *The 1% Treaty*. (2025) doi:[10.5281/zenodo.20076511](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20076511)
*Your governments possess nuclear weapons sufficient to end civilization 122 times but have not cured Alzheimer’s once. This treaty asks them to be 1% more rational.*
32\.
Sinn, M. P. *The 1% Treaty: An Incentive-Compatible Approach to Ending War and Disease*. (2025) doi:[10.5281/zenodo.18161560](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18161560)
*6,650 diseases have zero FDA-approved treatments; at current trial capacity, exploring them takes 443 years. Redirecting 1% of military spending scales capacity 12.3x, cutting the timeline to 36 years and preventing 10.7 billion deaths. At \$0.02/DALY, 9.3kx more cost-effective than the best existing interventions. The result holds across every specified adoption pathway.*
33\.
[Gallup. (2013)](https://news.gallup.com/poll/166211/worldwide-median-household-income-000.aspx).
34\.
Economic Policy Institute. [Growing inequalities, reflecting growing employer power, have generated a productivity–pay gap since 1979](https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequalities-reflecting-growing-employer-power-have-generated-a-productivity-pay-gap-since-1979-productivity-has-grown-3-5-times-as-much-as-pay-for-the-typical-worker/). (2024).
35\.
Nolan, B., Roser, M. & Thewissen, S. [GDP per capita versus median household income: What gives rise to the divergence over time and how does this vary across OECD countries?](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/roiw.12362) *Review of Income and Wealth* **65**, 619–645 (2019).
36\.
World Health Organization and World Bank. [More than half a billion people pushed or pushed further into extreme poverty due to health care costs](https://www.who.int/news/item/12-12-2021-more-than-half-a-billion-people-pushed-or-pushed-further-into-extreme-poverty-due-to-health-care-costs). (2021).
37\.
Calculated from IHME Global Burden of Disease (2.55B DALYs) and global GDP per capita valuation. \$109 trillion annual global disease burden.
*The global economic burden of disease, including direct healthcare costs (\$8.2 trillion) and lost productivity (\$100.9 trillion from 2.55 billion DALYs × \$39,570 per DALY), totals approximately \$109.1 trillion annually.*
38\.
SIPRI. Global military spending (\$2.72T, 2024). *SIPRI* (2025).