Dude, it’s 2026. We don’t sell shovels, we sell shovel subscriptions.

Which problems are you referring to? None of the physical issues, nor the human behaviour issues are relevant here.

Honestly, I don’t mind spending resources on this. Yes it turned out that the expected results were the ones we got, but until you do the study, you can’t be sure you won’t get unexpected results. Plus, once you’ve collected the data, it sometimes shows unrelated patterns that you wouldn’t otherwise have been able to see.

I feel like that entire passage completely ignores the fact that last time the bulk of humanity lived a communal lifestyle, the number of humans on the planet was a few orders of magnitude smaller. It’s a fairly easy setup to maintain when settlements are small and the bulk of people’s time is spent as hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers. As soon as you put a very large number of people into a city, the communal arrangement falls apart. And many people like living in cities. That genie is out of the bottle, and people are not going to be willing to go back to being a subsistence farmer in a commune.