We live in an era of astonishing capability paired with persistent dysfunction. Housing is unaffordable in the richest societies in history. Work feels increasingly precarious even as productivity rises. Climate anxiety grows alongside unprecedented technological power. The common explanation is that these crises are separate — unfortunate but unrelated failures of policy or politics.

This chapter proposes something more unsettling: what if the problems we experience across housing, economics, education, health, the environment, and work share a common structural origin? What if the systems we built for a world of genuine scarcity a century-plus ago are now misaligned with a world of emerging abundance?

Rather than cataloging grievances, this opening reframes the conversation. It suggests that many of today’s pressures are signals of transition — evidence that our institutional architecture is lagging behind our technological reality. The real question is why so many systems appear to be straining at once.

The fundamental premise of this book’s broad analysis of human systems, which are introduced in this chapter, is that anything we have designed can, in principle, be redesigned.