i've made this argument before but want to write it down in one place, none of this is that ground breaking or deeply original - just when i talk to more "normie" friends they don't fully get it and this is trying to synthesize the idea clearly
the goal of humanity should be maximizing energy use per capita, this means every human should use 1000 times or 1M or 1B more energy than they do now.
this might sounds like a strange goal at first - for many reasons. first why would you want to increase consumption of something and not just get xyz outcome?
before making the point about why increasing consumption is good, let's create some common ground first.
i would argue money is fake - it is just a ledger for "the real currency"/raw input - energy. energy is definitionally wealth. this graph comes up a lot, as to say there are no low energy rich countries.
i think it is fairly intuitive to most how electricity spend is energy use but human labor is a type of energy spend, low efficiency high versatile energy spend.
so the idea of energy being real wealth is fairly intuitive and well understood. what does this look like for an individual tho? rather than a country?
i would argue that your personal wealth is essentially how much energy you can leverage to make your life better - this can be an AC or using a plane or hiring a maid or at minimum just the food you eat.
so it makes sense that the more energy you consume, the richer you are and that poorer people should go up the energy consumption ladder to reach the level of wealth of the west. but the heart of this piece is that it is actually really hard to use energy.
if i told you to go spend 1GW tomorrow it would be impossible for you to spend that,
you would have to spend years inventing new technology to do so. one such technology might look like running your own supercomputer of power AIs to do extremely leveraged work? or using starship to commute across the globe . this is all to say that to increase energy consumption to 1GWh/day for an average american would mean them using three orders of magnitude more energy than they do now. this would mean their lives would be unimaginably better than ours.
there is a sense in economics of chasing forever growth, and if that is possible - you are chasing growth for growth's sake as it makes your life better. i think a better way to frame this is chasing how much energy can we consume, and we know the limits to this - this is in some sense moving up the Kardashev scale.
i think the framing that is lost in the Kardashev scale convo is how it is actually about increasing energy consumption per capita - enabling each person more leveraged energy use to make their lives better.