This paper has three parallel ambitions: to consider the potential impact of large-scale use of modern information and communication technologies (ICTs) through the device of an imagined ‘virtual’ research council (VRC); to discuss this imagined future from the principal-agent perspective of...

Considers the social and economic arrangements that would be necessary for rational mechanisms of exchange and distribution to emerge, function, and remain viable if extreme conditions produced an absence or the severe destruction of an institutional infrastructure and resource endowments.