Shifting "The Dodo Paradigm": To be or Not to be

In the 21st century the goals of mankind are evolving from raising near-term prosperity to unlimited-term sustainable survival in an acceptable state. This is bound to lead to a scientific revolution – a paradigm shift. This paper outlines the proposed ―mankind self-preservation paradigm‖ and its main components. That paradigm will involve all disciplines related to decision-making, including economics. The paradigm refutes the very foundation of these disciplines and changes their role and capability. The proposed paradigm differs from all other similar attempts in that it is supported by a fundamentally novel mathematical and computational toolkit. Accordingly, this paper pursues two main purposes. The first is to outline the cardinal change in philosophy of economics and adjacent disciplines and to prepare ground for global society-wide modeling of the ―mankindPlanet Earth‖ system. The second is to explicate the two most important of many principally novel components of the toolkit, (a) the multiscenario multicriterial stochastic optimization models with catastrophe-avoidance algorithm, and (b) an ensemble of strategic frontier™ with several ―synthetic‖ decision criteria. The paper also indicates enormous potential advantages of applying that toolkit to both global and local problems facing mankind. The toolkit will always provide two new soughtfor features of strategies – good adaptability for a very large range of scenarios and robustness, the ability to withstand multiple risks. The main conclusion of the paper is that only a switch to a self-preservation policy may increase the likelihood of sustainable mankind survival, and what follows afford the first steps to such a switch.

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