Apologies for late commenting but these issues won't be going away until something fundamental changes. My main comment to you would be that nothing will be figured out until all dependencies are taken into account, a fundamental dependency you are missing here is energy.
Rather than give a detailed explanation here, which only bores folk who are not interested to hear anything seeming to detract from capital, best just to point you to my story about "Kardashev Money", and let you follow relevant links from there, if you are interested.