Brilliant story, with a very real question, thanks for that.

As for an answer; I don’t see it as something missing measurement, but two things already measured that we fail to correlate; money and energy.

Money is a human construction that functions similarly to energy in nature, it empowers, transferring power from one place to another.

Yet we don’t use energy as a standard for money, we use capital, which might be classified in terms of used energy, but not energy itself, and that appears to have some pretty profound consequences.

Money disconnected from live energy, associated with mass instead, behaves almost like mass, attracting more to itself by an unknown force, like we identify as gravity.

Capital appears to attract capital, regardless of whether it is in the physical domain or not.

I believe the required fix is simply to set an energy standard to money, rather than a capital standard like gold, as we once did.

Watts per dollar, or dollars per Watt would do very nicely.

Not Watt-hours, which is just more capital, but Watts alone, or coulombs per second (which is still Watts).

We can already see something like this happening with solar powered proof-of-work tokens beginning with Bitcoin, though most Bitcoiners still don’t see it.

After that is done, all appears to be fixed, as far as I can tell.

More if you wish to search for it, is in my account of the Bitcoin Kardashev Hinge.