The whole world needs re-thinking from first principles – and the point of my latest book, Why Genes are Not Selfish and People are Nice, is to set the ball rolling.

Alas, it’s all too easy to list the things that have gone wrong. A billion people are chronically undernourished out of the total population of 7 billion. A billion more suffer from diseases of excess – including a world population of diabetics that is twice the size of Russia’s population. A billion live in urban slums – almost one in three of all who now live in cities. Half our fellow species are in imminent danger of extinction. All ecosystems are under threat, from woods and meadows to the oceans. The climate is de-stabilised. All in all, we are sliding headlong to Armageddon. The problem that obsesses governments and their selected advisers – the collapse of the neoliberal economy – is the least important, although the fact that they don’t see that the neoliberal party is over and are still trying to prop it up, at our expense, is a further sign of the inadequacy, the absolute unfitness for purpose, of the world’s present leadership.

In fact we can summarise what needs doing in a simple diagram: all the problems of the world in eight balloons.