From greed for resources and money to technology run amok and a politics of domination, hatred and fear of others, our world sometimes seems to be on a course of assured destruction.

How can our society not only avert disaster, but move toward a better path forward, driven not only by money-making (the accumulation of wealth, power and status), but also by meaning-making (the search for deeper purpose for ourselves in community with others and with the natural world)?

As scholars who have respectively studied Shakespeare and health and economics — along with a team of thinkers in economics, health policy, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and a number of theatre and literary artists and humanities scholars — we’re building a project called Reimagining Shakespeare, Remaking Modern World Systems.

Shakespeare and the arts can help researchers see the way toward new ways of thinking through our period of massive disruption, especially since the world in Shakespeare’s time, like our world now, was riven by social, political, ecological and epidemic crises.

Why Shakespeare? In some ways, Shakespeare was the Jeff Bezos of his time.

Unlike the billionaire entrepreneur Bezos, who founded Amazon and is now its executive chair, Shakespeare didn’t sell everything under the sun. However, like Bezos, who innovated new ways of packaging stories for people via books

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