Yeah they reference this in the book, it's always from him when he uses the bacteria (meaning in theory it's only his own pathogens or bacteria). He uses his crews shit that's been dried and left in Martian temperatures so it's sterilised.
Progressive taxes are a way to make up for the imbalance of poorer people spending a higher proportion of their income on essentials, it's a fundamental of economics. Although I have heard that the tax brackets in Russia are completely flat (not that that makes it any better).
They do something fun with this in the three body problem. It's amazing and makes a ton of sense but in the real world the application will probably be a lot cleaner.
Also the fact that the economy is managed can mean things aren't always testable. If you think there's going to be a recession based on models and you prevent that by using policy, did you really prevent the recession or was it never going to happen?
I thought the proposal to call them majority world countries was interesting.
But if lots of people use it wrong and break it then maybe it's too obtuse. I broke one of my applications by upgrading packages. The solution? Install the package again, I thought the package manager would take care of stuff like that but if it's meant to be me then I think it's a bad system.
I broke my install by updating it, I get that if you perfectly understand what's going on then it has no bugs but that's really not my experience. A lot of the time something will break and it's easy to say "I should've known it was this so it's my fault" but really if you didn't expect it to work a certain way and it breaks it's not a super stable system.
Film theory did an interesting video where they concluded it'd be okay since he'd only be intaking a little over time. (Not saying that's true)