Capitalism instead made food absurdly abundant and gave everyone air conditioned boxes.

Edit: to address all of the nonsense responses below all at once: China’s embrace of capitalism has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_China

Absurd. My wife and I quote this all the time.

https://youtu.be/crmUfGfeOJ0

https://youtube.com/shorts/GcmYRSpDrOY

1. Lots of wars and refugee crises.
2. Almost certainly unilateral moves by middle-sized nations seeing existential crises to inject albedo-altering aerosols into the stratosphere.
3. Depending on the timing of things in the next few decades we may be in an ice age very quickly from ice cap melt acceleration cooling the ocean. In an ice age the amount of arable land would dramatically decrease and if there is a harvest season at all it will be very short. Nearly everyone would starve.

The UN Chief resigning as a result would be a show of power. Calling for it and not getting is a show of weakness.

It depends on what you mean by “work out”. If the goal is to stop conflict by eradicating a culture, that’s worked many times.

If there were better options then they would have been adopted.

The writers messed this one up by making Foundation FTL jumps have basically no caveats. In the books ships could only jump to Hyperspace when they are a few days away from the nearest planet, jumps take days to calculate, have lots of error, and can only be reasonably accurate for modest distances.

When you write in “it’s magic and anything can happen” then you start to ask “why not use every ship as a weapon?” or “why not leverage the vault as the obvious galactic-scale superweapon that it is?”

Altium. Reasons. (the octopart integration is really nice)