The year is 2099.  Looking back it makes sense that we have progressed so far, but it has been amazing to watch events unfold to bring us this far.  At this point:

1) everyone has learned at an early age how to interact with love for others and take responsibility for actions so there is no crime;
2) no one has to do a job they don't want to do -- the drudgery jobs like cleaning; maintenance; production of basic needs (like agriculture); and day-to-day, not special cooking are done by machines; 
3) everyone is at peace because there is only one country that spans the entire world, with many states and substates providing the nuances of differences that groups of people want and expect of their life, both in terms of society and religion;
4) there is a small and shrinking government, that is basically needed just to settle the occasional problem that might arise from time to time;
5) medicine has conquered illness;
6) bioengineering has created ways to flavor humans to be unpalatable to all parasites;
7) production of special things is raised to an art that is assisted by machines -- custom tailoring of clothes and cobblering of shoes that fit, construction of buildings, landscaping, automobile design, etc.;
8) there is enough almost-free energy required by technology

The US decided to open its doors to any person or nation wishing to join.  And join they did wholesale.  But not immediately.  It was not until the people of the US did some housecleaning.  The citizens decided that the way things were organized was only passable but could be much better.  They organized and looked at what they wanted individually and as a whole.  They saw that how everyone was working didn't quite make sense, that some people were directly at odds with others, that in too many cases things were mediocre at best and decaying because people felt little responsibility for or control ot the situation.  They felt they were getting no benefit for thinking harder or working smarter, except for a few who managed to reap enormous benefits for work that did not seem to warrant the compensation.

They started by asking everyone what they would do if they knew they would have a consistent income of $150,000.  That seemed exorbitant because it was about five times the median income for the time.  And there wasn't that much money at first to pay everyone.  But came out of the exercise was that if people no longer felt they would be living hand to mouth, they could accommodate designating a significant portion of their income toward investing.  They would have enough to give of themselves in charitable ways.  They could even see that they might view themselves in a more positive light.

Then they decided to figure out what it would take to get everyone to that level.  They saw that what it meant to have an income of $150,000 was that they would alter their spending a lot.  They then started looking at the specifics on an individual by individual basis and realized that much of what they would buy with the extra money coincided with what everyone else would buy.  The next step was to realign what everyone was doing to more effectively produce the things that everyone really wanted instead of the things that had been produced by companies.  They found that they didn't need the big companies making choices for them.

They usually started looking close to home.  For food, some chose to have houses with well equipped kitchens while others decided they liked the variety and ease of dining out.  The main change was not that some liked to cook and others didn't but that those who liked to cook wanted a better kitchen system and environment, while those who chose to enjoy the cooking of others chose better prepared food either delivered or served at better appointed restaurants.

Their choice in clothes became more individualistic.  They found that they could create a unique wardrobe of clothes that arrived perfectly fitted, made of the material of their choice and the fashion and style the chose (or sometimes designed themselves).  All it took was recognizing that they wanted that ability and that the technology was easily at hand.  A person could take a scanned topography file to a group of tailors, who could coax sophisticated machines to make just about anything designers could come up with.  The tailors always knew exactly what people wanted because they had the people's orders in hand.  And the people were able to see what the clothes would look like on them before they ordered.

They started choosing larger houses with bigger yards, but then some of them started noticing that they were using more and more land just to live on.  That was decimating the land left for the natural habitats of wild animals.  They started examining what they wanted in a home and why.  The bigger the home, the more space to do things and to hold things, but there was a point beyond which a home could get out of hand without hiring help.  Since everyone was valuing work at $150,000, that made for a very expensive proposition.  The people made vacuum cleaners that automatically vacuumed in the middle of the night; dishwashers that washed and put away dishes; clothes washing machines that could wash, dry, sort and store clothes; many other machines to do housework; and yet there was something oversized about large houses.  They found they could design and build large housing networks that had a mix of private, well insulated rooms for families and medium and large common rooms where they could gather and interact -- play games, have parties, do projects, convene meetings and many other uses.  Eventually, as they improved their space travel, they also created an industry making living space in space -- talk about a room with a view!

Along the way, they decided to reinvent cities.  They brainstormed about everything they liked and disliked about cities.  They looked at how to counter the negative effects of anonymity -- for example, people thinking they could get away with crimes because no one knew who they were, people feeling even more lonely for having so many around whom they didn't know, people losing sense of their actions as making any difference.  They examined travel in cities and came to the startling revelation that if space within the city grew in three dimensions, so should the roads.  But at the same time, they saw they had to confront the noise and foul air of the internal cumbustion vehicle engines.  Tackling many problems with one solution, they decided to promote bicycling as a superior mode of transportation.  The creation of bike superhighways took less space, less material and was easier to design and build.  It almost entirely relieved the cities of air pollution and automobile congestion.  And the population as a whole gained because people were in better shape, and there was an across the board improvement in health, saving in health costs.  To accommodate the regular physical exertion, they constructed pervasive public showers.  For longer, cross-city trips, the mass transit was outfitted with easy access for bikes.

They turned their focus on mass transit and discerned that there were three major detractions to using it compared with using cars.  People had to go to and from it instead of the immediate presence of their cars in their driveways -- with weather only making this problem worse.  They had to conform to the schedule of the transit when they could take their car at any time.  And usually, mass transit had been set up with detours away from main routes to pick up and drop off riders, so with many stops and a winding path, it was a considerably longer commute than the same trip by car.  The shift to bikes helped with the distance from home to the pickup point, and with covered bikeways, the weather became less of a problem.  And the transit routes were streamlined to remain on the major routes.  Since they were pushing hard to make this a true convenience, they committed to two major enhancements.  They constructed interchanges at the transit's intersections so the vehicles would be able to continue without stopping at any intersection.  But even more significant, they instituted a side-mounted docking mechanism so that people could get on and off the transit without it having to stop.  They would board a docking cart and as the transit approached, the docking cart would depart and speed up to rendezvous with the transit.  It would hook onto the transit and the riders would transfer from the cart onto the transit.  At the same time, people wanting to get off at the next stop would load into the docking cart.  The cart would disengage and stop at the next stop, leaving the transit to continue without stopping.  They ran the transits on a frequent enough schedule that it was far more convenient to take the transit than to take their cars.

They found that efforts to control population were too overbearing so they redoubled their efforts to live in space as much as possible.  As the number of people living in space grew, they realized that they needed a reliable and easily accessible way to travel from space to the earth's surface and back.  They knew geosynchronous orbit was a long way up from the equator, but using very strong materials, they built several mountains at various points around the equator that made earth to space a much shorter and easier trip.

Sources of easily mined minerals became fewer and fewer as their consumption grew.  They also ran out of easily tapped fossil fuels, and the political fallout from having to deal with the byproducts of nuclear fission precluded them from turning to that source of power.  They saw that the only viable long term source for energy in the concentration and quantity they needed was fusion, so they chose to support a joint worldwide effort to achieve it.  It took many years, but fewer than scientists had predicted at the turn of the millennium.  In the meantime, they developed hypomantle drilling techniques and tapped geothermal energy.  They also created an armada of giant floating mobile windmill power stations that could withstand hurricanes.  They found that deploying these in nascent hurricanes dissated much of the wind's destructive energy so that the hurricanes were less forceful.

With these new, clean sources of abundant energy, they were able to stop using fossil fuels and reverse the greenhouse effect.  They were also able to mine the oceans for minerals and filter abundant water to reverse the spread of the deserts, which had taken huge and growing percentages of the equatorial land, a blossoming paradise.  And as long as there was relatively unlimited energy, people found they could make machines that could make the machines to make the things people wanted, leaving the people with more and more time to devote to science, arts and leisure.

One thing people had blamed on material scarcity had been the high divorce rate.  As material scarcity became less and less of a problem for all people, they started to realize that perhaps they were using that as a scapegoat for interpersonal problems that were deeper rooted than just money and material things.

As time continued, they came to realize that energy and the cumulative total of inventions were really the main basis for humankind's newfound material wealth.  Thus, no one really had a claim to vastly more than another.  They are still trying to establish a balance among what to incentives to use to prod those who refuse to work, what compensation to give those who work hard at simple or desirable jobs, and what rewards to give those who contribute great leadership, art or scientific achievements.

They also realized that the military had been a strong stimulant toward technological progress, but it had been very costly as well.  At the same time they found it harder and harder to refuse entry to foreigners.  They had been watching in sickened horror the ugly small wars that had been stewing throughout the world, leaving hordes of refugees in their wake.  They had monitored the poverty in far too many other countries.  They came to see that it was inconsistent to say on one hand that everything is built on the efforts of those who have gone before so everyone is entitled to a share of the resultant bounty; while on the other hand saying that Utopia was only for Utopians.

They decided that the best way to remove the need for a large military, give shelter to refugees and end world hunger was to entice everyone in the world to join in with them.  They threw open their doors to all people and nations who wished to join.  They decided to establish a University of Utopia to teach any people who wished to become members of Utopia the love of knowledge, through which the Utopians-to-be would strive to learn the language, culture and a skill that would be immediately applicable to providing the highest priority newades of Utopia.

People from all over immediately struck out to come.  As they left their homelands, the governments of those countries realized their best and brightest were leaving and something had to be done quickly to get them to stay.  Some countries, seeing how much sovereignty they could still retain -- how their neighboring countries that had already joined had burgeoning economies -- decided to join.  Other countries tried to force their people to stay using violent means reminiscent of the iron curtain.  The more that other countries joined, the harder it became for these repressive countries to retain their people.

The people in those countries made it harder and harder for the governments to maintain repressive methods.  The people who held power as leaders found that since they were only an infinitesimal percentage of the population that they could not force their minions to do their every bidding.  The people as a whole simply decided that the leaders were a handful of people trying to protect their control over the country, and the leaders were fallible.  The soldiers and police refused to arrest or harm dissidents.  The judicial systems did not convict them.  And so eventually, the people in those countries forced their governments to join, and thus the need for a large, expensive military came to an end.

And that simply sped up the process of uniting everyone's effort toward making what everyone wanted.  Space travel became a vacation of choice.  And travel on earth became easier and faster as they laid out a dense city-to-city grid of supersonic travel in vacuum tubes with antigravity levitation using the same concept of continual transit vehicles with access pods as used in city transport.

A legacy of earlier years was a considerably warmer earth, with wilder weather swings that made agriculture unpredictable at best on a small level.  Yet with biotechnology, the areas that had good growing conditions produced yields that ended up not always getting bought.  Life for small farmers was a tenuous gamble at best.  Over time they found that agriculture was being concentrated under the control of a few big companies before the started looking at how to start approximating Utopia.  They understood that this development was almost unavoidable and had started getting very uneasy about how this progression was headed.  It was with great relief that they instituted a farmers' union that could respond to the new stream of information coming to them about what people wanted.

Another problem they were forced to deal with was the feast/famine availability of fresh water.  They built huge underground aquaducts and deep lakebeds to catch water that would ordinarily have created floods in one area so that the water was then available to give to areas that had little or no water.  The western US plains, desert and California coastal cities suddenly became verdant wonderlands.  Desalinization projects also provided the water needed to retake the arid lands of Africa that had been lost to desert creep.  Indeed, the countries that had once been entirely desert now were becoming more green than desert.  A side benefit of such a wholesale shift toward new areas creating biomass was that the increase in carbon dioxide was slowing down.  Some even predicted that CO2 levels could actually be lowered.
 

GOVERNMENT
There is a world government made up of many states.  The states have borders determined by geographic and demographic factors -- different areas have different requirements, different population levels, different resources.  They have state governments similar in structure to the world government, and the state and world levels closely parallel the former US government in that the main power, what little there is, is separated into judicial, executive and legislative.

Legislature
The legislative arm is split between Representatives and Senators.  The Representative serve basically as conduits for initiatives and referendums held on the internet, which will be much more robust than the internet "cow path" of the turn of the millennium.  Media will be financed to do research and presentations of as many aspects as possible of major issues so people can inform themselves thoroughly.  The Representatives are elected and serve only a small enough number of people, perhaps 15 to 20 thousand, that they actually have the possibility of knowing all their constituents.  There would be far too many to make an easy target for special interest groups or other social forces.  Since the Representatives channel their constituents' votes, the Representatives' task is to assist in helping people to learn and understand all the perspectives of the major issues.  Some constituents may completely trust their Representative and not want to be bothered by the constant awareness needed to stay abreast of all issues; but as long as the issues are fully public and easily accessible, they always have the opportunity to monitor what is going on and enter their opinion into the decision.  The Representatives represent the cumulative self interest of everyone -- the voice of the people.

Senators are statesmen who are appointed according to merit and drawn from literally every walk of life: academia, business, elderly and young, science, entertainment, technology, home managers, farming, athletics, law and so on.  They are chosen for being compassionate, sensible, intelligent, able to balance mercy and justice, able to hold on to their principles in the face of public demands which they know to be self-serving or domineering over those who are fewer in number.  They serve extended terms of between 15 and 25 years and are well compensated.  They provide the check against the tyranny of the masses -- the conscience of the people.

Because there is direct input from all people who wish to participate, the laws are kept to the scope of each issue.  Thus there would not be room for "pork" amendments, nor is there the ambiguity of two versions passed by Senators and Representatives that has to be converged into a single bill.  And each law would be specific enough that it would provide the president with what could be considered a "line item" veto.

Executive
The president heads the executive arm.  The president signs or vetoes laws passed by the legislature and then enforces the laws.  The president also is in charge of the world guard.  There does not have to be a large military because there are no nations to engage in international conflicts.  Areas where there have been chronic, regional conflicts are heavily policed and all guns and other weapons removed from the area.  The president signs bills into law after they have been reviewed by a rotating board of experts who have deleted any provisions that cater to a single or special interest or are deleterious to poseterity, which is either not present or not able to fend for itself (nature and future generations are two main examples).