The plan to get an entire country out of debtors’ prison.

Technology is a better long-term growth option for Iceland. Not only does it offer a more palatable existence to all those former-fishermen-turned-bankers than heading back on a trawler, the country’s telecom infrastructure is top-notch, its people are highly educated, and, because Icelandic is a rather niche language, nearly everybody speaks good English (albeit with a sort of Elven accent).

CCP Games embodies this vision of the future. In a renovated fish processing plant, just down the wharf from Grandi’s headquarters—which are redolent of its marine catch—CCP oversees an alternative universe called Eve Online, a space-age, massively multiplayer online game that counts as many customers globally as there are men, women, and children in Iceland. They pay $15 a month to navigate characters that pilot intergalactic spaceships, engage in commerce, and shoot one another.

More controversial is what to do with all the plentiful and cheap geothermal energy bubbling below the volcanic island’s surface. As global energy prices rise and the cost of labor falls, it becomes highly economical for aluminum producers like Alcoa (AA) and others to rev up their nasty smelters in the Icelandic countryside, to the chagrin not just of Björk and Sigur Rós, Iceland’s two most popular musical exports, but of most residents with functioning olfactory senses.

Of course, all that steam from the bottom of the earth has other uses. It warms the springs that dot the country and lure in tourists. It also heats up the greenhouses that allow Iceland to grow produce, flowers, and even bananas.

Familiarity with one of the ideas for fixing California's own giant budget troubles suggests a quirkier use for the hothouses: growing legal crops of marijuana. If Iceland were to decriminalize pot it would enhance its allure as a tourist destination, saving North Americans, especially, half the distance to Amsterdam. That may sound like a step too far for Iceland’s conservative leaders. But perhaps anything to hasten the island's departure from its debtors’ prison should be on the table.