An acknowledgment of the enormous ambition behind Real Prosperity -- and why I believe the effort is worth making.
I want to be clear about something from the start: I'm under no illusion about the size of what I'm proposing.
I'm talking about changing economic incentives that have shaped commerce for centuries. I'm questioning business practices that have produced extraordinary fortunes, built multinational corporations, and settled so deep into the economy that most of us take them as inevitable. And I'm suggesting we can do better -- not a little better, and not just by adjusting tax rates, expanding government programs or asking rich people to give more. I'm asking whether we can build an economy where doing the right thing pays better than exploiting people.
I know how audacious that sounds. I also know audacity isn't evidence that it can be done. But the size of a challenge isn't evidence that it should be abandoned, either.
The Behemoth Before Us
The economic order isn't one institution to reform, one corporation to challenge, or one policy to overturn. It's a tangled network of incentives, institutions, markets, governments, technologies and human behavior -- and much of it works remarkably well. Capitalism has unleashed innovation, created enormous wealth, raised living standards, and opened opportunities earlier generations could hardly imagine. I have no desire to tear that down.
I celebrate entrepreneurship and admire ingenuity, and I believe people who create extraordinary value deserve extraordinary rewards. I'm not against billionaires, I'm not for confiscating their wealth, and I'm not proposing that government hand out economic outcomes. I don't want to make the wealthy poorer. I want to make poverty less and less necessary. Everything else here is built on that distinction.
But the system also rewards practices that deserve scrutiny. Companies can earn more by making customers depend on them. They can collect far more personal information than the service needs, put up barriers to competition, impose artificial switching costs, and squeeze more revenue out of customers who have fewer and fewer alternatives. None of this is universal, and not every profitable dependency is exploitative -- some come naturally because a product is genuinely valuable. The trouble starts when keeping the dependency matters more than continuing to earn the customer's trust.
Changing those incentives won't be easy. The companies that benefit are often immensely powerful, and their practices are propped up by infrastructure, shareholder expectations, regulation and consumer habit. Even a business that sincerely wants to behave differently can find itself at a disadvantage for trying. I know the behemoth is there.
The Dream Is Bigger Than Money
As I've explored this, I've pictured a future where most of humanity lives at a standard we'd now call wealthy. My first try at describing it used annual incomes in the millions and billions of dollars. Then I ran into an obvious economic fact: money isn't prosperity. If everyone suddenly had millions without a matching increase in goods, services and productive capacity, each dollar would simply buy less. We can't print our way into abundance. And even huge gains in productivity don't spread themselves -- scarcity, ownership, market concentration and unequal access would still matter.
So the vision needed refining. Maybe the goal isn't for everyone to earn millions, but for everyone to have the security, opportunity, freedom, healthcare, education and comfort we now associate with great wealth.
Imagine technology making essential goods and services dramatically cheaper. Picture AI and automation letting one person create value that once took a large organization, and advances in energy, agriculture, medicine, manufacturing and transportation lowering the cost of living while widening what people can do. Then imagine economic institutions built so those advances open doors for the many, instead of just adding to the power of the few.
Ubiquitous prosperity, as I mean it, looks like that. Not identical outcomes, and no artificial ceiling on achievement -- a much higher floor, with fewer and fewer people forced to live beneath it, and above it, room for innovation, enterprise and personal achievement that's practically unlimited.
Technology Alone Will Not Save Us
I'm an enthusiastic builder of technology, and I've seen firsthand how much AI can multiply what one person produces. But I don't believe technology automatically makes people more prosperous in any meaningful or fair sense. It amplifies what we can do, and that includes greed, surveillance, manipulation, concentrated power and dependency. An AI system that can do the work of hundreds of people could create enormous abundance, or it could hand the benefits to a handful of owners. The technology doesn't decide which. The incentives around it do.
So Real Prosperity isn't mainly a technology project. It's an effort to examine, and eventually influence, the economic arrangements technology and commerce run under. Can a business do better by protecting its customers' freedom, and can privacy be a competitive advantage instead of an obstacle to making money? Will open competition beat artificial lock-in, and will independent accountability build commercial trust? Could we create conditions where the most profitable long-term strategy is also the one that's good for customers, workers and communities? These questions deserve serious investigation. I won't claim every answer will be yes, but I want to find out.
The Hardest Obstacle May Be Human Nature
There's another difficulty, and it may be bigger than the rest: people are imperfect. We want security, recognition, influence, comfort and wealth. We rationalize. We sometimes confuse what's good for us with what's right. I'm not exempt from any of it.
Part of why this matters so much to me is that I've spent much of my life struggling with financial insecurity, self-doubt, and the wish to do something meaningful. I'd welcome real financial success, and I'd be grateful for what it could do for my family and the good it would let me do. But I've come to see a line I don't want to cross:
I welcome prosperity. I will not worship it. I seek success, but I will not purchase it at the expense of my soul.
Those words are easy to write. Living by them when a big financial opportunity is on the table may be a lot harder. So Real Prosperity can't depend on my goodness, my intentions or my staying in charge. If it grows, it needs standards, accountability and governance that can survive its founder. Its principles have to apply to my own businesses, and if those businesses break them, Real Prosperity has to be free to say so. Otherwise we've built one more organization that preaches principles while protecting its own interests, and the world has enough of those.
I Do Not Expect to Perfect the World
My faith shapes how I picture a prosperous society, and I wrote about that in No poor among them. Zion, as Moses 7:18 describes it, was a people of one heart and one mind, living in righteousness, with no poor among them. I believe that society, fully realized, belongs to Christ and His reign. I don't believe I can build Zion with a website, a manifesto, a business model or a movement.
And nobody in Real Prosperity has to share my convictions. Honesty, freedom, accountability, opportunity and human dignity are worth pursuing for people of every faith and of none. My faith gives me a reason to pursue them -- it doesn't give me a monopoly on what they mean, and it certainly doesn't entitle me to claim God's endorsement for every idea I have. I can be wrong, and I expect to change my mind as I learn. Conviction without humility can turn into the same arrogance we're trying to get past.
I Cannot Do This Alone
Maybe the most sobering part is that no one person can do what I'm describing -- not me, not a billionaire, not a visionary founder, not even a group of very talented people working in isolation. Real economic change takes participation across disciplines, industries, communities and generations.
We'll need economists to challenge our assumptions, entrepreneurs willing to test different business models, and developers who build technology that keeps people independent. We'll need investors who understand that good returns don't have to depend on exploitation, legal and governance experts who can turn ideals into enforceable commitments, and ordinary people willing to reward businesses that treat them fairly.
And we'll need critics -- especially critics. If our ideas can't survive informed disagreement, they aren't strong enough yet to carry the changes we're after. I don't want Real Prosperity to become an echo chamber or a personality-driven organization. I want it to be a place where ambitious ideas meet rigorous scrutiny, and the strongest ones come out better for it.
What Success Might Actually Look Like
I don't realistically expect Real Prosperity to transform the global economy in a year, a decade or even my lifetime. Maybe it never will. But I can picture smaller wins that would matter a great deal:
- a business finds that dropping artificial switching costs actually improves loyalty
- a publisher shows advertising can pay without tracking readers across the internet
- a tech provider makes a commitment to data portability that someone independent can verify
- an entrepreneur builds a successful company on principles competitors called impractical
- an investor finds that ethical governance lowers long-term risk
- other organizations adopt the principles without asking permission, paying a license fee, or crediting the founder
Each of those would be evidence that a different economic relationship is possible. What we need is evidence more than inspiration, slogans or promises -- demonstrations that integrity and prosperity can reinforce each other. If we can set those examples, others may copy them. If enough do, expectations may start to shift, and incentives may eventually follow. I can't predict that, but I can test it.
The Mountain Is Still There
I started with a simple question: what if doing the right thing were also the most profitable thing? The longer I look at it, the bigger the challenge gets. I see the economic complexity, the institutional resistance, the limits of technology, the flaws in human nature, and the long distance between hoping and doing. I also see how little I know.
But I've learned something about myself along the way. For much of my life, self-doubt talked me out of believing my ambitions were worth chasing. Now I'm finding that real progress doesn't require being sure of success. It requires being willing to act on what I believe is worth doing, while staying open to correction.