Betterness: Economics for Humans (Kindle Single)

But perhaps, given the parlous state of global prosperity, merely ridding the economy of dysfunction might not be enough to power another century or more of wealth creation. Maybe merely erasing industrial-age dysfunction yields not a “healthy” economy, just a stagnant one.

Adversarial, arrogant, and alienating, competitive advantage is often extractive.

The world today is being swept by tectonic shifts in both supply and demand. On the demand side, what constituencies want is radical—and rapid—change. On the supply side, the productive possibilities and the untapped paths for real wealth creation available to people, entrepreneurs, and organizations are undergoing equally transformative change.

Ambition specifies higher-order returns concisely and precisely: which kinds of higher-order capital an organization will return and to whom it wishes to return them. An ambition is what you might call a sharpened, honed, purified, meaningful version of a vision, updated for prosperity, not just “product.”

Maybe you believe that, at its best, humankind is capable of reaching not merely for the mall and the big-box store, impelled by the bonus and the corner office, but for the stars and beyond, propelled by the luminous promise of lives meaningfully better lived and the unconquered challenge of scaling the highest peaks of human potential.

profit itself is an industrial-era conception of performance,

Like psychology in James’s time, economics in our time has been founded on what you might call a negative paradigm. Its apostles and pioneers, like Adam Smith in the eighteenth century, David Ricardo in the nineteenth, and Milton Friedman in the twentieth, have stood on one another’s shoulders to build a dogma whose fundamental doctrine was to eras

When an organization gets intentional, it is saying to people, communities, and society, “We honor you: we want you to get the most out of what we offer. We see you not merely as mute, captive consumers, but as humans with dignity, will, power, and agency—the capacity to live up to your higher potential.” Here’s how I’d translate that to the real w

I’d suggest that today we stand on the vertiginous cusp of an equally dizzying transformation in our understanding of prosperity’s place in the human universe: that an economy isn’t an end in itself, but that it’s a means to the end of a good life. That life isn’t a means to the end of wealth, but that wealth is a means to the end of a good