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

When a person is wealthy relationally in social capital, environmentally in natural capital, managerially in organizational capital, personally in human capital, emotionally in emotional capital, and intellectually in intellectual capital, he or she might be said to be authentically, broadly, and deeply rich.

Think of betterness as business “plus”: the next level of human exchange. Business says: “I’ll offer you a product or service, in exchange for your currency. You will have more.” Betterness says: “Through the act of exchange, I’ll ignite your human potential. You will be and become better—fitter, smarter, closer, wiser, tougher, humbler, truer,

Imperatives are what demand work that’s timeless and ageless, not just transient and disposable.

Just as the crowning achievement of twentieth-century economics was constructing a national income statement, so the crowning achievement of twenty-first-century economics is likely to be conceptualizing and constructing a national balance sheet.

In a positive paradigm, the healthiest state isn’t just one that minimizes pathologies, but one that maximizes potential.

What happens when a nation willfully ignores perhaps the most fundamental lesson of economics and hopes that rent seeking will equal real prosperity? This does. What happens when a nation either loses, or prevents, a stabilizing middle class? This does. What happens when a government—any government—gets so out of touch with the governed? This does.

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

Going from business to betterness means going from vision, mission, strategy, and objectives to ambition, intention, constraints, and imperatives.