This book is about making a really big change in the world—one that unfolds over generations, not election cycles.

Right now, we live in a win-lose economy where shareholders and elites win while workers, democracy, and the natural world lose. In the long run, that imbalance threatens everyone. The cracks are already showing.

The good news is that we can replace this win-lose system with an everybody-wins economy, built step by step. This new economy will create and distribute wealth at far higher rates than today’s model, raising everyone in an ever-rising tide of prosperity—from the janitor to the clerk to the CEO.

If designed right, it will also shrink the size of government, strengthen democracy, and heal the Earth.

This new economy will still be a market economy. It will still value merit, profit, and competition—the hallmarks of free enterprise admired worldwide. In many ways, it will resemble what Raj Sisodia of Babson College calls “conscious capitalism,” only on steroids.

 
As it takes shape, brick by brick, the darker sides of today’s capitalism—poverty, dependence on big government, financial crises, pollution, wage stagnation, and more—will gradually fade. In their place will emerge an American economy built on shared abundance, stability, and environmental stewardship.

Crucially, this transformation can happen from the ground up—without new regulation or top-down legislation. A self-reinforcing chain reaction can begin with ordinary citizens like you and me, growing stronger over time, continuing long after we’re gone, until a full transformation takes hold.

If that sounds too good to be true, think again. In many ways, our thinking has become a prisoner of our own success—stuck in outdated, Cold-War assumptions. After a century-long struggle with Marxism, much of America entered the 21st century convinced that a market powered primarily by shareholder self-interest is the best—and only—way to organize an economy. Yet as Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, warned, we’ve been left blind “to emerging evidence that while free markets beat planned economies, there may be room for a modification that is even better.”

As this book will show, Grove was right. Not only is there room to do better—there’s a planet’s worth of room.  

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New Economy, New Name 

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To start, we need new vocabulary. Throughout this book, you’ll see references to a virtues-based or forward economy. It’s called virtues-based because it uses free enterprise to build wealth, lift people up, shrink government, and heal the Earth—all at once.

Using free enterprise to tackle so many challenges may sound naïve, but that’s only because we have no precedent for it. We’ve never seen what a market economy can achieve when it’s based on virtue instead of self-interest—when the invisible hand is guided by moral purpose rather than greed.

It bears repeating because it’s so important: virtue is far more powerful than greed.

If the cynical voice in your head doubts that, ask yourself this: is a government built on greed and self-interest—a monarchy or dictatorship—more effective than one based on virtue, law, and pursuit of the common good?

Most of us know the answer. But it wasn’t obvious to the monarchs of the 18th century who sneered at the American democratic experiment, expecting it to fail. They underestimated the force of virtue and the tremendous energy it releases. Similar untapped power waits to be released if we leverage virtue into our system of commerce (Fn 1).   

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Research Supports Virtue in Free Enterprise

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Many of the ideas in this book aren’t new. The need to change how we do business has been clear to many for decades. 

R. Edward Freeman at the University of Virginia has long argued that there’s a better way to practice free enterprise—one that serves all stakeholders, not just shareholders. He’s joined by Kate Raworth at Oxford, researchers Joseph Blasi and Donald Kruse at Rutgers, Richard Freeman at Harvard, and others whose work shows that wealth-sharing, virtues-based models create a more competitive and resilient capitalism.

(Why we don’t already have more of these virtues-based businesses is a paradox explored in Chapter 6.)

What this book adds to the conversation is a specific and scalable plan —a way to turn bright ideas and small-scale successes into a self-organizing, compound-growth model of unstoppable, positive change.

That’s what’s new here.  

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What You’re About to Read

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In the chapters ahead, you’ll find a concrete, actionable plan for how everyday citizens can join together to build a radically better world — without waiting on Congress, the President, Superman, or the Messiah to save us.

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It’s entirely within our reach to create an economy that generates more wealth, solves more problems, and restores the planet that sustains us.

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We just need the will — and the direction — to do it.

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This book provides one such roadmap.  

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 1 To be clear, the virtue placed at the center of America’s founding began with white, landowning men only. It took a civil war and more than a century of struggle to extend those virtues to the rest of the nation’s people — and the journey toward our more perfect union is far from done.