Meet Erik Ellis

I serve as Executive Vice President of Development at BrightNight — a next-generation power company backed by Goldman Sachs and BlackRock.  Over my career, I have developed and built large-scale clean energy infrastructure across America representing gigawatts of capacity. An engineer by training, I graduated with distinction from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and hold patents in energy systems.  To learn more about my professional work, see my Linked In Profile here.

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I understand how capital moves, which has been foundational for writing this book.  

 

But Forward Economics isn't about energy. It's about a question that wouldn't let me go for fifteen years.

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How does an economy based on the brilliance of markets and free enterprise, which triples in size over 50 years, manage to leave 80% of its workers behind?

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I'm not an academic economist. I approached this as an engineer — as a systems question: how do you design something that works reliably at scale, over time, even when individual components fail? What I found surprised me. The problems aren't random. They're predictable outputs of a flawed design. And a better design is possible.

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That inquiry led to empirical research examining how capital flows and economic architecture shape broader outcomes — with five papers investigating potential causes of inflation now available on SSRN. Forward Economics is a further result of that fifteen-year investigation.

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I live in Phoenix, Arizona with my wife. Our two children are heading off to college — an ending, a beginning, and perhaps the best reason to finish this work.

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If you have thoughts or want to go deeper, I'd love to hear from you at forwardecon@gmail.com.