50 years ago today, on Christmas Eve 1968, the Apollo 8 command module rounded the Moon. It was the first time human beings had ever ventured out of view of our home planet. When Frank Borman, Bill Anders, and and Jim Lovell rounded the dark side of the Moon, they saw something no person had … Continue reading Earthrise
“We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself.” Some resist the natural human impulse to inquiry, but Carl Sagan understood that every one of us is already on this adventure with everyone else. What we do and don’t know affects everyone, so truth matters quite a lot. Science is our pursuit of evidence-based … Continue reading Frontier Work
An expanded space for human liberty—free from persecution and degradation—is the measure of whether we, as organized society, are succeeding. Some take the view that this means no constraint on any person’s liberty can be allowed. The result of this thinking is a strange hybrid radicalism, combining an aversion to all centralizing institutions with a … Continue reading The Struggle for Our Future
The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States protects the freedom of the press, because without solid evidence-based knowledge of fact, no human mind is sovereign, and democracy cannot exist. Facts in evidence: People make choices. Choices have consequences. Societies are made of these consequences. Power leverages the instruments of society to re-shape … Continue reading Press Freedom is Human Freedom
The global crisis in climate disruption is deepening. Droughts, floods, storms, and wildfires are taking an increasing toll on human beings, straining vital ecosystems, and putting food and water supplies at risk. The Paris Agreement outlines a global collaborative “race to the top”, where nations support each other’s success and innovate as rapidly as possible … Continue reading Highest-value Climate Action is Economy-wide
We inhabit a period of great turmoil and suffering, while at the same time immense hope and promise flood around us, making it possible for any person anywhere to potentially make great contributions to the betterment of humankind. That better possibility is entirely dependent upon the guarantee that all people have access to the benefits … Continue reading Uphold the Humanity of Every Person
No society can win by denying basic human rights. We are subsumed in a vast web of evolving technological capability, some of which does not necessarily make us free. We are living through a paradox of organized human empowerment, in which the power to access information is greatly expanding across the world, and yet faith … Continue reading Democracy is an Engine of Economic Value
Bottom-line thinking is about whether your way of doing business has a future. Common practice is to treat a high volume of accumulated profit or cash as a proxy for operational sustainability. But the history of empires, and of financial crashes, tells us this is not the case. Lean bottom-line management is one example of … Continue reading Complex Adaptive Integrity is the New Bottom Line
Fear-based thinking leads to tyranny. Decision-making that holds fear of the other to be the most reliable logic for ordering human affairs implicitly rules out humanity’s most powerful resource: our ability to learn more than we previously knew we could about the universe, to counter threats, solve problems, and improve quality of life, together. It … Continue reading Tyranny Lives inside Your Fear
The world’s wealthiest 42 individuals now hold as much wealth as the poorest 3.7 billion. This corrosive market failure is driving a perversion of the whole economic landscape, where capital feeds capital, without necessarily providing what makes healthy societies, which should be the basis for market success. With extreme wealth abstracted at this level from … Continue reading Income Inequality puts Everything We Value at Risk
The Poet Economist 