How to Build an Abundant, Fair, and Clean World Economy — in one generation. 

Learn how nations have rapidly developed means of making a living for their people to provide prosperity for all while achieving other social goals such as security, independence, and protecting the environment — and how this has happened under nearly every political system humanity has tried.

To sign up, email zack@newconsensus.com

Right wing authoritarians are winning elections around the world running on a combination of economic populism, xenophobia and social conservatism. The xenophobia and social conservatism cement a marginal base. The economic populism adds enough protest votes to make a plurality. 

In the 20th century, the people of the world were promised constant and dramatic economic and social progress. In almost all countries, however, reality is nowhere near meeting expectations for the majority of the people. In rich countries, half or more of the population has been falling backwards for generations, while billions of people still live in conditions of oppressive poverty. 

Everywhere, parties representing centrism, liberalism, social democracy, progressivism, left populism and socialism are  failing to offer voters convincing plans to deliver the progress that people were promised. They’re also failing to provide credible solutions — or often any solutions at all — to the greatest threats to human life such as climate change, pollution, and pandemics, and to provide access to quality health care, education, and public infrastructure.

Why are so many political parties representing such different ideologies, working in such different countries, all failing to point the way to prosperity, security and health for their people? 

Rapid, sweeping economic progress used to be a common occurrence in the world. Dozens of countries went from poverty to prosperity in just a few generations — or in some cases even one. They did it under liberalism, capitalism and democracy. They did it under social democracy, socialism, communism, and under monarchs. They did it in peacetime and war, through revolution, and through incremental reform. 

Nearly every country that went from poverty to prosperity followed a common playbook. They learned the playbook by studying the countries that went before them. Many of their leaders lived and worked in those countries and watched their transformations with their own eyes, and often participated in them. Each country improved on the playbook and developed better tools, institutions and technology to make the process go faster. 

Some countries benefited from colonialism or slavery while they developed. Others didn’t. Some did it with outrageous levels of inequality for much of their development, others did the exact opposite. 

The first countries to get rich all at some point found themselves declining, collapsing, or being totally destroyed by war. So we also have many examples of already-industrialized countries with already-high living standards going through second, third and fourth rapid growth processes.

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What to expect from the class

In this first class offered by New Consensus, we’ll cover:

• How the world’s nations can work together to rapidly build a clean economy capable of providing prosperity and security for all. 
• How rich countries have the capital and technology to finance and enable the whole to build a clean and prosperous economy for all — and how doing so is the only way to restore prosperity to their own populations.
• What tools, technology, and institutions will be required to achieve this. 

We’ll read and discuss (sometimes with the authors!) selections from works that cover: 

• Histories of rapid economic development and re-development.
• The intellectual history of how leaders nearly everywhere forgot about the rapid development playbook and came to believe that making rapid, intentional progress was impossible and even dangerous.   
• How climate change, AI and other developments are bound to force another period of economic transformation — which could be either liberating or disastrous for humanity.

We’ll look at the economic development of the following countries: 

• Great Britain 
• The United States
• Prussia and Germany
• Japan
• Finland
• Denmark
• The Soviet Union 
• China
• South Korea
• Taiwan
• Singapore

We’ll read selections from these and other works: 

Bad Samaritans, by Ha-Joon Chang. 

Concrete Economics, by Stephen Cohen and Brad DeLong

The Entrepreneurial State, by Mariana Mazzucato

Invisible Hands, by Kim Phillips-Fein

Destructive Creation, by Mark Wilson

When Small States Make Big Leaps, by Darius Ornston

MITI and the Japanese Miracle, by Chalmers Johnson

Princes of the Yen, by Richard Werner

Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India, by Vivek Chibber

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, by Walter Rodney

Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850, by Prasannan Parthasarathi

Unprecedented Power: Jesse Jones, Capitalism, and the Common Good, by Steven Fenberg

The Reckoning, by David Halberstam

Saving Capitalism: The Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the New Deal, 1933-1940, by James Stuart Olson