Why We Need a New Economic Revolution

What happens to a system when more and more people realize it no longer works in their interest?

In today’s economy, too many things that benefit society are unprofitable — and too many profitable things harm society.

We see this everywhere in our daily lives.

Social media extracts profit from our attention instead of helping us build meaningful connections.
News media keeps us perpetually outraged and afraid instead of informing us.
AI is on a trajectory to hollow out our economy (or worse) instead of enriching us intellectually and materially.

And despite the breakthroughs of the information age, conflicts of interest in medicine, science, and agribusiness leave us unsure of what’s truly good for our bodies and minds.

So why does the system fail to serve people’s interests across these domains?

It’s not primarily because of greed. Nor because of some conspiracy or shadowy cabal plotting to make our lives miserable. The truth is simpler.

Our economy currently has business models for consumer and commercial goods — but not for ecosystem goods, the kinds of goods that benefit society as a whole.

When we try to shoehorn ecosystem goods like journalism, AI, or medicine into narrow, profit-driven frameworks, we inevitably create misaligned incentives — a dynamic that enriches the few while disadvantaging the many.

With the acceleration of exponential technologies, these dynamics can easily push us toward dystopian — or even catastrophic — outcomes for society.

But there’s good news: we can change that.

In The New Economic Revolution, we unpack the mechanisms that produced our current economic dysfunction, explore where it’s headed, and — most importantly — show how we can upgrade the economy so that what’s good for society is also good for the market.

We reveal why blockchain is essential to making this transformation possible: it’s the only technology that enables sustainable business models for ecosystem goods — not just consumer or commercial ones.

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