On RegenErative Economics And Local Wealth Creation

Right now, politicians may be flummoxed by our strong GDP, relatively low unemployment, and Americans’ pervasive disquiet around the economy. Most working Americans - whether creatives, professionals, truck drivers, or baristas - are not. Gig work, AI, exploding health care and housing costs, and now chronic global instability have dangerously frayed the post war American dream. Very few feel secure, and the price of that security is higher than ever. Adjusting tax rates or making a few policy calculations feel entirely inadequate to the moment, more like changing the tires on a 1985 Mustang on its 300,000th mile. The engine is shot, the axle busted.

What we’re proposing is true innovation at the root level of our economy: our values. The values themselves are perennial (stewardship, reciprocity, connection to place, beauty). The novelty arises when we instantiate these values in our current economy, which is digital, highly networked, globalized, and often abstracted from the real world of food, goods, and services.

We’ve been told for generations that such an effort is quaint, idealistic, impossible. Care doesn’t scale. Empathy is uncompetitive. Beauty, impossible to define for starters, is a luxury. We all feel these statements as the fictions they are. 

And  yet, every day we experience directly that beauty relaxes and inspires us; empathy enables us to make things - from novels to software - other people find useful; care undergirds our entire economy in the form of millions of hours of underpaid and unpaid labor (mostly delivered by women).

The next paradigm will encode these values (stewardship, reciprocity, connection to place, beauty) into our economy. 

Regenerative economics is the current name for an economy rebuilt from first principles, starting with these values. The movement, which translates some very old ways of being into our current moment, has gathered energy. While it remains heretical and somewhat inchoate (as many nascent movements are), we sense a great amount of life here. Nearly every week, we stumble on new organizations educating, organizing, and building around its animating ideas.

Our essays in the category “Local Wealth Creation” address various aspects of regenerative economics and finance, which are core to what Heresy is building for several reasons.

The first is that we believe it’s the best path forward to restore community, wealth, and health in the US. Taken together this set of essays makes the case that this is so, and, just as importantly, offers concrete ways to participate in this growing movement.

The second is urgency. We can’t wait for the movement to mature and clarify to start building. In fact, we hope Heresy accelerates this process both via our writing and our initiatives. For that reason, we chose “Local Wealth Creation” as the name of the section. Through Andrew’s first essay on the topic, we showcase how major, successful initiatives across the US already incorporate key elements of regenerative economics. 

People are already  building along these lines. We hope that by spotlighting current efforts we can help people see how close at hand regenerative economics actually is.

Finally, we’re noticing that professionals of all ages find themselves at cross purposes with the old order and its available opportunities. They long for a way to bring the new paradigm forth but don’t see easy ways to do this. We’ve built Heresy, and this section in particular, to help create and highlight these pathways.

We’re optimists by nature; however, we see a few areas where the movement requires more time. A truly regenerative economy rests on materials and processes that do not despoil the planet. How fast we transition to a regenerative supply chain depends in part on how fast fossil fuel becomes intolerably expensive. The creation of a commons, as articulated by Elinor Ostrom, John Fullteron, and others, also strikes us as an endeavor that may take decades to establish at the varied scales we require.

We need not wait for all elements to arrive to begin the work of creating the new protocols, instruments, and enterprises to bring forth a regenerative economy. And local wealth creation is very much where it starts.

The US has been an engine of innovation for good reason. We have (relatively speaking) low levels of red tape, massive amounts of private dollars deployed towards innovation annually, and a large domestic market. We have a legislative system designed to support innovation as well as close relationships between innovation hubs and local governments. We hope that Heresy can help direct a meaningful fraction of this energy to a novel and ancient set of values (stewardship, reciprocity, connection to place, beauty). We believe innovating at the source is the fastest path to prosperity and freedom for all.