Patrick Salemme
This world is a beautiful, incredibly complex place, and the forces of globalization (demographic, ecologic, economic, social, technological, et cetera) are fostering change at an dizzying and accelerating rate. What will change in the future? Almost everything.
Can one man have an impact in creating a better world? The storied lives of Thomas Edison, Abraham Lincoln, Leonardo Da Vinci, Cristobal Colón, stand side by side with my own personal heroes to emphatically declare the affirmative. As part of this, the most educated and global generation to ever live, the time is now to articulate a vision for something better.
Is goodness subjective? Are we able to even say what is better? All men seek to find their place in the world, to establish a legacy, to have their lives mean something. A better world, perhaps, is one where more people have the opportunity to realize the greatness that resides within themsleves. Nobel laureate and economist Amartya Sen argues that the purposes of development would be better served if policy was intended to improve the freedom an individual enjoys, be it economic, political, expressive, or religious. In this vein, a world where every individual enjoyed a greater degree of freedom would be categorically better.
What are the persistant structural impediments to freedom? Corruption, poverty, ignorance, and the neo-Malthusian trap of enviromental catastrophe. The good news is that we have a better understanding of each of these phenomena than ever before. The bad news is solutions will require new thinking, often which flies in the face of conventional wisdom. But these are not conventional times, nor are we a conventional people. This is my goal; to bring a positive change in the teeming and beautiful storm of planet Earth.