The Prosperous Society

How does one justify a progressive revolution? Not a revolution against tyranny, or oppression, or unjust treatment, or structural inequality and subjugation, but against stagnation and the will to sit idle when faced with the opportunity to embrace radical, transformative change.

It's an intriguing question.

And on the occasion of the United States' 250th anniversary, we might find some guidance from the architects of the American Revolution.

Writing in The Creation of the American Republic, celebrated historian Gordon Wood observes that much of the justification used by the most prominent among those revolutionaries borrowed extensively from the works of scholars from across the Western canon of political economy and law.

Quote, Mingled with their historical citations were repeated references to the natural law writing of Enlightenment philosophers and the common law writings of English jurists, both contributing to a more obviously rational rather than experiential understanding of the nature of politics." The American revolutionaries did have grievances, and they anchored them to the rights guaranteed in the English Constitution, which they viewed as mankind's towering political achievement to that point.

This foundation in liberal ideals, the enlightenment notions of natural, inalienable rights, and the value inherent in a free and open society, provided intellectual heft to their movement.

And these ideas propagated fluidly from the pens of prolific thinkers like Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, James Madison, John Jay, and others, whose thoughts were eagerly consumed by the residents of the colonies through the printed word.

This current moment presents society with another progressive revolution, an AI revolution that promises to reshape our economy, redefine our relationship with technology, and indeed reconfigure the visceral sense of human identity.

The core thesis of this series, The Prosperous Society, is that artificial intelligence will serve as the economic nervous system of modern society.

It represents a progressive technological revolution that will realign commerce utterly, transforming the central constraint on economic growth from production to distribution.

Artificial intelligence presents a profound structural reorganization of the mechanics of the economy, and it will deliver astonishing growth and prosperity as applied at the distribution layer of consumption through the economy's increasingly intelligent coordination layer, of which digital advertising is, today, the most important manifestation.

My motivation in writing The Prosperous Society was to anchor this thesis to the solid intellectual bedrock of the Western liberal canon.

To make the case that insofar as these ideas are good, worthy, and aspirational, which is my position, then so is the prospect of AI's influence on our political economy.

This undertaking is necessary and important, because at this moment, the discourse around AI is dominated by two viewpoints from the extremes.

Both camps assume that AI is primarily a story about intelligence.

One fears that intelligence will eclipse humanity.

The other believes intelligence alone will generate unlimited wealth.

I think they're both pursuing a misguided interrogation.

AI is first and foremost an economic technology.

As such, it demands an economic interlocutor.

Throughout this series, that interlocutor is John Kenneth Galbraith and, specifically, his influential and celebrated 1958 book, The Affluent Society.

I position Galbraith as the principal foil for my argument in The Prosperous Society, not because I believe he was wrong, Indeed, I think he was remarkably perceptive in diagnosing the post-war industrial economy.

But because his work serves as one of the intellectual undercurrents to modern critiques of capitalism, advertising, technological progress, and now artificial intelligence, often without being explicitly cited.

His theory of the dependence effect, that advertising manufacturers demand in service of ever-expanding production, still echoes through contemporary debates over consumerism and the social value of technological innovation.

My argument in the prosperous society is that the economy Galbraith described no longer exists.

Artificial intelligence fundamentally inverts the structure of his world.

Production is becoming increasingly less bounded rather than scarce, with distribution emerging as the binding economic constraint.

In this world, advertising, but especially personalized digital advertising, ceases to function principally as an engine of persuasion and instead becomes coordination infrastructure.

Much of what follows is, therefore, an extended conversation with Galbraith across nearly 70 years of economic history.

There are those who dismiss AI as nothing more than a novelty that has yet to produce any measurable impact on economic productivity and has thus contributed to a financial bubble that will inevitably and, likely, very soon, burst.

On that same side, another group of opponents presents AI as imminently attaining self-sustaining agency to a degree that threatens the existence of humanity or, at least of human labor.

These narratives talk past each other and fail to recognize AI as a powerful coordination mechanism that makes commerce broadly more efficient.

Yet even fewer coherent, convincing arguments exist from the opposite perspective.

Most are prosaic, self-aggrandizing, and promotional.

I believe the applicability of AI to areas like commerce in ways that are neither viable nor desirable has likely contaminated and vitiated public opinion of AI.

It's hard to get excited about the soaring prospects of artificial intelligence when the most aspirational use cases put forth by its proponents are automatically delivered shipments of dog food or AI-generated ad creatives featuring bicycles with two sets of handlebars.

AI can be economically expansive and beneficial to society, even as corrosive agency-eroding use cases exist.

We can celebrate the technology while rejecting frivolous use cases and products that supplant or obviate the kind of individual choice that is morally and expressively meaningful.

Over the next three hours, I will attempt to navigate these tensions with four linked but distinct claims.

In part one, why AI makes distribution more important than production.

In part two, why autonomous commerce is a false ideal.

In part three, why personalization changes the economics of the long tail and of identity itself.

And in part four, where the moral boundary lies between AI that expands freedom and AI that robs us of it.

Throughout this series, I anchor the discussion to the works of thinkers like Smith, Locke, Hayek, Tuckville, and Mill, because they represent the mainstream tradition of the Western worldview.

If my conclusions are wrong, I hope they're shown to be wrong within that same tradition.

But if one rejects the principles that this tradition rests upon – individual liberty, voluntary exchange, decentralized coordination, private property – then we're no longer arguing about AI.

And that's fine.

But I wanted this series to force that distinction.

If AI really represents a civilizational transition, then it deserves to be analyzed with the same intellectual tools we use to understand every previous civilizational transition.

Neither market commentary nor product marketing provides an adequate framework for understanding a civilizational transition.

This discussion is weighty and it demands input from the writers and thinkers with the gravitas to justify a progressive revolution.

But similarly, undertaking a work of this scale requires the discipline to reject the impulse to operate at the other extreme, to extol and espouse the merits of anarcho-capitalism and unshackled, uninhibited free markets, to fill the air with theorists from the Austrian school.

Not because these thinkers don't have merit, but because their inclusion would serve as a distraction and create a caricature of a worldview that isn't helpful in advancing an intellectual position.

My purpose here is not to defend any particular school of economic thought.

It is to defend the liberal political economy that empowers the free, open, democratic Western society.

Last summer, when I began outlining The Prosperous Society, I set out to write an economic defense of artificial intelligence to serve as ballast for more pessimistic narratives.

It was originally intended to be a short book.

I pivoted to the podcast format when those narratives reached fever pitch earlier this year because I wanted to respond quickly and to release new episodes on regular cadence.

But the prosperous society ended up becoming a defense of liberal political economy in the age of artificial intelligence.

I think that's a more appropriate piece of work in the current context.

If this series is successful, and by that I mean that it presents a cogent and compelling case for reaffirming the liberal tradition of Western political economy at the dawn of a new AI age, then it will offer not merely an optimistic perspective on artificial intelligence, but a rigorous intellectual justification for embracing one of the great progressive revolutions in human history.

I've been awestruck by the response to The Prosperous Society, from investors to company executives to fans of the podcast, and I'm proud to release the series in its entirety on July 4th, 2026.

To those listening, whoever you are, wherever you are, I'm grateful for your time, and I wish you the personal and economic dividends of a truly prosperous society.