To Imagine Real Solutions

We Must Transcend Academic Parochialism

I had the pleasure of attending the Imagine Solutions Conference 2025 in Naples, Florida on March 10, 2025. It is modeled on TED and originally featured 18 speakers, advertising that:

"Each speaker has either led, invented, created, changed, discovered, or provided knowledge, which influenced and impacted thousands, to millions and even billions of lives.”

As it turned out, four speakers had to back out, three due to funding uncertainty from recent Trump administration decisions.

Each speaker was indeed influential. Most were legitimate academic leaders in their fields. Given the recent changes in government funding of science, many scientists expressed a concern about these reductions, with one pointedly asking the audience to contact their representatives in support of maintaining scientific research funding. Several others expressed concern about “climate catastrophe” and the Trump shift back towards fossil fuels.

Afterwards there was a debate regarding whether the conference had been "political" despite asserting definitively at the beginning of the conference that it had been "apolitical."

Be the Solution: Solving the World’s Problems

As it turns out, the conference name, "Imagine Solutions," resonates quite powerfully for me. I was the co-founder and Chief Visionary Officer of Freedom Lights Our World (FLOW, Inc.) dedicated to envisioning entrepreneurial solutions to world problems. Whole Foods co-founder and founding CEO John Mackey and I co-founded FLOW to stimulate more interest in entrepreneurial solutions to world problems. We co-wrote (along with other authors) Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World's Problems. I am, in a sense, a professional at "Imagining Solutions."

Of course, my lens differs from that of mainstream academia. Most of academia either explicitly or implicitly envisions a sequence through which:

The world's best researchers (and thus the best minds in their given domains) discover new scientific and technical knowledge that then leads either to private enterprise solutions and/or to policy change in support of making the world a better place. But the moral center of gravity of most academic research is that governments, which are dedicated to the public interest, should either lead, control, or implement most important solutions on behalf of the public good, assuming, of course, that private, greed-driven profit-oriented business will not do so.

There are many moral, theoretical, and empirical assumptions baked into this world view. Dozens of Nobel laureate economists have done ground-breaking work that is largely inconsistent with this world-view, including Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Ronald Coase, Gary Becker, James Buchanan, Oliver Williamson, Vernon Smith, and many more. And yet despite the weaknesses of these assumptions, few academics outside of economics have internalized these considerations into their world views. Certainly none of the illustrious academics at Imagine Solutions demonstrated any understanding whatsoever of the limitations of their world view.

Just a note on my qualifications for making these claims: Nobel Laureate Gary Becker was my dissertation advisor. He wrote a recommendation letter for me for the academic job market before I chose to go into education instead.

I took courses with George Stigler, worked closely with a dissertation advisee who worked with Oliver Williamson for several years, spent time one-on-one with both James Buchanan and Vernon Smith, had coffee daily with Gordon Tullock (who should have shared the Nobel with Buchanan), had dinner with Milton Friedman, etc. For someone not in academia, I know the world of these Nobel laureates and their associates well.

A Bottom Up Solutions Paradigm

There are two major "blades of a scissors" which cut through the fabric of this worldview:

1. The preponderance of evidence shows that guided by naive notions of "serving the public good," most governments are systematically biased on behalf of special interests rather than the interests of the average citizen.

2. Conversely, despite the continuing heavy anti-capitalist bias of most professors, it is unambiguously the case that mass prosperity is necessarily the result of private enterprise.

The experiment with socialized economies from 1917 to 1991 (and continuing until today in the case of Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea) has unambiguously shown that they cannot deliver mass prosperity. The much maligned "profit maximizing businesses" are essential for delivering higher wages combined with lower cost products that result in better lives for those who have access to free enterprise systems (the global poor still do not have such access, which is why they remain poor).

Beyond these two essential points, there are a couple more that are useful for addressing common academic critiques of capitalism. These include the fact that there are a range of institutional solutions, including property rights solutions, for internalizing environmental (and other) externalities; and the fact that often the nations with fast growing inequality have also seen rapid improvements in the conditions of the working class.

In both of these examples, there is a tremendous amount of nuance (especially the second), but an academic who does not understand the relevant economic literature on these issues should not be blindly claiming that capitalism is flawed because of environmental externalities nor inequality per se. Separately it should be noted that Scandinavian nations, often regarded as examples of successful democratic "socialism" because of their large social welfare programs, are, in fact, among the most business-friendly and pro-market nations in the world. They are better thought of as free market welfare states than as any kind of "socialism."

Academia Has Anti-Capitalist Blind Spots

While one could define these positions as "right-wing," in fact many Democratic academic economists would more or less agree with them. Conversely, much of the Republican Party is no longer remotely committed to recognizable free market or classical liberal principles. Thus it is highly misleading to describe solidly supported, fairly mainstream economic principles as ipso facto "right wing" or partisan in any way.

That said, they are often perceived as “right wing” because the social atmosphere of universities is so aggressively left wing and anti-capitalist. I knew someone who was close to Nobel laureate Douglass North who said that he was more pro-market than he let on, but that “he wanted to be invited to the faculty cocktail parties.” That anecdote reveals the level of animosity and social hostility directed towards free market advocates.

At the University of Chicago, home to the famously free market “Chicago economists,” an attempt was made to name a research center after Milton Friedman after his death. Many faculty outside of the economics department protested and it was ultimately renamed the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics, which adequately placated the critics. Friedman was hated by the anti-capitalist left both for being the most highly visible and sustained advocate for free market economics of the 20th century as well as meeting once with Pinochet, the Chilean dictator.

This is one of the most absurd double standards of history as thousands of academics actively celebrated socialist dictators, including Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Castro. J.K. Gailbraith, now largely forgotten but for decades the leading left-liberal intellectual, celebrated Mao’s China after the estimated forty million deaths due to the “Great Leap Forward” and the Cultural Revolution. Friedman explicitly repudiated Pinochet and his policies. Very few leftist intellectuals repudiated the mass murderers they celebrated throughout the century.

It is also worth nothing that Gary Becker claimed that Milton Friedman probably was responsible for more people escaping poverty in the 20th century than any other human being. It is an apt measure of the anti-capitalist sensibility of academia that Gailbraith could praise the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century without reproach whereas Friedman’s pro-market advocacy brought billions out of poverty yet he is hated.

Understanding Market Solutions Case #1: From Poverty to Prosperity

But all of this background becomes more immediately obvious when one thinks seriously about “solutions.” I see poverty as the single most serious problem that needs to be solved. Billions are still poor. My wife, Magatte Wade, is from Africa, where children still die routinely, where many people are enslaved, where the most basic conveniences such as refrigerators, stoves, air conditioning, etc. are unavailable to most of the billion black people who live there.

This understanding of the world leads directly to solutions. By the late 1970s it was becoming clear that Hong Kong and Singapore, the two most free market jurisdictions in the world, were growing much more quickly than other nations. After the disastrous years of Mao, Deng Xiaopoing began turning China from socialist to capitalist by creating Special Economic Zones (SEZs) modelled after Hong Kong and Singapore. These SEZs, also some of the most capitalist jurisdictions in the world, led to a billion Chinese moving out of poverty to the middle class more quickly than had ever been achieved in history. Wages increased 5-10x or more in a generation.

Magatte is bringing an updated version of the SEZs to Africa via Prospera Cities. Although Milton Friedman deserves the ultimate credit, Nobel laureate Paul Romer, son of Roy Romer, a high profile Democratic politician, is famous as an advocate of a similar model.

Meanwhile, one of the Imagine Solutions speakers highlighted “inequality” as one of her three greatest concerns. I’m 99% certain that she is unaware that:

1. China’s SEZ free market reforms both increased inequality within China while reducing inequality globally.

2. Updated SEZ free market reforms in Africa will likely increase inequality in Africa while reducing inequality globally.

These are not deep paradoxes. Rapid growth sometimes results in increased inequality while raising wages (again 5-10x in China). At the same time, bringing a billion people at a time out of poverty to the middle class reduces global inequality.

I’ve never met a non-economist concerned about inequality who has any awareness of these basic facts.

As a relevant aside, leading development economist Bill Easterly acknowledged in a conference on SEZs that I set up in 2008 that the entire field of development economics had largely ignored zones. This was not at all a political bias—it was due to the fact that the data sets that economists studied were typically national data sets, so sub-national zones had simply been neglected.

Note the extent to which the dramatic economic growth of China in no way followed the standard model of academia, in which the smart professors research solutions that are then implemented by policymakers. Instead, throughout the 20th century, certainly since the 1940s, most development economists promoted theories of economic development that were mostly useless and often harmful when followed by poor nations. Back in the 1960s when Marxist intellectuals regarded foreign direct investment as “exploitation,” Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore created the most FDI friendly nation in the world (as Tracing Woodgrains wrote, he basically said, “Come exploit us!”) and made Singapore rich.

The fact that most professors in the 20th century either:

1. Supported Marxist regimes that engaged in mass murder,

2. Supported Marxist principles that perpetuated mass poverty,

3. At best provided misguided but largely ineffective development economics

does not speak well of academia as an institution seeking goodness or truth.

Pro-market economists, the leading exception to the generalizations above, were largely hated by their academic colleagues. This highly negative social pressure does not speak well of academia as an institution seeking goodness or truth.

Well, okay, so they got a really big one wrong. But we can still trust them on everything else correctly?

Academic Blind Spot #2: School Choice as a Solution to Adolescent Mental Health and Suicide

Let me suggest another really big one that is mostly unknown.

• There is solid evidence that pediatric suicides increase about 30% during the school year. This is an unusual pattern that ends at age 18.

• There is solid evidence that parents and students are more satisfied with private schools than public schools.

• There is solid evidence that LGBTQ students are bullied more in public schools than in private schools.

• There is solid evidence that being bullied increases the odds of dying by suicide.

One might have thought that professors who care about pediatric suicides and professors who care about LGBTQ students would be interested in policy proposals that increase access to private schools.

But you would be wrong. School choice policies, such as Educational Scholarship Accounts (ESAs), are anathema to almost all academics.

But suppose school choice didn’t only reduce the probability that LGBTQ students died by suicide, but also was beneficial more broadly to the social and emotional well being of young people. There are several lines of evidence that suggest this might be the case:

There is a plethora of academic literature on “school connectedness” showing that a wide range of adolescent dysfunction (teen pregnancy, fatal accidents, gang membership, etc.) and mental illness is less likely for students who feel connected at school (e.g. “Someone cares about me at school.”)

Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar notes:

Over the last decade or so, there has been a veritable deluge of epidemiological studies showing that the single best predictor of our mental health and wellbeing, and even our physical health and wellbeing, is the number and quality of close family and friend relationships we have.

Again, this should surprise no one. It is consistent with the “school connectedness” literature.

Is it possible that a private education market could include options such as microschools that were better at promoting school connectedness? And what if parents knew that if their children were not feeling connected at one school they could choose a better solution for their child?

How Can We More Successfully “Imagine Solutions”?

So, back to Imagining Solutions.

Jodi Halpern, one of the professors at the conference was doing brilliant research on neuroimaging of the human brain. She framed her research by suggesting it could help us find solutions for issues ranging from Alzheimers to functional mental illness such as depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia.

She was a wonderful, optimistic, sincere human being.

But insofar as human connection is the more fundamental need for adolescent well-being, investing in more neuroimaging is not likely to be the fastest path to a solution.

School choice, allowing millions of families to choose where their children will thrive, is a much more direct path to addressing the challenges of mental health than is neuroimaging.

To provide a simple analogue, it is finally becoming widely known that our epidemic of Type-2 diabetes is largely an evolutionary mismatch. The consumption of refined carbohydrates, especially sugar, has led to a wide range of conditions, including obesity, heart disease, metabolic syndrome, and increased risks of Alzheimer’s and cancer. Similarly, there is a strong case to be made that adolescent mental illness is largely due to an evolutionary mismatch. t is likely that the impersonal nature of public schools is contributing to adolescent anxiety, depression, and suicide.

Our data on this front is not as solid as I’d like because there is only one academic research program in the nation devoted to studying school choice objectively: The School Choice Demonstration Project at the University of Arkansas, led by Patrick Wolf, one of the top 50 education policy scholars in the U.S. Dr. Wolf has developed a research program to study this issue. It looks as if a local funder may be willing to fund it. But we should finance similar research in other states.

Is allowing parents to choose the right school for their child a “right wing” perspective? Sadly, that is where we are right now. Is reducing adolescent mental illness and suicide a right wing cause? I would hope not.

After the Imagine Solutions conference, the ED, Randy Antik, was asked about the left-leaning bias of the conference. He defended the conference as focusing on leading experts in their fields. He agreed that the complaints about Trump funding cuts were political, but understandable given the circumstances. And he is correct that the speakers were experts in their fields and, qua expertise, not political. The fossil hunters knew their fossil hunting, the brain neuroimager knew her neuroimaging. And so forth.

But because of the massive blind spots in academia, the result was a conference that largely failed to “Imagine Solutions.”

There are certainly domains in which the idea of research-leading-to-solutions is valid. But there are also immense domains of human well-being, including the problem of poverty and the adolescent mental health crisis, for which the mainstream academic paradigm is inadequate at best.

As long as the “Imagine Solutions” conference limits its horizon to mainstream academic expertise, it will fail to imagine solutions to the biggest problems of our time.