The shape of our civilization is not natural law
In 1960, South Korea’s per capita income was lower than Ghana’s. The country had been devastated by war, possessed few natural resources, and lacked the industrial infrastructure that defined modern prosperity. By any conventional measure, Korea seemed destined for continued poverty. Yet within a generation, it had become one of the world’s most advanced economies, producing everything from semiconductors to cultural exports that captivated global audiences.
What happened wasn’t magic—it was cultivation. Korean leaders understood something that pure free-market ideology obscures: successful societies don’t emerge spontaneously from unleashed individual ambition. They require the patient work of institutional gardening, the deliberate nurturing of capabilities and values that enable sustained flourishing.
This insight challenges a peculiar American myth that has taken hold over recent decades—the notion that the best societies emerge when governments simply step back and let markets work their magic. It’s a seductive idea because it requires so little: just remove obstacles and prosperity will bloom naturally. But the historical record tells a different story, one of conscious cultivation rather than benign neglect.
The US has had an industrial policy all along. We just didn’t call it that
Consider how the United States itself developed. The transcontinental railroad didn’t emerge from private initiative alone—it required massive government coordination, land grants, and infrastructure investment that no private entity could have managed. The internet began as a Defense Department project. The aerospace industry grew from military contracts and public research universities. Even Silicon Valley’s venture capital ecosystem depends on pension funds and government-backed university research that created the foundational technologies entrepreneurs later commercialized.
Yet we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that this history of public-private collaboration represents an aberration from true American capitalism, rather than its defining characteristic. The most successful periods of American development—the industrial expansion of the late 19th century, the post-war boom, the tech revolution—all involved extensive government cultivation of economic and social capabilities.
A story of fast development
The Korean story illustrates this dynamic with particular clarity because it happened so quickly and deliberately. Korean policymakers didn’t simply open markets and hope for the best. They identified strategic industries, invested heavily in education, promoted specific companies while demanding performance standards, and gradually built the institutional ecosystem that modern economics requires. They understood that markets are like gardens—they produce abundance only when carefully tended.
This wasn’t central planning in the Soviet sense. Korean companies competed vigorously, succeeded or failed based on performance, and operated in global markets that imposed harsh discipline. But they did so within a framework of public support and direction that accelerated development far beyond what pure market forces could have achieved. The government acted as a master gardener, creating conditions for growth while allowing individual plants to flourish according to their nature.
It’s not just the economy
The cultivation approach extends far beyond economic policy. Singapore’s transformation from Third World port to First World city-state required not just industrial strategy but cultural development—building institutions that promoted education, suppressed corruption, and fostered long-term thinking over immediate gratification. Leaders explicitly worked to shape social values, understanding that economic success depends on cultural foundations that don’t emerge automatically.
Even Nordic social democracy represents sophisticated cultivation rather than simple redistribution. Countries like Denmark and Sweden didn’t just tax and spend their way to prosperity—they built elaborate institutional ecosystems that align individual incentives with collective flourishing. Their generous welfare states work because they’re embedded in cultures that value work, education, and social responsibility. These values didn’t appear spontaneously but were consciously developed through educational systems, media policies, and institutional designs that reinforced cooperative behavior across generations.
The cultivation model helps explain why so many development efforts fail despite good intentions and adequate resources. Well-meaning reforms often treat symptoms rather than building the underlying capabilities that enable sustained progress. Providing schools without creating cultures that value learning. Building infrastructure without developing institutional capacity to maintain it. Opening markets without fostering the social trust and cooperative norms that make complex economic cooperation possible.
Contemporary China illustrates both the power and complexity of conscious cultivation. The country’s remarkable economic development over four decades resulted from deliberate institutional experimentation—special economic zones, gradual market opening, massive infrastructure investment, and strategic industrial policy. Chinese leaders studied successful models worldwide and adapted them to local conditions, understanding that development requires patient institution-building rather than sudden liberalization.
China’s approach demonstrates how cultivation can work within different value frameworks. Their environmental leadership, inequality reduction efforts, and social management strategies represent coherent institutional development within Confucian traditions that prioritize collective harmony and long-term stability. While these methods may differ from Western approaches, they illustrate systematic attention to building the cultural and institutional foundations that enable sustained prosperity.
What kind of economy do we want?
This tension appears throughout history. The Gilded Age produced extraordinary economic growth alongside social dislocations that required Progressive Era reforms to address. Post-war American prosperity created suburban development that isolated communities from each other. The tech revolution created unprecedented innovation while concentrating wealth and fragmenting shared information sources.
The cultivation metaphor suggests why these problems occur. Gardens that focus solely on maximizing short-term yield often exhaust soil nutrients, encourage pest infestations, and become unsustainable over time. Wise gardeners think systemically about soil health, biodiversity, and long-term productivity: sometimes they pull weeds, and sometimes they apply fertilizer. They understand that sustainable abundance requires attention to the entire ecosystem, not just the most visible crops.
Applying this insight to contemporary America reveals both opportunities and challenges. The country retains enormous advantages—educational institutions, innovative capacity, cultural dynamism, natural resources—but these assets require conscious tending to reach their potential. Like any garden, American society needs regular maintenance: removing invasive species that choke out productive growth, adding nutrients where soil has been depleted, pruning overgrowth that blocks sunlight from reaching emerging plants.
How it might look
What might such cultivation look like in practice? It would start with recognizing that markets are human institutions requiring conscious design to function properly. All markets operate within some framework of rules and shared values—the question is whether those rules reward productive contribution or extractive manipulation. Markets without institutional grounding in cooperative values become simple profit machines that optimize for whoever can game the system most effectively.
The goal is structural alignment of social contribution and social reward. Rather than allowing misalignment to develop and then trying to correct it reactively, wise cultivation builds incentive structures where individual success depends on creating value for others. This approach works with human nature rather than against it—most people want to contribute, create, and build something meaningful, but current systems often reward extractive behavior instead.
Economic cultivation focuses on creating conditions where innovation and efficiency determine success rather than inherited advantages or market manipulation. This involves investing in research that benefits entire sectors, developing infrastructure that enables broad-based innovation, and ensuring that markets maintain the prerequisites for genuine competition: easy entry and exit, robust competition, transparency, proper pricing of externalities, and protection against unfair scale advantages. Such cultivation addresses collective needs that individual businesses cannot handle—disaster prevention, disease preparedness, long-term infrastructure development, and acceptance of risks that would make capital formation impossible for single enterprises.
Educational cultivation emphasizes civic capabilities alongside technical skills, helping people understand how to cooperate effectively across difference while maintaining space for individual initiative and creative disagreement.
Cultural cultivation works to strengthen the social bonds that enable collective action without imposing uniform beliefs. This means fostering habits of mutual respect and common purpose that allow diverse communities to work together on shared challenges while preserving the cultural dynamism that emerges from different perspectives and approaches.
Cooperation can be organized
The cultivation approach offers hope precisely because it recognizes that different societies can thrive through different moral frameworks—individual competition, collective coordination, social democratic cooperation, intergenerational sacrifice—but all require conscious institutional design rather than hoping that spontaneous order will somehow serve chosen values. Human beings are essentially cooperative, and institutional design can encourage our better angels while constraining our worse impulses, but the specific forms this takes vary according to cultural values and historical circumstances.
History suggests this kind of institutional renewal is possible. The American founding itself represents perhaps the most successful example—the Declaration of Independence and Constitution didn’t invent new values but rather articulated and codified cooperative frameworks that colonists had been developing for generations. What made the founding documents revolutionary wasn’t their discovery of rights and democratic principles, but their systematic translation of existing cooperative commitments into institutional forms that could operate at continental scale.
The Progressive Era responded to similar challenges during the first Gilded Age by creating new forms of democratic participation appropriate to industrial society. The New Deal generation rebuilt American institutions after the collapse of the 1920s consensus. Both transformations preserved core American values while creating new mechanisms for expressing them under changed conditions.
Capitalism does not require chaos
The societies that thrive across centuries are those with institutional arrangements that successfully channel competitive energy toward cooperative ends. This insight, emerging from Korea’s deliberate development strategy through China’s intergenerational planning to the Nordic countries’ alignment of individual incentives with collective flourishing, suggests that political durability depends less on constitutional perfection than on conscious institutional design that serves chosen moral frameworks.
America’s current political dysfunction may reflect not the failure of democracy itself, but the erosion of institutional frameworks that once aligned individual success with social contribution. The challenge isn’t returning to some imagined past consensus, which was often exclusionary and incomplete, but developing new institutional arrangements that allow enduring American values—fairness, opportunity, community—to function effectively under contemporary conditions.
Rebuilding those frameworks requires more than procedural reforms or nostalgic restoration. It demands the kind of systematic institutional rebuilding that previous generations accomplished when faced with similar challenges: new forms of civic engagement that feel meaningful rather than performative, economic arrangements that reward productive contribution rather than manipulation, and information systems that support democratic deliberation rather than tribal mobilization.
The question isn’t whether Americans retain the capacity for productive cooperation—the evidence suggests they do—but whether current generations will prove as skilled at institutional design as their predecessors, creating arrangements where cooperative capacity can flourish while adapting to challenges that require new forms of collective wisdom. In 1960, South Korea’s per capita income was lower than Ghana’s. The country had been devastated by war, possessed few natural resources, and lacked the industrial infrastructure that defined modern prosperity. By any conventional measure, Korea seemed destined for continued poverty. Yet within a generation, it had become one of the world’s most advanced economies, producing everything from semiconductors to cultural exports that captivated global audiences.
What happened wasn’t magic—it was cultivation. Korean leaders understood something that pure free-market ideology obscures: successful societies don’t emerge spontaneously from unleashed individual ambition. They require the patient work of institutional gardening, the deliberate nurturing of capabilities and values that enable sustained flourishing.
The Randian mythos
This insight challenges a peculiar American myth that has taken hold over recent decades—the notion that the best societies emerge when governments simply step back and let markets work their magic. It’s a seductive idea because it requires so little: just remove obstacles and prosperity will bloom naturally. But the historical record tells a different story, one of conscious cultivation rather than benign neglect.
Consider how the United States itself developed. The transcontinental railroad didn’t emerge from private initiative alone—it required massive government coordination, land grants, and infrastructure investment that no private entity could have managed. The internet began as a Defense Department project. The aerospace industry grew from military contracts and public research universities. Even Silicon Valley’s venture capital ecosystem depends on pension funds and government-backed university research that created the foundational technologies entrepreneurs later commercialized.
Yet we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that this history of public-private collaboration represents an aberration from true American capitalism, rather than its defining characteristic. The most successful periods of American development—the industrial expansion of the late 19th century, the post-war boom, the tech revolution—all involved extensive government cultivation of economic and social capabilities.
The Korean story illustrates this dynamic with particular clarity because it happened so quickly and deliberately. Korean policymakers didn’t simply open markets and hope for the best. They identified strategic industries, invested heavily in education, promoted specific companies while demanding performance standards, and gradually built the institutional ecosystem that modern economics requires. They understood that markets are like gardens—they produce abundance only when carefully tended.
This wasn’t central planning in the Soviet sense. Korean companies competed vigorously, succeeded or failed based on performance, and operated in global markets that imposed harsh discipline. But they did so within a framework of public support and direction that accelerated development far beyond what pure market forces could have achieved. The government acted as a master gardener, creating conditions for growth while allowing individual plants to flourish according to their nature.
The cultivation approach extends far beyond economic policy. Singapore’s transformation from Third World port to First World city-state required not just industrial strategy but cultural development—building institutions that promoted education, suppressed corruption, and fostered long-term thinking over immediate gratification. Leaders explicitly worked to shape social values, understanding that economic success depends on cultural foundations that don’t emerge automatically.
Even Nordic social democracy represents sophisticated cultivation rather than simple redistribution. Countries like Denmark and Sweden didn’t just tax and spend their way to prosperity—they built elaborate institutional ecosystems that align individual incentives with collective flourishing. Their generous welfare states work because they’re embedded in cultures that value work, education, and social responsibility. These values didn’t appear spontaneously but were consciously developed through educational systems, media policies, and institutional designs that reinforced cooperative behavior across generations.
A garden needs a gardener
The cultivation model helps explain why so many development efforts fail despite good intentions and adequate resources. Well-meaning reforms often treat symptoms rather than building the underlying capabilities that enable sustained progress. Providing schools without creating cultures that value learning. Building infrastructure without developing institutional capacity to maintain it. Opening markets without fostering the social trust and cooperative norms that make complex economic cooperation possible.
Contemporary China illustrates both the power and complexity of conscious cultivation. The country’s remarkable economic development over four decades resulted from deliberate institutional experimentation—special economic zones, gradual market opening, massive infrastructure investment, and strategic industrial policy. Chinese leaders studied successful models worldwide and adapted them to local conditions, understanding that development requires patient institution-building rather than sudden liberalization.
China’s approach demonstrates how cultivation can work within different value frameworks. Their environmental leadership, inequality reduction efforts, and social management strategies represent coherent institutional development within Confucian traditions that prioritize collective harmony and long-term stability. While these methods may differ from Western approaches, they illustrate systematic attention to building the cultural and institutional foundations that enable sustained prosperity.
What do we really value?
This tension appears throughout history. The Gilded Age produced extraordinary economic growth alongside social dislocations that required Progressive Era reforms to address. Post-war American prosperity created suburban development that isolated communities from each other. The tech revolution created unprecedented innovation while concentrating wealth and fragmenting shared information sources.
The cultivation metaphor suggests why these problems occur. Gardens that focus solely on maximizing short-term yield often exhaust soil nutrients, encourage pest infestations, and become unsustainable over time. Wise gardeners think systemically about soil health, biodiversity, and long-term productivity: sometimes they pull weeds, and sometimes they apply fertilizer. They understand that sustainable abundance requires attention to the entire ecosystem, not just the most visible crops.
Applying this insight to contemporary America reveals both opportunities and challenges. The country retains enormous advantages—educational institutions, innovative capacity, cultural dynamism, natural resources—but these assets require conscious tending to reach their potential. Like any garden, American society needs regular maintenance: removing invasive species that choke out productive growth, adding nutrients where soil has been depleted, pruning overgrowth that blocks sunlight from reaching emerging plants.
Gardening tips
What might such cultivation look like in practice? It would start with recognizing that markets are human institutions requiring conscious design to function properly. All markets operate within some framework of rules and shared values—the question is whether those rules reward productive contribution or extractive manipulation. Markets without institutional grounding in cooperative values become simple profit machines that optimize for whoever can game the system most effectively.
The goal is structural alignment of social contribution and social reward. Rather than allowing misalignment to develop and then trying to correct it reactively, wise cultivation builds incentive structures where individual success depends on creating value for others. This approach works with human nature rather than against it—most people want to contribute, create, and build something meaningful, but current systems often reward extractive behavior instead.
Economic cultivation focuses on creating conditions where innovation and efficiency determine success rather than inherited advantages or market manipulation. This involves investing in research that benefits entire sectors, developing infrastructure that enables broad-based innovation, and ensuring that markets maintain the prerequisites for genuine competition: easy entry and exit, robust competition, transparency, proper pricing of externalities, and protection against unfair scale advantages. Such cultivation addresses collective needs that individual businesses cannot handle—disaster prevention, disease preparedness, long-term infrastructure development, and acceptance of risks that would make capital formation impossible for single enterprises.
Educational cultivation emphasizes civic capabilities alongside technical skills, helping people understand how to cooperate effectively across difference while maintaining space for individual initiative and creative disagreement.
Cultural cultivation works to strengthen the social bonds that enable collective action without imposing uniform beliefs. This means fostering habits of mutual respect and common purpose that allow diverse communities to work together on shared challenges while preserving the cultural dynamism that emerges from different perspectives and approaches.
The cultivation approach offers hope precisely because it recognizes that different societies can thrive through different moral frameworks—individual competition, collective coordination, social democratic cooperation, intergenerational sacrifice—but all require conscious institutional design rather than hoping that spontaneous order will somehow serve chosen values. Human beings are essentially cooperative, and institutional design can encourage our better angels while constraining our worse impulses, but the specific forms this takes vary according to cultural values and historical circumstances.
American progress has depended on evolving forms of cooperation
History suggests this kind of institutional renewal is possible. The American founding itself represents perhaps the most successful example—the Declaration of Independence and Constitution didn’t invent new values but rather articulated and codified cooperative frameworks that colonists had been developing for generations. What made the founding documents revolutionary wasn’t their discovery of rights and democratic principles, but their systematic translation of existing cooperative commitments into institutional forms that could operate at continental scale.
The Progressive Era responded to similar challenges during the first Gilded Age by creating new forms of democratic participation appropriate to industrial society. The New Deal generation rebuilt American institutions after the collapse of the 1920s consensus. Both transformations preserved core American values while creating new mechanisms for expressing them under changed conditions.
The societies that thrive across centuries are those with institutional arrangements that successfully channel competitive energy toward cooperative ends. This insight, emerging from Korea’s deliberate development strategy through China’s intergenerational planning to the Nordic countries’ alignment of individual incentives with collective flourishing, suggests that political durability depends less on constitutional perfection than on conscious institutional design that serves chosen moral frameworks.
Where do we go from here?
America’s current political dysfunction may reflect not the failure of democracy itself, but the erosion of institutional frameworks that once aligned individual success with social contribution. The challenge isn’t returning to some imagined past consensus, which was often exclusionary and incomplete, but developing new institutional arrangements that allow enduring American values—fairness, opportunity, community—to function effectively under contemporary conditions.
Rebuilding those frameworks requires more than procedural reforms or nostalgic restoration. It demands the kind of systematic institutional rebuilding that previous generations accomplished when faced with similar challenges: new forms of civic engagement that feel meaningful rather than performative, economic arrangements that reward productive contribution rather than manipulation, and information systems that support democratic deliberation rather than tribal mobilization.
The question isn’t whether Americans retain the capacity for productive cooperation—the evidence suggests they do—but whether current generations will prove as skilled at institutional design as their predecessors, creating arrangements where cooperative capacity can flourish while adapting to challenges that require new forms of collective wisdom. The moral architecture that sustains political cooperation isn’t built through exhortation but through structural changes that make shared purpose both possible and attractive.
