I seldom order books while I’m overseas, wanting to keep my suitcases light, but I’ve just ordered a copy of this book — which is ironic, because Michael sent me a copy when it was published, and I was still in the U.S., but for personal reasons I was doing much less reading at the time.

Some of you may recognize Strong as the CEO of FLOW, whose activities I have covered from time to time on Mudita Journal. Strong has some new projects that interest me a lot, and I look forward to discussing them here as they become more public.

Meantime, Be the Solution looks like an excellent resource for those of us with an interest in Strong’s brand of synergy between personal development and individual freedom.

Writing at Forbes, Ralph Benko offers a very favorable review that helps put the book into appropriate cultural and political context. He includes this quote from Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, who authored the book’s foreword:

Michael was the first Libertarian I had met who was also idealistic and who shared my commitments to both economic and political freedom as well as personal growth, social responsibility, and environmental stewardship. … Most Libertarians I know are committed to economic and political freedom but not to the other three. Most of my friends who were committed to personal growth and social and environmental responsibility don’t believe in economic freedom….

Benko cites this passage from Michael Strong as the heart of the book’s thesis:

Much of the animus against the free enterprise system is that it encourages shallow, materialistic values. But every human being who aspires to be an empowered creator must realize that there is no anonymous “it.” Everything we see around us is created by choices made by you and me, our friends and families, and billions of other mostly decent human beings around the world. … We can begin today to create a world in which people are primarily focused on love, compassion, community, wisdom, beauty, and any other ideals.

Benko also writes:

Be the Change has the potential of becoming the bible for savvy, hip Libertarians. Perhaps not since Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals has there been a book that so clearly reflects the ethos of pure creativity.

Alinsky: “The leader is driven by the desire for power, while the organizer is driven by the desire to create. The organizer is in a true sense reaching for the highest level of which many can reach — to create, to be a ‘great creator,’ to play God.” (Rules for Radicals, p. 61)

Strong: “[G]o create a world, a community, a subculture in which your ideals can be instantiated, realized, in which you can show us what your vision of beauty and nobility looks like. Create a new social reality, so that I can see your dreams come true. I want to see a world in which billions of dreams are coming true constantly.” (Be the Change, p. 332)

That certainly got my attention.

If you order a copy too, I’d be especially interested to hear your thoughts.

I particularly like what he conveys in the first few minutes. I’m more ambivalent about the idea of businesses having “responsibilities” to the community, since it seems one-sided to me; it is not clear to me that businesses have any more obligation to the community than communities have to businesses. So why emphasize one over the other?

At the same time, I do think that if I owned a business such as Whole Foods, I would be looking for ways to use our massive influence to have a good impact not only within the direct sphere of our business (our customers, employees, owners, etc.), but also on the communities in which we operate.

What do you think?

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” –Rumi

Shuffling through the ankle deep sand of the narrow paths that pass for streets in a traditional Senegalese neighborhood at 2 a.m., guided by a Sufi mystic who has been having visions since the age of 13, we come across a crowd watching a wrestling match behind a makeshift canvas enclosure. Peeking through the holes in the canvas, along with the street urchins who cannot afford the 10 cents admissions fee, by flaming torchfire we see a pair of incredibly powerful men wrestling shoulder to shoulder, dripping with sweat and dust, wearing only a simple loincloth as they throw each other to the ground with great fierceness. We then walk along the beach in the dark, past a graveyard of holy men, with the huge waves crashing and crabs running in the moonlight. And amidst all of this indigenous, exotic romanticism, the marabout wants me to help modernize Senegal.

There is a breed of Westerner who hates our civilization, and wants to return to a more indigenous way of life. But most people who do not have our way of life, long for it. I am reminded of climbing a local promontory in Alaska with an orange-robed Tibetan priest and a group of local hippies, who had asked him to bless the mountain for them. In the blessing ceremony that he was performing, he quite innocently and honestly prayed for them that they would find oil under their land, assuming, as do most people from poor countries, that these people would be delighted to have the gift of sudden wealth. Little did he know that this particular group of people would find the thought of discovering oil beneath their land to be a curse rather than a blessing. Their sudden expressions of repugnance were unimaginable to him.

That said, it is also true that many people from other cultures fear the erosion of their own cultures, even as they long for the comfort, convenience, pleasure, and respect that comes from living the life we enjoy in the “developed” world. A majority of people living on less than $1 dollar per day listen to radio, and a majority of those living on less than $2 per day watch television. They are all watching, at least part of the time, American programs which often show the most tawdry aspects of our culture, unbelievable shamelessness and vulgarity along with unbelievable material wealth.

Senegalese culture is an especially warm, kind, and respectful culture for those who experience it from the inside (for a sense of the warmth and diversity of the music, see here, here, and here). Casual tourists are harassed by beggars and street vendors, so if one does not have personal relationships with individual Senegalese one might not experience the real Senegal. But for those who have the opportunity to develop real relationships here, one can feel a culture that is relatively free from anger, hatred, ego, and vanity.

There are, of course, good people and bad people everywhere. But the social norms here are, on balance, more modest than in the U.S. One of the projects I am working on here is the SEEDS Academy, a basketball academy founded by Amadou Gallo Fall, the VP for International Relations for the Dallas Mavericks. Although the Senegalese tend to be very tall and exceptionally athletic, one of the concerns at the academy is to train the players to be aggressive rather than respectful so that they can compete in the NCAA and NBA.

To take a different kind of example, in watching a video of a Senegalese concert, most of which was the singing of religious songs, the young people at the concert were as enthusiastic as any American concert crowd. But when a Congolese band came on that, instead of religious songs, sang songs with sexually explicit lyrics and quasi-pornographic dancing, the Senegalese young people became suddenly quiet and visibly embarrassed, en masse. This was a spontaneous response and it was not a behavior that one would see in the U.S., where highly sexualized performances at rock concerts are well received.

So the problem that I am currently working on is how to help a country become wealthy while preserving, as much as possible, its cultural integrity. On the wealthy side, the good news is that Senegal is ready to take off and join the world economy as soon as Americans are ready to invest in and purchase from Senegal. I may be exaggerating slightly by putting the burden largely on Americans, but many Senegalese are frustrated with having France as their primary trading partner, because of the various ways in which they EU economy is formally closed and, even more so, because of the ways in which the Europeans are not as culturally adventurous, open, and welcoming as are the Americans. Plus, relative to the French, the Americans have money and spend it. The Senegalese want to do business with Americans.

Unfortunately, many Americans are burdened with an enormous set of prejudices regarding Africa. Our image of Africa is that it is a land of poverty, violence, corruption, and disease. While there are many Americans who are eager to pity Africa and send money, fewer Americans are ready to recognize Africa as a legitimate place to vacation, do business, and build friendships. And with leaders such as Robert Mugabe in place and the Congo civil wars periodically re-erupting, unfortunately many of the negative perceptions of Africa have a basis in reality.

But most of those generalizations do not apply to Senegal. Senegal has been a stable, functioning democracy since independence. Although one should take malaria pills here, especially in the rainy season, there are no unusual health risks here; even the AIDS rate in Senegal is comparable to that in the U.S. The climate along the gorgeous coast is more moderate than is that of Texas; typical Dakar daytime temperatures range from cool and breezy 70s in the dry season to the high 80s in the brief rainy season.

After forty years of socialism, President Wade of Senegal has, since his election in 2000, put in place a thoroughly pro-market agenda: he has created a one-stop shop business registration service that makes opening up a business in Senegal straightforward for both foreigners and natives, and he has an entire office devoted to setting up industrial parks and free zones, with a determination to attract American investment in the free zones. Senegal has secure property rights and a strong tradition of rule of law and contract enforcement; thus businesses that invest here need not worry about many of the legitimate fears that prevent them from investing in many developing world nations. Only seven hours away via a direct flight from NYC, D.C. and Atlanta, Senegal is, in effect, open for business.

Poverty is the worst problem facing Senegal, and it is clearly the legacy of forty years of socialism. When Senegal achieved independence in 1960, it had one of the strongest manufacturing sectors of any African nation. Leopold Senghor, the first leader of independent Senegal, was educated by French socialists and therefore believed that government control of the economy was superior to capitalistic competition. Until 1986, a hundred and sixty-one different manufactured items essentially had government-granted monopolies due to the misguided belief that competition was harmful to economic progress.

The impact was exactly the reverse; sixteen years of government-enforced monopolies resulted in a shrunken manufacturing sector with poor quality standards that prevented Senegalese industry from competing in the global market. A series of reforms starting in 1986 began to open up the economy, but just as the transition economies of eastern Europe struggled when initially faced with global competition, so too did Senegal’s economy. Moreover, the combination of ongoing socialism with more open trade resulted in the collapse of the Senegalese manufacturing sector.

The dominant cultural and religious force in Senegal is Sufi Muslim, with more than 95% of Senegalese being followers. Among the Sufi brotherhoods, the most powerful one is the Mourides, founded by Cheikh Amadou Bamba, a charismatic mystic who is beloved for resisting the French colonial powers in the late 19th and early 20th century. Bamba preached a principled non-violence [PDF link to a brochure about Bamba's teachings], decades before Ghandi, and hard work as the path to holiness, and one of his first disciples was a highly successful entrepreneur who added entrepreneurship as one of the paths through which work became holy. As a consequence, the Mourides diaspora around the world tend to be successful entrepreneurs wherever they go. Moreover, because Mouridism is ethical first and foremost, Bamba, in his own way, launched the first generation of Conscious Capitalists(R).

Thus in a world in which a common prejudice towards Muslims is the belief that they are terrorists, and a common prejudice towards Africans is that they are lazy, passive, and unethical the Mourides are globally distinguished for being especially peaceful Muslims and especially hard working, ethical, entrepreneurial Africans. I don’t want to exaggerate; decades of dependence on NGOs and government have undermined the work ethic in Senegal. But if Wade is able to complete his project of releasing his people from decades of socialism, the future looks bright for Senegal.

Unlike many African leaders, Wade is moving in the right direction. But always and everywhere, economic freedom only results in economic growth if entrepreneurs build successful companies, and African entrepreneurs can only build successful companies if they receive investment capital and if consumers purchase their products and services. But if Senegal’s beautiful beaches are over-run by the drunken spring break party crowd from the U.S., and if all of the investment comes from the most short-sighted and calloused businessmen from France, the U.S., China, and the Arab world, Senegal may become wealthier but a land destroyed by drunkenness, corruption, pollution, and prostitution. But if the best and most caring people come to Senegal as tourists and investors, and learn to love and respect the music, the people, and the culture, then perhaps Senegal can develop as the first wealthy nation in black sub-Saharan Africa while also providing a model of how to modernize in a culturally respectful manner.

Michael Strong
CEO & Chief Visionary Officer
FLOW

UPDATE (from Joshua) — I just forwarded this newsletter to Mudita Forum, with the following prefatory note:

I regularly enjoy the newsletters I get from Flow CEO Michael Strong. The folks at Flow have something unusual going on: They understand the importance of Eastern spiritual teachings as well as the importance of free markets and individual liberty. They’re dynamic that way, in the best possible sense. I’d say they’re a heavily Tier-II organization (in spiral dynamics parlance), in ways that even Ken Wilber’s Integral crowd often seems too self-limited and “green.”

Below is the most recent newsletter that I received from FLOW. If you enjoy it as much as I did, you might want to consider signing up to receive the newsletter on their web site. They also have a Facebook page.

They’re one of the few organizations out there that I get actively excited about, in terms of their ability to strike to the heart of human goodness — both spiritually and politically. I hope you find them valuable, too.

The purpose of Mudita Forum is to provide a stimulating, thoughtful environment for discussing Eastern consciousness-raising practices — such as meditation, mindfulness, and the cultivation of presence — while using Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism as a basic philosophical frame-of-reference.

The old group got lost when I was changing servers a couple years ago, but recently I’ve been contacted by new people wishing to join.

My hope for the new group is that it will be much like the old one: low-volume, high-quality, and stimulating on many levels.

I sent invites to many of you from the old group, but I’m sure I missed some of you. Also, Google apparently holds such invitation messages until they can review and approve them manually, so who knows when you’ll get my invitation.

Membership in the new group is by approval only, but feel free to request joining if you’re interested in the subject matter.

Feel free to browse some of my own public posts to the forum for an example of the kinds of things we discuss.

From this month’s FLOW newsletter:

Akawelle means “also known as love” in Liberia. 15-year-old former Liberian civil war refugee Lovetta Conto created the Akawelle necklace from the casting of bullets spent in the Liberian civil war, as a symbol of the life that come from devastation, with the right attitude, real support, and a liberated entrepreneurial spirit. FLOW is working with the Strongheart Group, who provided Lovetta with a fellowship and a new place to call home in Liberia to advance her work of inspiring other young Liberians to make a new world by engaging their creativity and entrepreneurial spirit. We encourage you to support Lovetta and the youth of Liberia by purchasing her Akawelle necklace.

I enjoy the symbolism of her jewelry, and the spirit which it embodies:

I like it that there are parts of the world where the realities of life and death obviate any kind of postmodern cynicism and make people feel proud to embrace life with both arms.

Kudos to the FLOW team for helping support entrepreneurialism in Liberia — beginning with projects that help heal the heart and restore the human spirit to its upright position.

Below is their latest, from CEO Michael Strong. Other than perhaps his analysis of Mac vs. PC I find this to be a very stimulating and incisive discussion of the relevant topics.

Dear FLOW Members,

One of our most powerful instincts is that those who contribute the most to a community should be rewarded the most. From this perspective, it has always been a source of great consternation that educators and healers are often poorly paid, while other individuals whose contribution to the public good are more dubious may be highly paid. For many of us, our sense of justice is constantly violated by this obvious inequity. For much of the last century, “capitalism” was blamed for this state of affairs.

I know a dedicated, hard-working Montessori teacher approaching fifty with no pension, barely able to pay her bills, whose school may be going bankrupt, leaving her unemployed. I once calculated that Montessori teachers sacrifice about a million dollars in lifetime earnings, relative to public school teachers, in order to pursue their vocation.

In another direction, I know the CEO of a large yoga business, a highly professional businessman who once led his family’s multi-million dollar jewelry business, who struggles with the challenge of paying his yoga teachers well.

What to do? There are those who would legislate more government funding for educators and medical professionals, in various ways. But precisely because the vast majority of Montessori educators and yoga teachers practice their arts outside government-legitimized channels, such legislation would not help them at all. Indeed, sometimes government-mandated education and health care reduces the opportunities for alternative practitioners. Montessori educators, for instance, often campaign against government-mandated pre-school, because by supplying free government pre-school such programs would probably put the vast majority of Montessori schools, most of which are private, out of business.

One could, of course, declare that all alternative education and healing are appropriately marginalized, and with issues as urgent as education and health care the last thing that we need to worry about are alternatives outside the mainstream (though both Montessori education and yoga are creeping towards the mainstream).

For those of us who do find value in alternative education and health care, and for those of us who are simply committed to innovation and to individuality, this perspective is profoundly unsatisfying. I don’t want my options for myself and my family to be limited to those legitimatized by the custodial state.

Moreover, a strong case can be made that there are severe weaknesses in the “establishment” education and health care systems. This does not mean that there are not some things that they do well, but it seems premature, to say the least, to reduce the amount of innovation that is possible in the most important realms of human life.

One of the statistics that has long interested me is the fact that about three-quarters of health care costs in the U.S. are attributable to chronic diseases: heart disease, stroke, cancer, and diabetes leading the way. The single most powerful way to reduce the incidence of all of these diseases, and their associated costs, are lifestyle changes (The most lethal cancer by a large margin continues to be lung cancer, largely due to smoking). In addition, most accidents, the largest source of death among young people, are due to lifestyle choices, among them drinking and driving. Separate from both the costs of chronic diseases and the costs of accidents are the costs associated with addiction per se. The epidemic of obesity results in all health care problems become more frequent, more deadly, and costlier to treat. Added together, the overall health costs of bad habits may well exceed 80-90% of our health care costs, somewhere between $1.2 – $1.4 trillion per year, more than double what we spend on all K-12 education in the U.S., more than the GDP of sub-Saharan Africa.

As an educator, I was always more concerned with the school’s culture than I was with academics per se; it is a profound mistake to force schools to focus directly on test scores and ignore all other aspects of life. My explicit goal was to develop positive habits and attitudes among the students in my care. The best “alternative” or “holistic” educators and health care practitioners are often profoundly focused on habits and lifestyle choices, as are many of the best traditional educators and health care practitioners. But we have created institutions that penalize such a focus rather than reward such a focus.

I have often looked at the $1.2 trillion or so in health care costs due to our bad habits and wondered how that massive amount of wealth could be redirected towards those educators and health care providers that support the development of good habits. It is a well-documented fact that cultural variables are more important determinants of health than are education, income, or access to health care. At a given level of income, Asian-Americans and Hispanic-Americans tend to have better health than Euro-Americans, who in turn tend to have better health than African-Americans and Native Americans. Hispanic Americans from Mexico are healthiest when they first immigrate to the U.S., and gradually regress closer towards the national average the longer they live here. Mormons are significantly healthier than the rest of us. If we could all be Asian, Hispanic-fresh from Mexico, or Mormon, health care costs might instantly drop by nearly a trillion dollars.

What if some educators or health care practitioners were actually effective at helping us cultivate better habits? In principal, our insurance costs should decrease. There are already insurance discounts for non-smokers in health insurance and for good students in auto insurance. If an insurance company knew that students from a particular educational program, or practitioners of a particular kind of yoga or martial art or whatever had reliably better health statistics, they could provide significant discounts to the individuals who were associated with such healthy practices. If the discounts were significant enough, those organizations and individuals who were consistently able to improve health habits could increase their rates, and pay their professionals more highly. Ultimately high-quality preventative care, with highly paid professionals providing such care, would become a reality.

Most of the alternative educators and health care professionals I know believe that, in fact, they are more effective at imparting good habits and lifestyle changes than are most mainstream sources of education and health care. The mainstream would counter that there is inadequate research evidence of this fact. And so the Montessorians and yoga teachers and others patiently work to try to obtain funding for research to prove that what they are doing has some measurable value. Most of them hope to become legitimate in the eyes of the establishment so that they can receive some of the establishment funding.

In the world of personal computing, for nearly thirty years now there has been a virulent argument between supporters of Macintoshes and supporters of Microsoft PCs. On the basis of cost and measurable performance, Microsoft PCs are almost always a better buy than are Macs. On the basis of quantifiable evidence, Macs lost long ago. And yet Macs have retained their position on the leading edge, inspiring millions of enthusiasts even while Microsoft continues to imitate elements of cutting-edge Mac design.

Insofar as improvements in our quality of life are not easily measured, it is a mistake to await double-blind research evidence and government approval before allowing such innovations to receive support. Insofar as the worlds of education and health care are heavily regulated and have been for the past hundred years, the vast majority of potential innovations in our quality of life have remained stillborn during this period.

Entrepreneurs bet their lives on unproven visions. If it were legal to do so, more entrepreneurs would bet their lives on delivering education and health care that changed habits and improved quality of life and, most importantly, health insurance that monetized the value of those improved habits. Some of those, using unproven technologies, would become wealthy and provide new and better ways of living to millions of people. We should have education and health care chains that are far more powerful than Apple and Whole Foods Market, bringing new and better ways of living to millions. Ultimately, once these markets in happiness and well-being have been legalized, we will see all of the capital and talent that we now see flowing into technology and finance flowing into education and health care. And great educators and holistic health care practitioners will become highly paid, highly respected members of our society. In this sense we need more capitalism, not less, in order to create an ever-improving quality of life for everyone in our society.

Newsweek Magazine recently named Moreno Valley High School (MVHS), of Angel Fire, New Mexico, the 51st best public high school in the U.S. based on the number of students who take Advanced Placement (AP) exams. The first year I founded the school none of the students had taken an AP test and a local college professor told me point blank that northern New Mexican students were not capable of passing AP tests. The second year of the school we were ranked the 147th best in the nation, the third year 36th best, and now 51st best, with AP passing rates more than double the national average. Most of the schools ranked more highly than MVHS are either wealthy suburban schools in elite enclaves or they are magnet schools that gather the best and the brightest from an entire city. Given the demographic profile of the school, it has consistently been one of the highest performing schools three years in a row.

I know exactly how to replicate this performance and had wanted to create a chain of these schools across the country. But I was forced out of the school due to the fact that I had never had an administrator’s license. There is no research evidence showing that the “methods” that I used produce these results – because the devil is in the details. I got into the business of starting schools because I realized I had to design every aspect of the school in order to ensure these results. It is not a matter of a “method” resulting in “replicable results.” It is the matter of individual vision manifest in a unique organization leading to outstanding results. Government-controlled institutions can never support the cultivation of thousands of individual visions resulting in unique organizations leading to outstanding results.

Through economic freedom based on rule of law and secure property rights, war and poverty can become a thing of the past around the world. Through property rights solutions to tragedy of the commons problems, we can create an environmentally sustainable world. And by legalizing markets in happiness and well-being, we can create a lively, innovative industry in health and learning, happiness and well-being, that will result in a continuously improving quality of life for all nine billion human beings in the 21st century.

Towards life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,

Michael Strong
CEO & Chief Visionary Officer
FLOW, Inc.

If you find this kind of analysis interesting, I encourage you check out their web site and sign up to receive their newsletter yourself.

A few days ago, Justin Fox from Time Magazine published a lengthy interview with Mackey and his college housemate Kip Tindell — who, as it happens, is the CEO of the Container Store, which is similarly prosperous and also run by a very similar business philosophy.

Year after year, Fortune magazine consistently rates their two companies as among the best companies in the world for which to work.

Here’s a good quote from Mackey, from the Time interview, that sort of sums up Mackey’s business philosophy:

First of all, Milton Friedman is one of my personal heroes, so I don’t want to trash Milton Friedman. But he had a mechanistic view of business–it’s like a factory that you bring inputs in, capital and labor, and you mix them together and out spits profits, and that’s the reason business is created. That’s how he would think about it.

It’s true that what Kip and I do also does create the best or maximum long-term shareholder value, but that’s not the reason we do it. If that was the reason we did it, we probably wouldn’t be as successful at it. The whole idea is to create an organization where all of the stakeholders are flourishing at the same time. Or in a very simple, simplistic model, which I teach our team members, the purpose of management is to make sure that the team members are well-trained and they’re happy in their work. If they’re happy in their work, then that’s going to result in good customer service and happy customers. If the customers are happy, then the business is going to flourish and the investors will be happy.

So you get this virtuous circle, and you can add the suppliers in because they have to be flourishing as well. It’s this idea that everyone is creating with the business voluntarily, and they all need to simultaneously flourish. And if they do, the business will prosper. And that will maximize long-term shareholder value.

It’s not a strategy to maximize shareholder value. It’s not the reason we’re doing it. The reason we’re doing it is because we want all of the stakeholders to flourish. Where I differed with him was what was the purpose of the business and why it really existed. He couldn’t conceive that it would exist for any other reason than to maximize shareholder value. And once he understood that this does maximize shareholder value, he said, “Oh, we agree.” I said, “No, we don’t agree because that’s not the purpose of the business.” And that’s where we never could quite sync up.

And Tindell says a short bit later:

I mean, we were joking at a gathering that we had this past summer that even the lawyers and bankers kind of get into the act. They’re so philosophically proud of the way your organization is governed that they kind of get into the conspiracy and feel somehow a part of it and do things that wouldn’t ordinarily take place.

I’m not quite nailing that description, but there’s a harmonic effort that takes place, like a chorus is so much more beautiful than a single voice. These people are all interconnected. And it not only provides a higher return to each of them–compensation for the employees, return for the shareholders, this creative crafting of a mutually beneficial relationship from the vendors–but it enriches the lives of those people, too, as crazy as that sounds.

So that’s when business starts transcending into sort of an emotional response. It’s fun. It’s passionate. People love Whole Foods. They love the Container Store. And it’s very satisfying to not just us but everybody that works there and everybody that shops there.

Fascinating. Read the full interview for much more about these two creative, intelligent gentlemen.

I keep thinking there’s something important for Objectivists to learn, here.

At a recent talk I saw him give in Austin, Mackey made an interesting statement to the effect that “Profits are like happiness — if you aim for it directly, you’re more likely to miss. But if you aim for the underlying values that make it possible, you get the big payoff.”

I do wonder whether Ayn Rand is guilty of encouraging people to aim a little too “directly” at happiness rather than understanding just how fully happiness comes through caring relationships, radical self-acceptance, and personal generosity.

True to form, many Objectivists and free marketers criticize Mackey’s approach to maximizing stakeholder value (rather than just shareholder value) because it’s not aimed directly at maximizing corporate profits.

My own sympathies, though, are increasingly with Mackey. I think his company, and his life — he looks to me like a happy, actualized man, from what I can tell — provide good testimony on behalf of his approach.

Today I noticed an article he published recently at Cato Unbound, wherein he makes some excellent points about charter schools in the United States — and why they haven’t (really) been given a fair trial yet, when it comes to helping American students overcome their rotten performance scores.

I liked this point:

After the fall of communism, even the most recalcitrant academics acknowledged that Hayek had been correct that governments cannot manage an economy successfully. And yet nearly twenty years later, the notion that governments can manage an education system remains a respectable notion.

And here’s some interesting background about Michael himself:

After a career in both public and private education, in May of 2002 I moved to Angel Fire, New Mexico, to serve as the founding principal of Moreno Valley High School (MVHS), a charter high school.

In a rural area not known for the quality of its education (a UNM-Taos professor told me point-blank that “northern New Mexico students are not capable of passing AP courses), we created an AP program that in the second year of the school ranked us among the top 200 public high schools in the nation and, in the third year, the thirty-sixth best public high school in the nation on the Washington Post Challenge Index.

Although the ranking is based on the number of students who took AP tests divided by the number of graduating seniors, our students also achieved a score of 3 or higher at more than twice the rate of the national average. Because of our performance, and our innovative approach to getting there, AP New Mexico co-hosted training by our faculty for AP teachers statewide.

Teachers moved from other states in order to teach at MVHS and parents moved from other states so that their children could attend MVHS.[5]

Thus when I read an academic like Miron contrasting the rhetoric of charter schools with the reality, I know that the “rhetoric” of charter schools can be achieved. I know exactly how to do it and could do it again, over and over again, across the country. And I know exactly why it has not been achieved on a broader basis — which has a lot to do with why I am no longer in K-12 education.

See his full article for much more.

I’m looking forward to meeting Michael in person on June 15th in Austin at John Mackey’s presentation on Conscious Capitalism.