Michael Strong argues that restrictive law keeps people poor, while new jurisdictions with freedom to create value can unleash prosperity. He points to North vs. South Korea and Shenzhen's special economic zone as proof that governance drives development. The Startup Societies Foundation Summit at George Mason (May 9-10) explores how new legal frameworks could free billions from poverty.
Hello, I'm Michael Strong, co-founder of Radical Social Entrepreneurs, lead author of Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World's Problems, and the founding director of the Academy of Thought and Industry, along with many other innovative schools. I am going to be speaking May 9th and 10th at the Startup Societies Foundation Summit at George Mason University. We are explaining to the world and celebrating and building a community around the idea of new jurisdictions that can create prosperity. If you don't already understand the role of bad governance, bad law and governance, in keeping poor people poor, I beg you to come to this event and learn about it. There are many dimensions to this problem. But one way to get your mind around it is look at North Korea, South Korea, East Germany, West Germany, the Mexican border, US-Mexico. There are places around the world where a line in the sand, so to speak, dramatically, dramatically results in different outcomes for human beings. In a different case, there are special economic zones, most famously Shenzhen in China. Poor fishing village 20 years ago, 40 years ago, now one of the most prosperous places in China because they zoned it differently. And not zoning in a narrow sense of commercial, residential to commercial, but they changed the law and governance. Anytime you take human beings and allow them the freedom to create new value in new ways, you will see entrepreneurs creating value and gradually prosperity creating. All jurisdictions— Hong Kong, Singapore, Scandinavia, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, much of the Anglosphere— jurisdictions that are prosperous make it much easier to create new entrepreneurial ventures and scale those ventures. Than jurisdictions that are poor. If this doesn't yet make sense, come and listen to the various talks and ideas and creativity in the Startup Societies movement at the summit and join us in taking the first steps in Puerto Rico and elsewhere to release billions of human beings from unnecessary poverty. Thank you. Hope to see you there.
