When you write about systems, you quickly realize you’re also writing about the stories beneath them. Every policy, every rule, every routine we inherit began as an idea about how people behave and what we believe they deserve. To understand where those ideas came from—and what it will take to reshape them—we need more than policy analysis. We need perspective.
That’s why, as I wrote this book, I kept returning to the voices of people who saw the world with unusual clarity. Some lived more than a century ago. Others are reshaping conversations today. All of them help us see what’s possible when we widen our lens.
I turn to Jane Addams, who believed democracy was forged in daily acts of connection and care.
To Frederick Douglass, who understood that freedom depends not just on aspiration but on the structures that either expand or restrict it.
To john a. powell, who urges us to build systems rooted in belonging—not division.
To Mariana Mazzucato, who challenges us to rethink where value comes from and who participates in creating it.
These thinkers share something essential: a belief that society is made—and remade—through human choices. Systems do not spring from nowhere; people design them. And because people built them, people can change them.
In my forthcoming book, I draw on these voices—and many others—not as footnotes, but as guideposts. They help us see that the challenges we face today—scarcity mindsets, conditional support, unequal opportunities—are not inevitable. They are the result of stories we’ve inherited and structures we’ve maintained. And that means we can choose differently.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll share more about the thinkers who shaped my work and how their insights can help us write a more expansive story of well-being in America. Not as an academic exercise, but as an invitation: to imagine what we can build when we design with clarity, curiosity, and a wider circle of possibility.
Whose work—past or present—helps you see our shared future with fresh eyes?
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