The Backstory

Eighteen months ago, a friend asked me to build a leadership program for my community. Not write about leadership. Build something people would actually sit inside, together, for months.

I pulled together everything I had. Twenty years of curriculum. Every book that had held up under real pressure. Numerous leadership conferences and workshops. Every practice I'd tested enough to trust. I organized all of it into five containers, the actual spaces we operate in as people: the self, the interpersonal, the organizational, the civic, and the community. Five rooms everyone lives in, whether they notice it or not.

Then I ran it. Thirty-four leaders from my hometown of Grants Pass, Oregon, moved through the whole thing with me over eight months. We built the container and we lived in it. Real weeks, real setbacks, real people showing up when it would have been easier not to.

Somewhere in the civic and community containers, economic questions started surfacing. I didn't plant them. That's just where they live. You cannot spend real time in the unstructured, non-hierarchical space, the community itself, without running into who has resources and who doesn't, who gets a seat and who gets left standing.

I could have stayed in facilitator mode. I'd built the curriculum. I was running the room. But a handful of people in that cohort weren't willing to let me hide behind the process. They pushed back directly. I was asking them to put their real thinking on the table, so where was mine. What did I actually think would fix any of this.

That question is where The Civic Forge started. Not in a policy paper. In a room, with people I respect, who wouldn't let me get away with staying neutral.

That room didn't hand me a new thought. It made me finally say one out loud.

From 2008 through the pandemic, I watched crisis after crisis move through this country, and I watched who came out ahead each time. I watched the economy "rebound," or look like it did. Stock markets hit new highs. Housing costs hit new highs. Every number you'd point to as proof of prosperity kept climbing.

And underneath all of it, the gap between the top and the bottom kept widening. The middle, the people the whole system is supposed to serve, kept thinning out. We were told things were getting better. For a lot of people, they weren't.

I want to be clear about where I stand, because none of this is an argument against the system. I am a capitalist. We live in a capitalist society, and I think that's mostly a good thing. Capitalism is a "me" engine. It rewards ambition. It rewards individual effort. It gives people control over their own future. None of that needs an apology.

And here is my own version of it, the tenet underneath everything else on this site. I love creating wins for myself and my family. I have no interest in doing it by handing someone else a loss. Winning at other people's expense has never felt like winning to me. The wins I'm proudest of are the ones that created winning scenarios for other people at the same time. That's my capitalism: run hard, get out front, and build in a way that makes the people around you better off for having been near it.

But a "me" engine without a counterweight doesn't stay ambition. It becomes concentration, because that is what the engine is built to do. American policy, as we've actually voted for it over time, has always leaned a little toward "we," toward protecting people from each other and occasionally building something together that none of us could build alone. Not because we're against ambition. Because we've watched, more than once, what happens without something on the other side of it.

I spent months studying this the right way. Not skimming headlines. Reading the economists and historians who had already spent real time on pieces of this problem, the ones who'd succeeded in small ways and the ones who'd failed in useful ones.

Somewhere in that work, the different threads I'd been following converged into one picture, and the picture stuck.

Picture a big elastic band with everyone standing inside it. The people at the top run ahead. Nothing stops them. Nothing should. Running is the whole point of ambition, and I have no interest in a system that punishes people for getting out front.

But a band has give, not infinite give. Run far enough and it goes taut. Past that point, if the leaders want to keep advancing, they have to pull the trailing edge forward with them. The leaders stay out front the entire time. Nobody falls out the back. And the size of that band, how far someone can run before the pull kicks in, isn't fixed by nature. It's a dial. It's the disparity we choose, as a society, to live with. Right now we act like there's no dial at all. That's a choice too, and not a good one.

That's elastic capitalism. The whole idea, in one image you could build with a rubber band and two hands.

Before I decided any of this was worth building further, I did the honest thing and went looking for where I might be wrong. I read the prior proposals, the older papers, the economists who had already tried versions of this idea. I wanted a straight answer to a plain question. Had someone already done this, and I'd simply missed it.

The answer is that pieces of this exist in the literature, and real credit is owed to the people who got there first. The closest ancestor deserves its name: the Rising-Tide Tax System Vetted 8/10, proposed in 2006 by Leonard Burman, Jeffrey Rohaly, and Nobel laureate Robert Shiller. They saw the same problem and built a version of the answer with the tools of their moment, and elastic capitalism builds on what they proved.

But the specific mechanism, the actual way the coupling works, hadn't been built quite this way before. I'm not claiming to have invented economics. I'm claiming I found a genuine gap and built something to sit in it, on shoulders I didn't grow myself.

I've spent most of my life in Grants Pass. It's a small, rural town, the kind of place people don't expect big ideas to come from.

One of the fastest-growing companies in the country came out of Grants Pass. Dutch Bros started here, in this same small town, long before it became what it is now. Big things come from small places more often than people think.

Grants Pass also ended up at the center of a case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, over how cities can handle homelessness. I don't hold that up as something to be proud of. It isn't a badge of honor. But it gave me a front-row seat to how policy actually lands on real streets, for real people, in the town where I live. I've watched these questions play out somewhere I couldn't look away from.

This is still early work. There are real gaps in the framework, and I'd rather name them myself than have someone else find them first. But eighteen months of building it, testing it against people willing to push back, and checking it against everyone who came before me has convinced me it's worth putting in front of more people than a room in Grants Pass.

What follows on this site is the rest of it. The honest diagnosis of what's broken. The specific levers I think can move it. The actual specs for how it could work. And elastic capitalism itself, the destination all of it is building toward — what began as one band in my head and has since grown into a set of them, each wired to its own gauge.

This is just the beginning. I'm glad you're here for it. We keep going.