My story, and why this plan will work.

This all began when I was a child.

The problem, and the solution
As a child I discovered that a billion people are starving. Why? Because they can only earn around a dollar a day. But this is economically crazy! If they had better roads and better laws they could each earn 10 or 20 dollars a day. Not from handouts: they would be creating that wealth themselves! It would only take a small investment and then the pay off is enormous. We just need to find a way to do it.

Later I discovered that this is not a coincidence: what we call "morality" is simply the rules that work. Societies that cooperate and give freedom will become wealthier. And the winners write the rules! Morality just means cooperation,. Treat the other guy decently because one day the other guy will be you.

Later still I discovered something else: the miracle of compound growth. If you can just do 5 percent better than someone else, then in a few years you have double the wealth! Then the wealth doubles and doubles again. So if the rich and powerful oppose you, you can buy them off!

The real problem: thinking it through
So why doesn't everyone do the right thing and make everyone rich? Because it is always more profitable to steal, in the short term. The trick is show the greater long term benefits of not stealing.

This is an intellectual problem. It does not require wealth or armies, it just takes one person to work out the details. Then when people see how it makes them money they will do the rest themselves. Think about it! One person, by sitting and thinking, can save the world.

But could I do it?: I am not Einstein, how could I succeed where others have failed? Well this is where it gets interesting.

Standing on the shoulders of giants
I knew it should be possible in theory, but did not know how. In my teenage years I studied everything I could, and refined my ideas. I knew that I was not the first person to try. There must be thousands of people throughout history who had given the world's problems deep and serious thought. Clearly none of them had found the complete answer, but they must have found different pieces of the puzzle. It seemed to me that the best thing I could do would be to spend my life finding all the pieces and putting them in a slightly better arrangement, so that smarter people then me could take the next step.

And then something amazing happened.

The Internet changed everything
I was born in 1968. When I decided to study poverty I was 12 years old. I was a teenager in the 1980s, during the rise of the computer. I was a young adult in the 1990s, during the rise of the Internet. My life's goal. to find the best existing ideas and synthesize them, became a thousand times easier. Previous generations could not even dream of these tools, and now they are available to anyone.

I have summarized my life's research on AnswersAnswers.com. I have shared these ideas with philosophers, and all the criticism relates to presentation, not the underlying logic. I just need to work on the presentation and then it will be ready for the world.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why I think saving the world is simple in theory, and why previous generations have failed, and why this generation will succeed.

Who's with me?