Johan Norberg opens his book with a startling admission: Marx and Engels were right about something. Free markets had, in a remarkably short time, created greater prosperity and more technological innovation than all previous generations combined. They saw it happening before their eyes in the 1840s. They just got the diagnosis catastrophically wrong.
Here's what they missed: wealth creation doesn't stop. The pie keeps growing.
In 1800, around 90% of humanity lived in extreme poverty. Today, that number is below 10%. Global GDP per capita has increased more than tenfold. Average life expectancy has more than doubled. Child mortality has plummeted. Literacy has soared. And this isn't just statistics—it's the story of billions of individual lives transformed. A child in Bangladesh today has a better chance of surviving to adulthood than a child born to British nobility two centuries ago.
This is the miracle hiding in plain sight: every single day, billions of people wake up and, through voluntary exchange, make each other's lives better. The farmer grows food. The trucker moves it. The grocer sells it. The customer buys it. No central planner orchestrated this. No committee decided who gets what. It just happens. And in happening, it creates wealth that didn't exist before.
Norberg makes the point directly: "There are no free lunches, and wealth has to be created before it can be distributed." This is the part Marx and Engels missed. Wealth isn't a fixed amount sitting in a vault that we need to divide fairly. It's something that gets made, every day, through human ingenuity and exchange. When someone builds something useful, invents something valuable, or figures out how to do something better, they're not taking from anyone. They're adding to the total. That's wealth creation in its purest form.
The result is that the pie grows, and everyone's slice grows with it.
A smartphone in your pocket today has more computing power than NASA had when it put humans on the moon. It costs a fraction of what a basic mobile phone cost thirty years ago. And it connects you to the accumulated knowledge of human civilization instantly. That's not redistribution; that's wealth creation. Someone figured out how to make something incredible, and in doing so, made all of us richer.
This is what defines a Prosperian: understanding that prosperity isn't a zero-sum game. Wealth creation is our core value because we know that when your neighbor succeeds, when a business thrives, when an entrepreneur builds something that works, the whole community benefits. More opportunity. More choice. More possibility.
At Próspera, we're not trying to divide up what exists. We're betting that when you remove the barriers, reduce the friction, and let people create freely, wealth creation happens faster than anyone imagined possible. That's not theory; that's 200 years of evidence, happening again right here.
