We must be no less radical in rethinking the foundations of human organizations. Like our forebears, we must do our part to emancipate the human spirit. It is here we find a cause worth serving—to build organizations that give every human being the opportunity to thrive.

Future people count. There could be a lot of them. We can make their lives go better.

This is the case for longtermism in a nutshell. The premises are simple, and I don’t think they’re particularly controversial. Yet taking them seriously amounts to a moral revolution—one with far-reaching implications for how activists, researchers, policy makers, and indeed all of us should think and act.

For some people in the study, making the economics work proved relatively easy, whereas for others it proved much more difficult. Family wealth served as a significant means to pursue a hedgehog in only six of the 34 lives we studied, whereas in ten of 34 cases people endured at least one significant phase of scarcity while in pursuit of a hedgehog. Yet whether easy or difficult (or somewhere in between), they committed to focus their inner fire in line with their encodings and they figured out how to make the economics work.

A friend once said of my earlier work that I wrote with a signature of “well-founded hope.” The mountains of systematic research, combined with my dedication to drawing insights from the evidence, provided the “well-founded” part. “But the message is always hopeful,” he said. “You demonstrate with evidence that good can become great, that people can build organizations worthy of lasting, that strong values can win in a hypercompetitive world.” Well-founded hope. This study only added to that signature for me. It made me feel even more hopeful and optimistic, not directly about the world at large, but about people. And people, after all, make the world.

In their book Power and Progress, MIT economists and Nobel laureates Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson argue that every technology revolution must begin with a rallying ambition. It is the promise of a technology benefiting everyone that puts in motion the long journey of amassing enough talent and resources to turn it into a reality. After analyzing one thousand years of technology history, the authors conclude that technologies are not inevitable. The ability to advance them is driven by a collective belief that they are worth advancing. The irony is that for this very reason, new technologies rarely default to bringing widespread prosperity, the authors continue. Those who successfully rally for a technology’s creation are those who have the power and resources to do the rallying. As they turn their ideas into reality, the vision they impose—of what the technology is and whom it can benefit—is thus the vision of a narrow elite, imbued with all their blind spots and self-serving philosophies. Only through cataclysmic shifts in society or powerful organized resistance can a technology transform from enriching the few to lifting the many.