Designing the values-driven economy — how the vision began

How one man’s struggles inspired him to imagine a new economy governed by our humanity, not the market’s short-sighted, amoral profit model.

The ideas for the Values Movement grew from decades of personal and business challenges encountered by its founder, Mark Publicover. As an innovator who holds over 50 patents, Mark has a passion for solving problems and protecting children through a long history of invention. Distraught when a friend’s child was injured falling off their family trampoline, Mark set to work creating the first practical trampoline safety enclosure, and founded JumpSport. After numerous industry rejections, Mark mortgaged his home to bring it to market. Now that his trampoline enclosure has become the global safety standard, Mark loves to say, “We hug millions of kids every day.”

Building a competitive business in the early 2000s was especially challenging as many of JumpSport’s U.S. manufacturing partners were being pushed out of business by off-shoring. Unfair so-called “Free Trade” policies allowed large corporations to discard the communities, workers, and small manufacturers that had built and sustained their businesses. Mark explains, “I could see our humanitarian intelligence was being denied by the market’s fixation on short-sighted, amoral profit-making. The destructive environmental and social costs of removing production from democratically evolved and more humanely managed nations to authoritarian and unregulated nations were ignored.”

Also, because the global economy is geographically disconnected and culturally diverse, off-shoring has allowed corporations to profit while separating themselves from any moral responsibility or liability for pollution and other harms suffered in foreign lands.

“None of us wish to decimate someone else’s homeland. We know what is right and how to care for one another, but our institutions, controlled by narrowly focused interest groups, aren’t hearing us,” says Mark. “What we need is a decentralized, people-powered global protocol where every voice can have an impact, and where the simple act of anonymously sharing your values links you with millions of other like-hearted individuals who are committed to supporting companies and buying products that align with their values.” The tremendous leverage of our collective buying power will prioritize ethical decision-making throughout the economy. We can reward sustainability, prescribe compassionate labor practices, and broaden the distribution of wealth and power.

“The frustrations and helplessness we are all feeling about where our world is headed should inspire us to build a compassionate economy. We need to make our invisible values, like trust, transparency, and stewardship, visible and powerful in the marketplace,” states Mark. Empowering and incentivizing each person to use their values as the primary filter for every exchange will put our humanity at the center of every transaction. In a Values Movement economy, companies that wish to thrive will need to certify the degree to which their products and profits were ethically made to gain access to billions of values-driven consumers and their communities.

The Values Movement, powered by Arkius blockchain technology, opens the door to a paradigm shift where humanity’s individually shared values become the driving force of the global economy.

Join the human economy at ValuesMovement.org.