Editor’s edition · Early release

The Wealth of Humanity

Name: The Wealth of Humanity: Together We Prosper
Author: Mark S. Hewitt

Together We Prosper

Ten thousand years of what makes a people rich, from the first villages of the Indus to a country taking stock of itself. The oldest wealth we have is each other.

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Together we prosper; apart we fail.

Watercolor: families walking a raised road toward a timber platform under a northern sky. — From the book: the road ahead

The book

Ten thousand years of what makes a people rich

Long before money, the people of the Indus valley came through the ice ages with stone, fire, knowledge and each other. Their wealth was what they knew and what they shared, and they handed it from one generation to the next.

The Wealth of Humanity follows that inheritance across ten thousand years. It begins with the first villages at Mehrgarh and the planned cities of the Indus. It moves through what Adam Smith actually counted as the wealth of nations, Elinor Ostrom’s discovery that communities can govern what they share, and the waqf, a centuries-old way of holding wealth in trust. It names five kinds of wealth that money alone cannot measure: financial, ecological, cultural and human, social, and generational.

It then brings that history to a country taking stock of itself. Drawing on the five-volume Country Baseline Series for Pakistan, it looks at sunlight on rooftops, water beneath the fields, what the mountains really hold, and a nation that buys its fuel. It asks the questions any community must answer before it builds: what do people need, who decides, how do we know it works, and what survives after the founders are gone?

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The podcast

Audio discussions and summaries of the book, introduced by the author. The discussions are AI-generated from the manuscript, and the introduction uses an AI clone of the author’s voice; each episode says so in its notes.

All episodes, notes and transcripts · RSS feed for any podcast app

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Watercolor: a woman and two children reading tracks in the sand by a river.

The Long Inheritance
A seven-minute video overview of the book. On YouTube.

The series

The Country Baseline Series

The Country Baseline Series assembles the evidence a nation and its partners need before designing regenerative communities, productive enterprise and the institutions that sustain them. Each volume describes the present with sources, assesses what is possible, and records what remains unknown.

The Country Baseline Series sets out the evidence a nation needs before it builds, and The Wealth of Humanity asks what that evidence is for. The first Country Baseline Series covers Pakistan. The volumes are in editor’s review and are not yet released.

Introduction to the Series

How the series was made, what the volumes say together, and the candidate sites across all volumes.