In Investing in America, Antony Bugg-Levine, with whom I co-authored perhaps the first book on impact investing, makes a simple argument: the promise of America depends on capital. Not capital in the billionaire sense of concentrated wealth, but capital as a democratized tool—available to workers buying their companies, to first-time homebuyers with limited down payment savings, to entrepreneurs building companies that improve job quality, to communities preserving their land.
Our friend and colleague traces this insight back to Benjamin Franklin, who established revolving loan funds in the 18th century to help young workers become business owners. By 1990, those funds had made thousands of workers into owners and channeled millions of dollars toward positive public impacts of various types. What could be a more appropriate tribute to the 250th celebration of our nation’s declaration of independence?
The book’s central insight is this principle of enabling ordinary people to build wealth through capital access rather than waiting for charity or corporate benevolence, remains America’s most underutilized mechanism for economic security. The vivid examples that populate these pages—from the landscapers of El Paso who became 100% employee-owners to the manufactured home residents who cooperatively purchased their land in Missouri—demonstrate this vision is not nostalgic fantasy but practical, profitable reality.
What makes Investing in America distinctive is Antony’s insistence impact investing is not a moral indulgence but a structural necessity. He profiles investors solving three interlocking problems:
· the financing gap preventing workers from competing with private equity to own their companies,
· the inaccessible mortgage market excluding millions from home ownership, and
· the shortage of capital for entrepreneurs building businesses prioritizing worker financial security over maximum capital/value extraction.
The book acknowledges traditional markets have failed less through malice than rational indifference (though I would argue institutional racism is a form of social malice, so we could perhaps discuss that point further). Antony argues mainstream capital flows toward what it knows in the form of established businesses, high-credit borrowers and high-margin projects. The key point here is the parched lands beyond these rivers of capital represent trillions of dollars’ worth of unrealized human potential.
Antony’s heroes, many of whom are raised up for our consideration, are pragmatists who accept that solving challenges of economic inequality requires working across traditional divides. They partner with government, work alongside donors and traditional investors, and build financial products generating market-rate returns while expanding opportunity.
From the perspective of those of us connecting the dots between economic empowerment and a fight against our nation’s drift to authoritarianism, the book’s implicit argument about democracy and authoritarianism is its most consequential.
The reality is economic insecurity is authoritarianism’s greenhouse: When millions of Americans work full-time yet cannot accumulate $400 for emergencies and workers have no path to ownership and wealth in the companies they help create and build, the result is desperation and a realization of a lack of economic agency. Desperation makes people vulnerable to appeals from those supposedly strong men promising simple solutions to what ails our nation.
Concentrated capital breeds concentrated power, which in turn breeds the conditions for autocracy. Conversely, distributed capital (capital accessible to workers, entrepreneurs, families, communities) distributes power itself. It creates the economic security that allows people to think beyond survival, ultimately investing in their futures and then able to engage in our democratic processes as empowered and engaged citizens rather than suppliants.
Perhaps my only quibble with both the book and our field of impact investing as a whole is that Antony does not make this autocracy argument explicit despite the fact that it underlies virtually every page of this very readable book. Impact and traditional investors expanding capital access are not simply improving lives. They are immunizing American democracy against the conditions that breed authoritarianism and our growing slide to fascism. The examples he cites and those I have also documented are core and central to any effort to address the lack of this economic agency felt by so many Americans today.
The true power of the practice of impact investing rests not in its potential to offer investors various levels of financial return (from philanthropic to blended finance and market rate) but rather its ultimate potential to counter at least some of the coarser aspects of modern financial capitalism as presently practiced, to ultimately become an antidote to autocracy.
What emerges from Investing in America is a framework for understanding capital innovation not as a luxury or simple moral good, but as foundational infrastructure for democratic resilience and regeneration.
The fragmentation Antony documents is not inevitable. A country that could engineer the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, create the Community Reinvestment Act, and establish the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit can certainly engineer new forms of ownership, financing, and wealth-building. The investors profiled here prove pragmatism and profit may align with expanding who gets access to capital. They show the American Dream, understood not as personal enrichment but as opportunity earned through work, requires more than policy change or charitable intent.
The change we seek requires capital, designed and deployed with imagination and rigor. In a moment when authoritarianism ascends globally at least in part by exploiting economic insecurity and broken promises, Antony reminds us America’s best defense is not rhetorical but structural, making the promise of capital access real for millions more people.
Excellent point about the roots of autocracy Jed. Perhaps you too are pointing to a deeper truth without saying it explicitly. May I suggest that what you are describing is what in the regenerative (how life works) worldview we describe as “creating conditions” (for health/thriving) rather than seeking to control outcomes (with our impact goals and metrics). Instead, I suggest honing in on design “first principles”. In this case the principle of “empowered participation” is most operative (among others). Regeneration is a process with its own intelligence, life’s intelligence. Far smarter (and wiser) than our western trained “logical” left brain analysis that fragments the whole into parts we can measure 👍
Thanks for the summary review — sounds like a good book to be able to discuss possible futures with more traditional finance types. I’ve always wondered about the reluctance of some authors to deal with issues of ethics and morality. Sometimes the arguments are rather tortured…..coming right up to the line of understanding that inequality is bad for democracy but somehow not seeing inequality as a moral issue. Thanks for noting that there should be more capital for entrepreneurial businesses that prioritize worker financial security over maximum capital/value extraction among other things. Anything that helps us move from the bifurcated “extract” or “do good” model of financing is welcome. Nevertheless, many folks — as you well know as a founding blended value leader — have been working at this for decades. While we can point to some amazing trees that are flourishing, what can we say about the forest?