New Consensus Press

The publishing imprint of New Consensus.

New Consensus Press publishes the books, pamphlets, and stories that carry the new consensus into the world. Ideas change history only when they are made vivid, readable, and free. So we publish across every form the written word can take, from graphic novels and pocket pamphlets to major works of history and economics, and we give them away.

Our purpose is educational: to equip a generation to imagine, argue for, and build an economy that works for everyone. Every title is free to read, free to share, and licensed for anyone to build on.

Why a press?

The old consensus was not won in a single election. It was built over decades with many tools: think tanks, media, donors, and political organizing. Books were one of the most important. Popular paperbacks, academic tomes, foundation pamphlets, and op-eds slowly made one story about markets and government feel like plain common sense. Books are not the only tool a movement needs, but they are an essential one, and we intend to use them the same way: not with a single white paper, but with a whole shelf.

New Consensus Press is where that shelf takes shape. Some of our titles are works of imagination, like Looking Backward from 2100 to 2027, which lets readers walk through a world that already works. Others are works of argument and reporting, like the Lucky Bastards pamphlets, which take apart the myths propping up the current order. Whatever the form, the aim is the same: to make the case for a better economy in language people actually want to read, and to put it in as many hands as possible, for free.

The Collection

A Series

Lucky Bastards

A series of short pamphlets that puncture the founder myth: the story that says our richest men got rich because they saw a future the rest of us couldn't. Read the contemporaneous record and a different picture emerges: men who were wrong about most things, lucky at the right moments, and ruthless enough to turn luck into permanent advantage. The founder myth is the load-bearing wall of the last fifty years of economic ideology. Pull it out, and a lot of arguments about taxes, monopoly, and who should make the rules start to look very different.

Elon Musk Got Lucky cover
Lucky Bastards · No. 1

Elon Musk Got Lucky

The Making of the First Welfare Trillionaire

by Zack Exley

Elon Musk became the first trillionaire in human history. The official story says he saw the future. The record says something else: a man handed a stake by an apartheid head start and a rich family, who cashed a streak that ran on public money (NASA contracts, a Department of Energy loan, emissions-credit mandates, a market mania) and then turned the fortune against the institutions that minted it. Built entirely from the public record and his own words, with every claim cited, this is the contingency-and-luck story behind the founder myth's brightest star.

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Review copy · v0.0.14. A small number of citations are still being finalized.

Forthcoming in the series: Sam Altman, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and more.

Looking Backward from 2100 to 2027 cover
A Novel

Looking Backward from 2100 to 2027

by Zack Exley

A modern retelling of Edward Bellamy's 1888 bestseller, one of the best-selling books of the nineteenth century, which helped a generation of Americans believe a fairer economy was possible. In our version, Juliana West, a San Francisco tech CEO, falls asleep in 2027 and wakes in the year 2100, in an America that finally got things right. As her guide walks her through the new world (its work, its cities, its money, its politics), she and the reader come to understand how we got from here to there.

We wrote it because argument alone rarely moves people; you have to let them feel the future you are asking them to build. Bellamy understood that. A plan tells you what to do; a story makes you want to do it. Looking Backward is our attempt to make the new consensus not just credible, but irresistible.