From the Publisher

The Institute recently held its annual Global Conference in Los Angeles, with 5,000 attendees from 67 countries taking part in an intellectual banquet spread across more than 200 sessions. It was, to put it mildly, a corker.

Each year, we choose a theme for the event, one that we hope speaks to the moment and will resonate with speakers and attendees alike. With the backdrop of political and market uncertainty at the beginning of 2025, the process of deciding on this year’s theme was more challenging than ever. When we decided on “Toward a Flourishing Future,” we were staking out a claim of optimism as a rallying cry for the long term. Flourishing is one of the loveliest words in the English language — yet one that’s underused, perhaps because there’s no clearly agreed-upon meaning. Economics Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps offered his take in his 2013 book Mass Flourishing. Phelps explored why the explosion of prosperity in some nations between the 1820s and the 1960s created not only wealth, but also true flourishing – meaningful work for many along with opportunities for personal growth and self-expression for far more people than ever before.

His conclusion was that the wellspring of this flourishing lay in modern values such as the desire to create, explore and meet challenges. The word “mass” in his book title followed from the reality that, unlike in previous periods of rapid societal advancement – for example, the Renaissance – this efflorescence was driven not by a handful of visionaries and titans, but rather by millions of people empowered to think, create, plan and pioneer.

That’s all well and good but how, you may ask, does any of this relate to the 2025 Milken Institute Global Conference?

Each theme is meant to be a call to action for our attendees and speakers, and this year’s theme resonated gratifyingly with many of them. My colleagues and I often heard notes of appreciation for focusing on brighter horizons, even as panelists and speakers endeavored to illuminate the challenges of the present.

We hope – like the millions of creators and pioneers who fueled the mass flourishing that Phelps described – that our Global Conference attendees took from the halls and meeting rooms of the Beverly Hilton a heady dose of inspiration and fresh ideas. And we hope that it will serve as potent fuel for the next wave of human flourishing.

Conrad Kiechel, Publisher