On a Saturday in April of 2001, seven professionals and businesspeople in their 20s and 30s got together for 8 hours in a Los Angeles living room with an electronic white board and lots of snack foods to discuss the direction that public policy in the United States had taken and what we could do to change its course for the better. Some in the group had been friends for years; others were meeting each other for the first time. What brought us together was a shared belief that principled pro-market policies were being discarded by the leadership of both national parties, in favor of parochialism, statism, and short-term politics. Our rallying cry crystallized on that first day, and has remained consistent ever since: "Expanding opportunity in the context of robust economic growth."

Expanding opportunity is important for two reasons, we concluded. First, it is important to robust economic growth because it allows all of our precious human resources to be tapped to the fullest. The 1944 GI Bill, which bestowed tremendous economic benefits to our nation by allowing many members of a whole generation to attend college for the first time, provides an example of this impact. Another example is the 1862 Homestead Act, which allocated 270 million acres of public land to allow private citizens to become land owners.

Second, expanding opportunity is central to who we Americans are as a people. Our Declaration of Independence declares us to be equally endowed with the "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." If we ever permanently lost sight of that goal, our country would gradually lose the dynamism and can-do spirit that creates new millionaires from scratch in every generation and that sustains our faith that our hard work will create a better life for ourselves and for our children.

Despite the fact that few Americans - and fewer politicians - would say that they don't believe in the goal of equality of opportunity, we believed (and still believe) that our political system is not producing much progress on this goal today. We saw conservative, liberal, and ad-hoc split-the-difference approaches to policy dominating the political landscape.

Both liberalism and conservatism draw upon powerful and legitimate animating ideas: liberalism in that government policies should aim to improve people's material conditions and life chances; and conservatism in that an individual's efforts and choices should be the main determinant of success or failure. The core insights of each ideology, however, have been eviscerated by interest group politics. For example, many conservatives support handouts to corporations on a gargantuan scale, while many liberals support trade and tort laws that increase costs for average Americans.

Instead of focusing on policies to create true opportunity, our politics is dominated by "split-the-difference" debates (e.g., exactly how many tens of billions of our hard-earned tax dollars should be given away to huge agro-businesses?). At the same time, issues vital to building an Opportunity Economy (e.g., early childhood education) are marginalized because they lack a politically aggressive constituency.

Having decided upon our political focus, the group's next task was to compile a list of things that matter most in achieving Opportunity Economics. We assembled a list of relatively familiar ideas: low and stable long-term interest rates; effective investments in education from pre-school onward; expanding home ownership; tax and regulatory policies that reduce the burden on the working poor; the elimination of inefficient corporate subsidies and trade barriers; affordable health care coverage; and portable pension benefits. After assembling this list, what astonished us was how very little attention was actually focused on these issues in the course of our current political debate. We made a commitment, as a group, to do our best to change this state of affairs.

That commitment resulted in numerous meetings and calls over the next 12 months, many of which took place in an office building on Hope Street in Los Angeles, California. In our first two years in existence, our relatively small team of busy professionals donated hundreds of thousands of dollars of in-kind services to the group's efforts. Others joined our efforts along the way, from a variety of industries - health care, entertainment, high tech, private equity - and from all over the country - California, Texas, Virginia, New York. We became known as the Hope Street Group, and together generated a white paper to flesh out our ideas as to what matters most towards achieving equality of opportunity in a high growth economy. In the summer and fall of 2002, HSG members interviewed policy makers, think tankers, and political operatives - Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike - and solicited their ideas about how a new generation of business executives and professionals could shift the focus of the debate towards the principle we had articulated. We soon became convinced that a network of young business executives and professionals committed to this principle could make an enormous difference in a political arena that was hungry for new ideas and fresh energy.

In the spring of 2003, the Hope Street Group incorporated officially as a non-profit, non-partisan organization devoted to bringing the talents, energy and networks of a new generation of business executives and professionals into service towards achieving the goal of equality of opportunity in a high growth US economy. The Hope Street Group's first formal contribution to the public debate was our policy platform, "Building the Opportunity Economy," released in June 2003.