Is Capitalism Still the Best Engine for Human Flourishing?

“Global extreme poverty fell from 90% in 1820 to under 10% today, driven overwhelmingly by market economies integrating into global trade. No other economic system produced anything like it — not central planning, not autarky, not command economies. The burden of proof is on capitalism's critics to name an alternative with a comparable track record.”

“Capitalism's famous failures — monopoly, externalities, boom-bust cycles — are arguments for specific interventions: antitrust, carbon pricing, financial regulation. They are not arguments against markets themselves. The alternative is not some perfectly designed alternative but something demonstrably worse, as the 20th century repeatedly demonstrated.”

“Capitalism has a structural incompatibility with the climate crisis. It externalizes costs onto the future and the poor, and no amount of green capitalism has produced the emissions reductions the physics requires. The market cannot price catastrophic risk it has no incentive to price; that is not a market failure to be corrected — it is a structural feature.”

“Democratic institutions designed to tame capitalism are being captured by it. Regulatory agencies are staffed by the industries they regulate; campaigns are funded by the interests they constrain; and billionaires own the media that sets the terms of debate. A system that systematically undermines its own constraints is not self-correcting — it is self-entrenching.”