The future of capitalism will not look like its past
Last December, the Pew Research Center released a poll in which it attempted to gauge American perceptions of capitalism and socialism. Here’s what it found, broken down by age group:
The generational differences reflected in those numbers are stark. Americans aged 18-29 are deeply ambivalent about capitalism, while a slight plurality is supportive of socialism. Their grandparents, on the other hand, offer a mirror-image reversal, reporting an overwhelmingly negative view of socialism and a generally positive attitude toward capitalism.
There are many ways to interpret numbers like that, the most obvious being the Churchillian observation that people tend to grow more conservative as they get older. There’s no doubt some truth to that, in part because as people get older, they acquire more wealth and want to protect it. Like older Russians who mourned the collapse of the Soviet Union, older Americans also become emotionally invested in the system in which they’ve lived all their lives.
However, I suspect there’s also something deeper at work in those poll numbers, something that reflects the different historical experience of the age groups in question. And that difference will influence public policy debates in this country in profound ways over the next three decades.
Today, younger Americans have no cultural memory of the Cold War, an era in which American capitalism was in existential conflict with Soviet communism and its softer, more rational cousin, socialism. Unlike older Americans, they were not raised in a world that divided itself along that particular fault line. Framed in a more conservative way, younger Americans have little direct, first-hand experience with socialism. They are, you might say, naive about its drawbacks.
The dividing line between those worlds would of course be 1989, when the Berlin Wall collapsed. Today, Americans who are 40 or younger have lived all of their adult lives in a world in which communism was no longer a grave threat to capitalism. And that’s important, because the basic insight of capitalism — competition is good because it drives people and organizations to do better — applies to political ideologies just as well as it applies to football teams or individuals.
In this case, as long as communism existed as a realistic alternative, capitalism and its defenders had to mute its harsher aspects to make it more appealing. They had to “deliver the goods” of a broad middle class, with a division of the economic pie that would be judged by both insiders and outsiders as fair and just. Otherwise, they would be handing ammunition to their ideological enemies, who depicted capitalism as a brutish, winner-take-all system.
But after 1989, with its competitor vanquished, capitalism in effect began to exert its monopoly power. It became rougher, less paternal and more aggressive. If income for the already wealthy soared while the pay of working class Americans stagnated or even declined, well, too bad. It was justified as Darwinian justice, a form of justice much different from the concept of economic justice that had been in effect prior to 1989.
Today, when younger Americans think of capitalism, this is the system that comes to mind. Their parents and grandparents experienced it as a system that produces great prosperity; in their own lives, they have seen capitalism produce something much less appealing. The fact that the collapse of 2008 was driven largely by Wall Street excess, and that most of those who engaged in that excess have escaped serious consequence, only compounds the image problem.
I’m not trying to argue that we’re now entering some kind of post-capitalist era, because whatever its disadvantages, capitalism still beats every other system known to man. But it will have to be a form of capitalism that fits the needs of its time, and it will be molded by generations that have different expectations and understandings. Capitalism is not a static concept; it must live by its own rules, which means that it will adapt or it will fall.
– Jay Bookman
Tell us what you think about the site
Customer Care »
Vacation stops, manage subscriptions and more
AJC Services
Sections
Other Editions
Visitor Agreement | Privacy Statement
© 2013 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
527 comments Add your comment
godless heathen - Support Small Business Saturday
November 20th, 2012
8:37 am
Is this lazy younger generation the same one dieing in the Bush wars?
Newsflash, Skippy. Bush is not President any more.
stands for decibels
November 20th, 2012
8:39 am
Nick W @ 8.33, that’s bleedin’ obvious to me, but perhaps not to others, and I appreciate you taking the trouble to explain it. Thanks.
Georgia on my mind...
November 20th, 2012
8:40 am
Just say NO to Nathan Deal if he decides to run for reelection.
real john
November 20th, 2012
8:42 am
Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.
–Winston Churchill
Yet, this is what the liberal fools in this country are trying to lead us too…
Welcome to the Occupation
November 20th, 2012
8:43 am
Nick W, real good points.
Btw on this: “This is the blowback societies get when portions of it untether certain words from their original meaning”
I would not say that it is so much that these meanings ever had an “original meaning” that was stable (there’s always been lots of flux over terms like socialism and communism, for ex.) as that these are floating signifiers that are always up for grabs. And that’s a large part of what ideological struggle is about. One of the core objectives of the movement conservative and right wing projects over the last 3 decades or so has been to utterly trash and demonize the term “liberal”. but more importantly, to collapse it with the “left” generally i.e. communism, to the point that the untrained mind is frightened into thinking that anything that’s “liberal” is already proto-communist. And it’s been remarkable successful – at least up to now it has.
Welcome to the Occupation
November 20th, 2012
8:45 am
real john: “Yet, this is what the liberal fools in this country are trying to lead us too…”
A quick post-ie before heading to first period class?
josef
November 20th, 2012
8:46 am
MR MIKE
Glad you liked the Clemenceau quotes. As the old folks would say, he was a mess! Another of my favorites of his was:
“America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
–Georges Clemenceau
As for him and the military historian’s take, I’m sure you’re familiar with his role in the Dreyfus Affair. Zola gets a lot of, justly due, credit there, but in my opinion, it was Clemenceau who was the true hero of that effort to clear the name of an innocent man even if it meant taking on the most powerful institutions in the republic.
Lord Help Us
November 20th, 2012
8:47 am
Always a hoot to hear the older generation that created a $16 trillion dollar debt disparaging the ‘younger generation…
Hopefully, they will do a better job of electing leaders than we did…
St Simons
November 20th, 2012
8:47 am
where’s teh bottom for the cons? well, we may be getting close,
after hearing about the state funded agenda 21 summit,
honey-boo-boo is embarrassed to be from Georgia
real john
November 20th, 2012
8:47 am
Welcome to the Occupation;
Nope, just before work…something most of Obama’s supporters wouldn’t know anything about.
I happened to be quoting one of the greatest leaders in history.
St Simons
November 20th, 2012
8:49 am
damn that Luckovich is funny and dead on accurate.
that’s the best week of cartoons ever i believe
stands for decibels
November 20th, 2012
8:57 am
Drown-Grover-in-a-bathtub SHEETZ.
Ben Shockley
November 20th, 2012
8:58 am
“There are many ways to interpret numbers like that, the most obvious being the Churchillian observation that people tend to grow more conservative as they get older. There’s no doubt some truth to that, in part because as people get older, they acquire more wealth and want to protect it.”
Ummmm….Jay…there’s a possibility you’ve overlooked. The most likely possibility, in fact.
People learn and become smarter as they get older. Well, except for liberals, anyway.
Mary Elizabeth
November 20th, 2012
9:01 am
One can surmise all kinds of reasons that the under 30 crowd voted for Barack Obama in large numbers. The fact is that they did, as did the majority of Americans. Moreover, the world continues to move “forward” – not backwards – as Obama has observed and has reaffirmed as his vision. In my assessment, and in the assessment of others, moving “forward” translates to a more humane form of capitalism than has been present in our nation for the last few decades.
Welcome to the Occupation
November 20th, 2012
9:06 am
real john: “I happened to be quoting one of the greatest leaders in history.”
Yeah actually as he was quoting that he was busy getting his ass handed to him by his Labour opponents, you know, the party that gave Britain the NHS, the single-payer universal SOCIALIST health care system that has proven one of the must successful, and astonishingly popular ,programs in any country anywhere?
Btw, you say Obama supporters know nothing of work, that’s 6th grade level political arguing. For starters, Obama received votes from large numbers of Hispanic voters, and if you’ve ever observed anything about that particular group of society you’ll know that they quite possibly work rings around much of the rest of the non-immigrant population. So your claim kinda doesn’t make any sense now does it?
willydoit?
November 20th, 2012
9:07 am
My 20 year old nephew sums it up for me as to the differences in the generations.
He gets his $200 EBT card every month, trades it for beer from his uncle. Then he asks his 77 year old grandmother for money to buy cigarettes…she tells him “NO”. He gets mad and replies….
“Its not fair that you have 20 something acres, 4 or 5 rental houses, 2 cars and money in the bank and I have NOTHING”
He truly doesn’t understand it took her 50 years to aquire all she has.
He is registered and wanted to go vote for Obama….but his “greedy nanny” wouldn’t give him a ride to the polls!
Mary Elizabeth
November 20th, 2012
9:13 am
Lord Help Us, 8:47 am
10 trillion of the 16 trillion debt was driven up precisely by the Republican Bush administration for the deliberate intent, according to Paul Krugman, to force the American hand of cutting severely the (”humane”) entitlements of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. (The remaining debt under Obama was in large part accrued to offset the Great Recession, which had begun under Bush II’s watch.)
And, we see that devious Republican intent being callously played out, presently, in Congress, and in those Red states, such as in Georgia, which are now refusing to offer their own insurance exchanges to accommodate Obamacare, even though millions of their citizens will not be able to have health insurance in their states (until the federal government intervenes) because of their callous political game of one upmanship. It is no surprise to me that the young voted for a more positive, more humane capitalism of the future.
omie
November 20th, 2012
4:57 pm
willydoit-
Your 20 year old nephew sounds like a turd. Are you really trying to say that this is the first generation to produce turds? Hardly. The difference between you and your nephews generations is that your generation raised his generation. So, its your fault. Boom.
dbm
November 20th, 2012
5:05 pm
Kamchak ~ Thug from the Steppes
November 19th, 2012
11:04 pm
Are you saying having a prescription for amphetamines back in the day is equivalent to being a METHamphetamine addict now? How carefully have you checked this?
I’m not sure which is worse, the boring conservative complaints about Miss Rand’s atheism and the sex in her novels, or the imaginative liberal smears.
dbm
November 20th, 2012
5:09 pm
Kamchak ~ Thug from the Steppes
November 19th, 2012
11:19 pm
There is a mature way to appreciate Ayn Rand. Too bad some people never progress past the childish stage.
Please stay off Wingfield's blog .......Dems
November 20th, 2012
6:05 pm
As a capitalist and a Nurse, I have 4 separate companies that will make me close to almost 1 million. America is so great that I still pay taxes as if I was 30,000 a year wage earner. I love capitalism!!!!! It is the only way to get ahead without working for corporate America.
Doug504
November 20th, 2012
11:52 pm
There has been a huge change between how companies treated workers in my parents generation, my generation, and my kids generation.
My father worked for a company that cared about each employee, They paid well, provided good benefits, and paid attention to each employee. When my Dad got terminally ill, the head of the company stepped in to see what we needed. An exceptional company.
I have worked for several Fortune 500 companies. They spent money for good benefits. But they didn’t care about individual employees and they didn’t provide personal attention. Still pretty good companies.
One of my kids works for a company that underpays its workers, has rapid turnover, and provides minimal benefits.
Walmart limits employee hours to avoid paying benefits. Suggests employees apply for Medicaid and Food Stamps. Objects to increases in the minimum wage.
So why are young people less satisfied with capitalism? Maybe because they are underpaid, overworked, and have few benefits. Or to put it another way – their parents were paid more, worked less, and had better benefits.
GET A JOB. QUIT BEING A TAKER scream some people. The cashier at a retail store, the maid at a hotel, the garbage man on your block, the janitor at your office, etc. All these people have jobs – and all would like to be paid enough so that they had to pay taxes.
Hostess declared bankruptcy. Supposedly the workers were the cause – because they made $10 an hour ($21,000). The CEO is making $575 an hour ($1.2 million) but that isn’t a problem.
Capitalism at its best elevates workers, owners, and society as a whole
Capitalism at its worst is degrading, dehumanizing, and selfish. Slavery was capitalism and it was (ironically) a free market. It made profits but it also hurt people and was morally wrong.
Young people have a poor view of capitalism because for the last 20 to 30 years capitalism has moved toward the worst it can be.
dbm
November 21st, 2012
6:31 am
Doug504
November 20th, 2012
11:52 pm
Slavery is very anti-capitalistic.
dbm
November 21st, 2012
6:33 am
Kamchak ~ Thug from the Steppes
November 19th, 2012
11:19 pm
I notice you didn’t mention any of Ayn Rand’s nonfiction.
willydoit?
November 21st, 2012
9:05 am
omie
Glad you feel that way. You can continue, along with me, to pay for these “turds” to leach off the rest of us.
And I agree with you, our generation raised this generation…We should be ashamed of ourselves.
appleseed
November 22nd, 2012
12:24 am
We compete world wide now.Big difference 20/30 yrs. ago.Automation helped us compete against low wages.Now we have nothing to compete with.The companies are where the low wages are,and the monies stashed in these countries with lower tax rates.Need bring the money back.
lexi
November 22nd, 2012
3:57 am
The suggestion that FDR “saved capitalism” is fable larger and farther from true than the tale of Paul Bunyon and Babe carving the Grand Canyon. That it survives among self-described “highly educated” (read: highly schooled) people and “educators” is a tribute to the power of a swooning, leftist press and academia, coupled with general ignorance about basic economics.
Rather, FDR turned a serious recession, caused by a shrinkage of the money supply, into a decade long harrowing depression by interfering with the natural rebounding of the economy. Before he intervened unemployment never hit double digits. After, nearly 25%. Now that’s progress to liberals.
How did he nearly destroy capitalism? By labor legislation (Wagner and Davis-Bacon Acts) which made labor more pricey and less competitive (and designed in large part to exclude negroes from the workplace), anti-trade measures (Smoot Hawley Tariff Act) which triggered a contractionary and destructive international trade war, regressive taxes imposed on a variety of consumer goods, including liquor and tobacco, institutional price fixing through industry councils, and internicine misallocations of productive resources which were redirected to inefficient uses and industries, usually to buy votes.
The vast majority of unaligned economists recognize the grievous harm those measures caused. And, the social security scheme he thrust upon the nation is a Ponzi scheme which itself is ruinously unfunded and impossible (it seems) to fix without committing political suicide.
Thanks for nothing, FDR.