Opinion
Capitalism as Our Greatest Hope
— July 16, 2013

By Jonathan Haidt
What I'm hoping is that we as Americans, and people in other countries, too, can think more clearly about capitalism as the engine of growth that lifts people out of poverty.
By Jonathan Haidt
But in the long run capitalism is triumphing all around the world. That's a very good thing, because countries that turned away from it mired their people in poverty, and were prone to war and exploitation and cruelty. So in the long run I'm hopeful that the Third World is developing. As people get richer, they then get rights. They then get more accountability from their government.
I think that ultimately, if we're going to reach our potential, if we're going to live in decent civilized societies that don't go to war, it's going to be because we have crossed the demographic transition and the political transition, where the whole world has effective political institutions, the whole world has democratic capitalism, and not crony capitalism. This is a problem in each nation. I hope that each nation can get it right. Nations that do it well will rise and become the leading nations of this century. Nations that do it wrong, like Russia, will stay mired in corruption and inefficiency.
Read full article as published in The Huffington Post
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Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership.