In the summer of 1976, I was a student on an exchange program in the Soviet Union. Friends and professors warned me to expect cold shoulders and suspicious glances. Instead, I met students and workers who were desperate to learn more about the West and escape from a system that drained their ambition and creativity. “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work,” they told me, summing up a society where neither employer nor employee had a meaningful stake in the product of their work.
In the decades that followed, much of the world turned away from collective ownership toward private enterprise, and the results were extraordinary. China, through a pragmatic embrace of markets, lifted more than 800 million people out of poverty. India and Eastern Europe followed suit, unleashing pent-up energies and transforming stagnant economies into growth engines. Capitalism, once derided, now seemed to promise dignity and opportunity.
Yet history has a way of complicating triumphs. The market systems that produced abundance also produced inequality. In every nation that transitioned to a market economy, wealth clustered at the top. Those with political connections took control of state enterprises or exploited inefficiencies in new markets to amass wealth. Ordinary people were left behind.
While other nations were shifting from collective ownership to private enterprise, the United States doubled down on a more unregulated form of capitalism that lowered taxes on the wealthy and removed guardrails protecting the poor. Beginning in the 1980s, our political culture, on the left and right, has increasingly emphasized personal freedom over community responsibility, and efficiency over equity. As a result, the top 0.1% of U.S. households now hold about 22% of the nation’s wealth — nearly tripling their share since 1980. This isn’t the result of corruption or conspiracy. It’s the predictable outcome of investment incentives, tax structures and a cultural philosophy that elevates meritocracy (and privilege) over morality.
History teaches that capitalism’s concentrating tendencies rarely correct themselves. If unchecked by political, judicial or cultural forces, violent upheavals like the French and Russian revolutions may follow. There was a time, not so long ago, when American democracy could challenge unchecked power. We embraced community responsibility and rallied behind leaders who tamed our more selfish tendencies. At the dawn of the 20th century, Teddy Roosevelt took on the trusts. In the 1930s, FDR reined in the banking and securities industries and rewrote the social contract to protect the poor and the aging. In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson sought not just to manage inequality but to eliminate poverty altogether. In each case, a combination of popular democratic opposition, judicial action and regulatory reform tempered the power of concentrated wealth.
One would think that the extreme wealth of the 1% would lead to a backlash favoring taxation of wealth, protections for labor and enhancement of social services. Instead, the disillusioned victims of globalization find themselves allied with its billionaire beneficiaries behind the cult of a personality who promises dominance, prosperity, and security while sowing division and disparity.
A decent society must do more than grow; it must share. A moral economy fosters public goods that markets cannot provide: clean air, safe streets, public education, national defense and care for those who never had a fair start. In our age, prosperity is often mistaken for virtue. We praise grit but forget grace. We have re-imagined Christian morals in a manner that justifies cutting taxes on the wealthy while weakening protection for the vulnerable. Jesus called the poor “blessed.” Trump calls them “losers.”
In 1976, I saw what happens when collective ownership erodes human initiative. We risk the opposite mistake. By celebrating wealth and choice to the exclusion of responsibility and restraint, we undermine the moral foundations of our economy and our democracy. If our system is to endure, it must do more than reward ambition. It must also reaffirm a sense of justice and obligation — toward our neighbors, the vulnerable, and the generations to come.
Scott Brown is the former dean of the Tucker Foundation at Dartmouth College. He lives in Hanover.