That said, the left is offering an aggressive critique of capitalism — one finding traction among Democrats (and some populists on the right) — that proponents of free enterprise should aggressively respond to, especially given the second economic collapse within a decade with slow growth in between. Many Americans have never known a sustained boom like the Long Boom from 1983 through 2007.

But it may not be enough to point out liberal democratic capitalism and creative destruction create a wealthier, healthier, and more interesting society. I mean, that should be enough. Maybe not, however. What about the “moral” case for capitalism and the economic growth it generates like no other system ever devised or imagined? Does capitalism make a better society in non-material aspects? Harvard University economist Benjamin Friedman made a powerful affirmative case that it did in his 2005 book, “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth.” As Friedman has written about his thesis:

The experience of many countries suggests that when a society experiences rising standards of living, broadly distributed across the population at large,  it is also likely to make progress along a variety of dimensions that are the very essence of what a free, open, democratic society is all about: openness of opportunity for economic and social advancement; tolerance toward recognizably distinct racial, or religious, or ethnic groups within the society, including new immigrants if the country regularly receives in-migration; a sense of fairness in the provision made for those in the society who, whether on account of limited opportunities, or lesser human endowments, or even just poor luck in the labor market, fall too far below the prevailing public standard of material well-being; genuinely contested elections that determine who controls the levers of political power; and democratic political rights and civil liberties more generally. Conversely, experience also suggests that when a society is stagnating economically—worse yet, if it is suffering a pervasive decline in living standards—it is not only likely to make little if any progress in these social, political, and (in the eighteenth-century sense) moral dimensions; all too often, it will undergo a period of rigidification and retrenchment, sometimes with catastrophic consequences.

It’s an appealing intuition that Friedman supports through a political and economic analysis of US and Western European history. For example: The Great Society was passed in the Go-Go 1960s, while the economic volatility of the 1970s was followed by a decline in public support for welfare programs and immigration. And it was the post-WWI economic collapse of Germany that led to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. The key mechanism here, according to Friedman, is a comparative one: the sense among people that they are living better than their neighbors as well as what they themselves were not so long ago. And there is some empirical support for Friedman’s conclusion. In a 2011 analysis, Lewis Davis and Matthew Knauss of Union College found growth helps but could be offset by rising inequality:

In The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Benjamin Friedman argues that growth reduces the strength of interpersonal income comparisons, and thereby tends to increase the desire for pro-social legislation, a position he supports by drawing on the historical records of the US and several Western European countries. We test this hypothesis using a variable from the World Values Survey that measures an individual’s taste for government responsibility, which we interpret as a measure of the demand for egalitarian social policy. Our results provide support for a modified version of Friedman’s hypothesis. In particular, we find that the taste for government responsibility is positively related to the recent change in the growth rate and negatively related to the change in income inequality.

To use more recent history, one might note how the 2016 election played out against the long but so-so US economic recovery from the Global Financial Crisis. A 2019 Reuters analysis found that real GDP growth in the 2600 counties won by Trump barely topped 1 percent vs. 1.8 percent in the counties carried by Hillary Clinton. Of course, maybe democratic socialists think they have discovered a way of outgrowing capitalism. But their record is not good.