The Joy of Capitalism

MARKETS DON'T JUST MAKE US RICHER; THEY MAKE US HAPPIER.

- JOHAN NORBERG

PRESUME THE ECONOMIC case for free markets is true: that capitalism makes us freer and richer, creates better jobs and greater opportunities, and helps us solve environmental problems. Does it make us happier too?

The American conservative Patrick Deneen believes liberal capitalism makes us “increasingly separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves, replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.” Under the exhaustive headline “Neoliberalism—the ideology at the root of all our problems,” the British leftist George Monbiot claims that these problems include (but are by no means limited to) “epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia.”

Freedom “doesn’t make us free, it makes us lonely,” adds Christian conservative Joel Halldorf. “Increasing mental illness, isolation and populism are signs that liberalism cannot sustain itself.” The leftist economist Noreena Hertz argues that “neoliberalism has made us see ourselves as competitors not collaborators, consumers not citizens, hoarders not sharers, takers not givers, hustlers not helpers.”

Such sweeping statements are only very rarely followed by attempts to document any causal link or even a correlation. Surprisingly often, a quick misreading of classical liberals is supposed to be enough to prove the connection between liberalism and greed and loneliness, as if the resistance to forced relationships was based on a resistance to relationships themselves.