Ken Langone’s new book I Love Capitalism! An American Story might just as well be titled The Kids Are Not All Right. For years, publishers courted the founder of Home Depot to pen a memoir, but it was only after the 2016 presidential election that he finally accepted the invitation. The reason? “When I saw the massive number of young people gravitating toward Bernie Sanders,” the 82-year-old billionaire told an interviewer in May, “it scared the hell out of me.”
A self-proclaimed cheerleader for capitalism, Langone has every right to be worried. A spring 2016 poll from Harvard University’s Institute of Politics finds that only 19 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 identified themselves as capitalists, and 51 percent of those surveyed said they did not support capitalism. Similarly, a YouGov poll commissioned late last fall finds that, by 44 percent to 42 percent, more US millennials would rather live in a socialist country than a capitalist one, an ideological defeat for free marketeers that grows more ominous when the 7 percent who prefer communism are included.
Like Langone, I’m surprised by these findings. Unlike Langone, it’s because I wouldn’t have imagined capitalism to be nearly so popular among millennials.
As a demographic group, millennials fill the unruly club car that follows right behind my cohort, Generation X. Once the object of sustained curiosity but now something of a forgotten class, Gen Xers came of age in the 1990s, when the fall of Communism, the dot-com explosion, and galloping economic growth saw entrepreneurs, CEOs, and wizards of high finance become popular icons of American exceptionalism. With the tinsel shimmer of Hollywood celebrities and the aura of C-suite sages, this elite class of business professionals passed from relative anonymity to a steady rotation on cable television, in Executive Branch offices, and on tony panels at Aspen. These high-profile figures were tribunes of an unapologetic capitalism, hale and hopeful, without either the misgivings or the suspicions of extreme success.
Economic arrangements will always be disputable, so capitalism was not without controversy even in this most remarkable decade. Still, with the evolution of capital markets, the efficiency gains brought about by information technology, and a boom in global trade, many of the most intense arguments about the economy revolved around how little the government could do in light of a golden goose that seemed so procreant with its eggs. Even the occasional reminders that capitalism retained the capacity for calamity—the Asian Financial Crisis, runaway inflation in Russia, the collapse of hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management—were swiftly dismissed as a necessary scolding of the invisible hand or evidence of creative destruction. Indeed, when US Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, and US Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers famously appeared on a 1999 cover of Time Magazine above the headline “The Committee to Save the World,” I suspect that many Gen Xers had the same thought I did: Really, the world needs saving?
Loosely defined as a cohort born sometime between the early 1980s and the late ’90s, millennials are a group whose historical consciousness was inaugurated by the horrors of 9/11 and the abrupt conclusion of so many comforting fictions that buoyed the irrational exuberance of the previous decade. Among these fantasies was the notion that American capitalism had effectively solved the problem of dissatisfied customers. Such a determination was less a direct response to the rock-bottom unemployment of the late 1990s or even five years of robust GDP growth north of 4 percent, and instead a general sense that capitalism was healthy, working well, and admirably fair to all parties. Certainly, most people arrived at such conclusions without recourse to much in the way of hard logic or rigorous analysis. Rather—like Langone’s declaration at the opening of his book, “Capitalism works. Let me say it again: It works!”—they were expressions of lived experience and a very personal faith.
Millennials have a limited faith in capitalism, and almost none at all in the financial sector. The same 2016 Harvard poll finds that only 11 percent of this particular group trusted Wall Street to do the right thing “most of the time,” a number that shrinks to 2 percent when “all of the time” is surveyed. Such results are hardly surprising if you consider the fact that the defining economic event for Americans 18–29 (the age range of those polled) is the 2007–10 financial crisis. If years of stagnant wages and sluggish growth, to say nothing of the economic effects of two ongoing wars, did little to create an economic environment where one felt particularly hopeful before the crisis, the “once-in-a-century credit tsunami,” as Alan Greenspan famously dubbed it, seemed to guarantee a generation of skeptics.
Having taught business ethics for more than a dozen years, I have seen the change in my own students. I began with classes filled with fellow Gen Xers and am now surrounded by millennials. A decade ago, memories of the dot-com implosion in addition to the spectacular case studies in corporate malfeasance of Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco tempered the fullest sense of capitalist triumphalism. However, for the most part, my rosters swelled with young professionals ebullient about the system they were preparing to lead. Today, few of my MBAs are explicitly anticapitalist—though, this year, I did have my first unapologetic socialist—but increasingly I find support for the system among my students to be lackluster and provisional. “Yeah, I guess capitalism is the best,” these students glumly convey in class discussion. “But there are a lot of problems with the system, and I really wish we could do better.”