Markets are systems for coordinating people, and I judge them that way. They reward innovation and pass information through price signals. They often allocate resources faster than economic planning. They coordinate millions without anyone holding all the information.
They also fail in known ways. Prices ignore externalities such as pollution. Outcomes concentrate wealth and bargaining power as output rises. Short-term incentives crowd out resilience and upkeep. And some goods distort when treated as products: attention, care, education, and political influence.
The question I find useful is never “markets or no markets”. It is under what rules, incentives, and institutions markets produce outcomes worth wanting. Abstract models are incomplete. Real outcomes depend on human nature, institutional limits, cultural norms, and strategic behavior. That is why game theory is part of the engine rather than a footnote.
So do not ask whether capitalism is good or bad. Ask this. What incentives are being created? Who captures the upside? Who absorbs the downside? What rules would align private gain with public benefit?
Nor are markets the only engine of progress. Charles Kenny found that a country with no income growth for a century would still have seen infant mortality fall by nearly two-thirds. Health, schooling, and rights spread through cheap technologies and ideas, even where incomes stalled. Growth is not all of progress.
Markets are tools, not moral oracles. They drive progress only under conditions. With weak rules and institutions they amplify extraction, inequality, and short-term thinking as easily.