Jay L. Zagorsky, Boston University and H. Sami Karaca, Boston University

Capitalism, communism and socialism are the world’s three major economic systems. While the phrase “economic system” may seem like a yawn, countless people have fought and died in major wars over which one should dominate.

Shifts from one system to another, like the 1989 fall of communism in much of Eastern Europe, changed the lives of millions. And while researchers know that a country’s economic system dramatically impacts people’s living standards, less is known about how attitudes toward these systems have changed over time.

We are professors working at Boston University’s new Ravi K. Mehrotra Institute, which is trying to understand how business, markets and society interact. Given many recent criticisms of capitalism, we were surprised to find positive sentiment toward capitalism is slowly rising over time.

The main economic systems explained

Capitalism, communism and socialism are economic and political systems that differ in their principles and organization. Capitalism emphasizes the private ownership of resources and the means of production, driven by profit and market competition, with minimal government intervention.

Communism, on the other hand, advocates for a classless society where all property is communally owned. In communism, wealth is distributed according to need and there is no private ownership, which aims to eliminate inequality and oppression.

Socialism falls between these extremes. It focuses on the collective or state ownership of key industries and resources. This allows for some private enterprise, with the aim of reducing inequality through social welfare programs and obtaining a more equitable distribution of wealth.

Modern economies blend capitalism with socialism to address challenges like inequality, market failures and negative externalities, like when a business harms the environment. Governments intervene through regulations, welfare programs and public services to tackle issues like pollution and income inequality. This creates what economists call a “mixed economy.”

The amount of state involvement varies from country to country. At one end is market capitalism, where markets dominate with a limited government role. The U.S. is one such example.

At the other end is state capitalism, like in China, where the government directs economic activity while incorporating market elements. The goal is to combine market efficiency and innovation with measures to contain capitalism’s social and economic costs.

How to measure people’s attitudes toward economic systems

Some surveys have asked people directly how they feel about these systems.

For example, the Pew Research organization’s most recent survey on the issue found the proportion of Americans with positive views of either capitalism or socialism has declined slightly since 2019, with capitalism remaining more popular overall. Nevertheless, Americans are split sharply along partisan lines. About three-quarters of Republican voters have positive views of capitalism, compared with less than half of Democratic voters.

Unfortunately, there are no long-running surveys tracking people’s feelings toward the three systems. Because of this shortcoming, we used artificial intelligence to analyze references to the three systems in more than 400,000 newspaper articles published over a span of decades.

We identified every news story that discussed capitalism, communism or socialism using ProQuest’s TDM Studio. ProQuest has digitized almost all the articles in major English-language newspapers – including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times – starting in the mid-1970s, with partial archives from earlier years.

The AI model was designed to assess the tone of each article across several dimensions, including anger, surprise and happiness. After the model scored each article on those qualities, we combined the emotions into three categories: positive, negative, and neutral or unknown. For example, an article discussing capitalism might be rated as 60% positive, 20% negative and 20% neutral.

Using an AI large language model allowed us to track shifts in press attitudes over time – which, to be fair, might not match popular opinion.

How views have changed since the 1940s

When we looked at newspaper articles from the end of World War II to the present, we found something unexpected. In the 1940s, capitalism was not well regarded. The average article containing “capitalism” or “capitalist” got a 43% negative and 25% positive sentiment score. This is surprising, since we looked at newspapers published primarily in countries with capitalist systems.

However, just because capitalism didn’t get a high positive score doesn’t mean that newspaper writers loved communism or socialism. In the 1940s, articles with those words also got relatively high negative scores: 47% on average for articles containing “communism” or “communist,” and a 46% negative rating for “socialism” and “socialist.”

Since that time, however, positive sentiment toward capitalism has improved. In the 2020s, the average article with capitalism got a more balanced 37% negative and 34% positive sentiment score. While capitalism clearly isn’t loved in the press, it’s also not disparaged as much as it was just after World War II.

The news media’s attitudes toward capitalism improved more than attitudes toward socialism or communism over time. In the 1960s, positive attitudes toward all three were roughly the same. Today, however, positive sentiment toward capitalism is 4 or 5 percentage points higher than the other two. The climb wasn’t steady, since the number of favorable articles about capitalism fell during recession years.

Still, some contemporary commentators fret that capitalism is in crisis.

Not long ago, The New York Times – a newspaper located in the world’s financial center – ran an op-ed headlined “How Capitalism Went Off the Rails.” A recent book review in The Wall Street Journal, a newspaper that is a bastion of capitalism, starts, “Our universities teach that we are living the End of Times of ‘late capitalism.’”

But while capitalism clearly isn’t beloved by all, we didn’t find evidence that it’s being overtaken by socialism or communism. Instead, using AI to process the attitudes reflected in thousands of newspaper articles, we found that people – or at least the press – are slowly warming to it.

Jay L. Zagorsky, Associate Professor of Markets, Public Policy and Law, Boston University and H. Sami Karaca, Professor of Business Analytics, Boston University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Tim O’Brien, Harvard Kennedy School and Tim Freeman, Harvard Kennedy School

Picture yourself living the American Dream. You likely have more opportunity than your parents did. Through hard work, smart choices and perhaps some good luck along the way, you have financial stability and a great deal of freedom to choose your next steps in life.

Chances are also good that you live in or near a vibrant community with a robust local economy.

We tend to focus on the individual aspects of the American Dream, but we also value our communities – our downtowns, little leagues, good schools, safe public spaces and local traditions. Individuals and families tend to seek out the places that provide these things along with nearby jobs. And when communities begin to lose these quality-of-life assets, residents notice. Younger people tend to migrate away.

But why do places that were once vibrant sometimes lose this quality?

This is a question that we have reckoned with as economists who study constraints to better economic growth, most recently with the state of Wyoming. We’ve found that there is an often overlooked factor shared across many different places, and understanding it is critical to helping such communities recover.

Why communities enter cycles of decline

Whether a community thrives or falls into an economic tailspin depends greatly on its ability to generate “tradable income.”

Tradable income is jargon for money generated from stuff that a local economy sells beyond its borders. This could be the crops people grow, the products that factories manufacture, the services that businesses sell, or the minerals that are pulled from the ground. This income is then circulated within the local economy in the form of demand for other jobs, such as cashiers, barbers and handymen. Tradable income is essential to import all the goods and services that are not produced locally.

Without tradable income, the rest of the local economy will struggle to survive. You can think of tradable income like the oxygen that circulates through the body of the local economy.

Rural economies nearly uniformly have fewer and less diversified sources of tradable income than urban economies. They may rely on the same main source of tradable income that was the reason the community was settled in the first place.

These economies are much more vulnerable to existential economic and environmental shocks and downward spirals of community decay than urban economies, which have built up more diversified tradable income sources over time.

Regional economies that were built on extracting and selling a natural resource, for example, can face booms and busts based on resource prices or government policies. The sudden closure of a mine can, within years, begin to wipe a community off the map. This is even though most jobs in the community were not directly supplied by the mine. The deeper and often overlooked problem is that the tradable income was tied to the mine.

This process is nothing new. It is the reason why the West has many ghost towns, and why many once-strong manufacturing towns transformed into the Rust Belt. In small communities, a regional school or even a Walmart can have the same effect if it closes, since these can be the sole sources of outside money.

The loss of any critical source of tradable income, if not replaced, deprives the local economy of the oxygen that it needs to survive. Without new sources of tradable income, downtown stores close because businesses lack demand, joblessness rises, local tax revenue collapses and people leave.

Federal funding has a design flaw

State and federal policy has never been particularly effective at enabling local economic transitions from old sources of tradable income to new ones, or even softening the blow.

Today, it is not hard to see how climate change – as well as efforts to fight it by shutting down fossil fuel extraction and power plants – can bring new and painful shocks to local economies, just as automation and globalization have done.

The Biden administration’s recent push to build infrastructure and jump-start strategic industries – including through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act – was partly driven by a desire to provide economic opportunity to parts of America that have increasingly been left behind.

Recognizing that different places have different needs, these federal efforts tended to channel resources to communities through discretionary grants rather than formula funding. In other words, the system put the responsibility on community leaders to identify funding opportunities and compete for that funding through proposed projects meeting predefined criteria, rather than have resources divided according to population or some other formula.

A key problem, however, is that most rural places do not have the local government bandwidth and staffing to navigate this system.

Town clerks and part-time local officials are often responsible for many public jobs and do not have the time or resources to navigate what can be byzantine federal funding systems. They do not have the time to absorb the flood of webinars, newsletters and online tools that federal agencies have created to circulate opportunities, let alone to mobilize successful grant applications for complicated programs with short application windows.

Not surprisingly, federal funds have tended to flow to larger municipalities with greater resources to begin with.

Wyoming, a largely rural state, is an example. The state is receiving less per capita in federal discretionary grants than most other states, and those grants are reaching relatively few communities. Our team at the Growth Lab at Harvard Kennedy School has been working with officials and residents there to find solutions.

Many folks in Wyoming believe that qualifying criteria for grants have purposefully disadvantaged the very conservative state. There are some criteria for qualifying for programs that fuel this narrative, such as grants targeted to coal communities that match the demographics and income levels of Appalachia more than Wyoming. Similarly, the lack of Medicaid expansion in the state lessens federal funding flows.

However, the main reason is much simpler and more mundane. Small and stressed communities from Wyoming to Vermont, across the political spectrum, face the same systemic obstacles in navigating the system.

Government can do better – here’s where to start

Statewide efforts have grown, including in Wyoming, to help local leaders identify and access federal grants, most importantly by building staffing and help centers that local leaders can draw upon to help navigate the federal system. But we believe a fundamentally better system is possible.

Rather than federal entities creating highly specific grant programs, inviting communities to apply and compete, and selecting winners centrally, they could flip the script when it comes to rural communities in regions that are facing shocks to tradable income.

Federal entities could instead work in concert with each other and with local leaders, starting with the place-specific needs of regional economies, and develop custom projects accordingly. Instead of shopping around centrally designed programs, federal agencies could do more to empower and support locally determined transformation efforts.

This was the spirit of the Recompete Pilot Program of the U.S. Economic Development Administration, which awarded six large grants last year among many, many locally driven proposals from economically distressed areas. A similar shift in approach was a key takeaway of the federal government’s Interagency Working Group on Coal and Power Plant Communities and Economic Revitalization, whose recent progress report looking back at three years of work emphasizes a greater need for working with, rather than imposing on, local leaders and coalitions.

Developing new pathways for tradable income will rarely be easy or fast, but this is one better place to start.

Tim O’Brien, Senior Manager of Applied Research, Growth Lab, Harvard Kennedy School and Tim Freeman, Research Fellow, Growth Lab, Harvard Kennedy School

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Jue Liang, Case Western Reserve University

Uncommon Courses is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching.

Title of the course

Ghosts, Zombies and Monsters: What We Fear and Loathe in Religions

What prompted the idea for the course?

I am an expert in Tibetan Buddhism, women and gender, but not in ghosts, zombies and monsters. However, my experience teaching introductory courses on Asian religions and religious studies prompted me to grapple with the challenge of teaching students the importance of understanding the people whom we feel are “other” and come to terms with things that do not make sense.

These fearsome, “other-than-human” beings live on the boundaries of our moral, social and emotional imagination, and they often embody the issues, concerns, hopes and fears that have shaped our lives. Therefore, they are the ideal pedagogical candidates to challenge one’s preconceived notions of death, self and the other.

What does the course explore?

The course is divided into three thematic sections. First, we reflect on ghosts, examining how different cultures provide specific definitions of death and imaginations of an afterlife. We read about Buddhist hungry ghosts, or “pretas,” and Chinese ghost stories. We also explore discussions of hauntings in a Thailand airport as well as the experience of ghost hunters in North America. Ghosts are often believed to be beings who failed to transition to an ideal afterlife and linger in a liminal state, interacting with and haunting the living.

Second, we examine zombies. These are considered another type of liminal beings who are regarded to be alive but have lost the distinct stories that make each of them a unique individual, according to scholar of monster theory Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. We explore the Haitian origin of zombies and the phenomenon of the “uncanny valley,” the eerie feeling we may experience when encountering something that appears almost human but not quite.

Last, we look at monsters. Monster theories and the study of monstrous beings as a cultural category have grown into a flourishing field of inquiry in recent decades. This has opened many avenues for exploring beings typically regarded as categorically different from humans.

The class explores monsters as disastrous animals, gendered beings, exiles from their religious communities and names evoked in news reports to describe individuals who have committed particularly disturbing crimes. We ask questions such as why some animals are more likely to be seen as frightening or malicious than others, and what is gained and lost by calling someone a “monster.”

Why is this course relevant now?

Ghosts, zombies and monsters are as ancient and as contemporary as the humans living with them. We will probably never stop fearing, being disgusted by or projecting some people among us as “monsters.” However, at a time when fear, disgust and labeling carry unusual weight in shaping relationships in our own community, I believe critically reflecting on how we engage with difference and otherness is an urgent call. Monstrous and demonic beings also ultimately occupy a place where boundaries are constantly pushed and redrawn. What was monstrous once might be no longer now, and vice versa.

What’s a critical lesson from the course?

This course brings to the fore what is commonly demonized, marginalized or unseen in religious traditions across the globe, and it asks what it is about ghosts, zombies and monsters that appalls and arrests us. One lesson students take away from the course is that our fears and horrors are always culturally and contextually specific. In other words, ghosts, zombies and monsters are also reflections of ourselves.

What materials does the course feature?

We watch three films, one for each section: Masaki Kobayashi’s “Kwaidan,” Jordan Peele’s “Get out” and Penny Lane’s “Hail Satan?”

Students also become familiar with a variety of narratives – both serious and humorous – about ghosts, zombies and monsters, ranging from “Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio,” a collection of supernatural stories, to Key & Peele sketches about Satan or the zombie apocalypse, and Haruki Murakami’s short story “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo.”

What will the course prepare students to do?

Good storytelling plays a crucial role, as it allows us to temporarily inhabit another, imagined world. Many of my students revealed their talent for storytelling during a class session where we went around the room sharing spooky tales. In the act of telling each other stories, we begin to understand and navigate our differences.

Students are not going to become professional demon tamers or ghost hunters after this class. Instead, I hope they leave with a newly found recognition, if not tenderness, toward creatures and things they originally were afraid of or felt repulsed by.

Jue Liang, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Case Western Reserve University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.