Capitalism has lifted billions out of poverty, driven unprecedented innovation, and expanded human freedom on a scale no other economic system has matched. Yet the word itself is losing public support in the very country most associated with it. But understanding what Americans actually believe about economics and where those beliefs come from could lead to more productive conversations about capitalism and ultimately a more compelling and unifying case for it.
What Americans Actually Believe
Favorable views of capitalism in the United States have fallen from 61% in 2010 to 54% in 2025, according to Gallup. Yet in that same 2025 survey, 95% of Americans viewed small business positively, and 81% viewed free enterprise positively. Other surveys similarly show widespread positive attitudes toward entrepreneurship. This suggests that many Americans who have grown skeptical of capitalism still support core features of it.
Our team at the Archbridge Institute’s Human Flourishing Lab wanted to explore this further. If you describe the core mechanics of capitalism and socialism without using those labels, which system do Americans believe will advance human progress and flourishing?
To find out, we partnered with The Harris Poll on a Progress Pulse survey that presented 2,000 American adults with two economic viewpoints. One said that private companies and entrepreneurs competing freely in the marketplace are the best way to solve today’s big challenges and improve people’s lives. The other said that government agencies coordinating resources and setting priorities are the better path forward.
We found that Americans are much more likely to believe that a free market approach (68%) will best advance human progress and flourishing than government coordination (32%). This preference held across every demographic group we examined. Political differences emerged as expected, but clear majorities of Republicans (76%), Democrats (60%), and independents (68%) chose free markets, private companies, and entrepreneurship over government coordination and planning. Economic freedom won out even among young adults, who are often assumed to be socialism’s most receptive audience. Nearly six in ten adults under 25 chose free markets, private companies, and entrepreneurship.
These findings identify common ground to build on. But they also reveal challenges that need to be addressed in order to improve our economic discourse and rehabilitate capitalism’s reputation.
The Psychology of Economic Reasoning
The first challenge may be the most fundamental. Research on what scholars call “lay economic reasoning” suggests that non-experts tend to reason about markets very differently than economists, relying on intuitive, moralized, and zero-sum thinking. For example, they tend to view profit with suspicion and attribute economic problems like high prices to the motives of businesses (corporate greed) rather than to broader market dynamics like supply and demand. Indeed, in one survey comparing the views of economists and the general public, 85% of economists attributed high gas prices to supply and demand while 73% of the public chose the profit motive. In the same survey, 46% of the public selected “business profits are too high” as a major reason the economy was not doing better, compared to just 4% of economists. According to these scholars, lay economic reasoning reflects basic features of human psychology. Humans spent the vast majority of their history in small-scale societies with no occupational specialization, no capital investment, and no perceptible economic growth within a single lifetime. The modern market economy, with its global trade, rapid innovation, and massive wealth creation, is recent by comparison. Our intuitions about economics may still be wired for the pre-market world.
In short, before even getting into other factors that inform attitudes about capitalism, there is a more basic challenge in how people naturally think about economics.
The Conceptualization Problem
In addition to the underlying psychological challenge of lay economic reasoning, capitalism has a conceptualization problem. The word itself means very different things to different people, and for a significant share of Americans, what it means has little to do with free enterprise.
A 2025 survey of over 2,000 U.S. college students conducted by the Sheila and Robert Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth presented students with two definitions of capitalism. The first described a system of free market competition in which private businesses compete to serve consumers. The second described a system in which businesses use political connections and government favoritism to gain unfair advantages at the public’s expense (cronyism). Only 59% chose the free market definition. Another 26% chose cronyism, and the rest were unsure. Critically, those who defined capitalism as free market competition were far more likely to view it favorably, while those who defined it as cronyism were far more likely to hold a negative view.
Real-world events likely contribute to how people conceptualize capitalism. Corporate bailouts, the 2008 financial crisis, and high-profile corruption scandals might be pushing the popular understanding of capitalism further from entrepreneurship and free enterprise and closer to concentrated corporate power and corruption. Indeed, as Gallup has documented, even as Americans maintain positive attitudes about small business, sentiments toward big business have been declining for years, with only 37% of Americans reporting a favorable view as of 2025. For many, capitalism is more synonymous with large corporations than the small businesses they love.
The Polarization Problem
Layered on top of bad economic reasoning and capitalism’s conceptualization problem is political polarization, which increasingly shapes how Americans think and talk about economic systems.
Debates over capitalism and socialism have become tribal markers as much as substantive disagreements. According to Gallup, from 2010 to 2025, Democratic favorable views of capitalism dropped from 51% to 42%, while favorable views of socialism climbed from 50% to 66%. Republican views remained largely stable. The Challey Institute data tell a similar story. While 72% of conservative students defined capitalism as free market competition, only 57% of liberal students did the same. Moreover, only 16% of liberal students reported having a positive view of capitalism, compared to 57% of conservative students. When economic terms start to become proxies for political identity, confusion and division deepen. Capitalism becomes a stand-in for everything the other side represents, and defending it feels like picking a team rather than describing a system.
It is important to note that the tribal dynamic cuts in both directions. It is tempting to focus on the left’s growing hostility toward the word capitalism. But the fact that many Republicans rally behind the word does not necessarily mean they understand or support the free market principles it describes. Research on anti-profit bias, for instance, finds that zero-sum views of profit appear across the political spectrum, not just on the left. In our Progress Pulse survey, 24% of Republicans chose government coordination over economic freedom. Reflexively defending capitalism as a political identity marker is not the same as understanding economic freedom.
How These Challenges Connect
These three challenges build on each other. At the foundation are psychological tendencies that make modern economics inherently difficult to appreciate. On top of that sit widely varied definitions of what capitalism actually means. And increasingly, those conceptualizations and related attitudes are being sorted along partisan lines, turning economic discourse into a front in the culture war.
Entertainment media provides a powerful example of how these challenges reinforce each other in the broader culture. Filmmakers and screenwriters are not professional economists, and their storytelling likely draws more on lay economic intuitions than on economic science. In addition, film and television have long been dominated by those on the political left. Together, these factors likely contribute to capitalism being depicted as a destructive force, business success being frequently portrayed as coming at someone else’s expense, and profit-seeking being treated as inherently suspect. Inspiring entrepreneurial stories are told regularly, yet they are rarely framed as products of the economic framework that made them possible. The scrappy founder overcoming the odds is celebrated, but the capitalist system that gives scrappy founders a shot in the first place is ignored or vilified. The cumulative effect is a cultural narrative in which the word capitalism absorbs the blame for economic frustrations while the freedoms it represents go uncredited.
Making the Case for Capitalism
The challenges outlined here are not an exhaustive account of why capitalism struggles in the court of public opinion. But they do suggest that more productive conversations about capitalism require a better understanding of how people naturally think about economics, what they believe capitalism means, and how political tribalism compounds these challenges. For those who want to advance capitalism as a positive force that unites Americans around a shared commitment to economic flourishing, the path forward involves both education and bridge-building.
When it comes to education, effective communication about capitalism may need to work with people’s moral intuitions rather than against them, making the case that free markets are fundamentally cooperative systems and making the positive-sum dynamics of competition and innovation visible in concrete, human terms. This means helping people see dynamics they already participate in but may not fully recognize. It means going beyond GDP and related statistics and emphasizing the human story, including the billions lifted from poverty, the explosion of innovation and choice, and the expansion of personal agency that free markets enable. In short, we should point out the aspects that people already value—freedom, agency, and morality—and talk about why they are compatible with capitalism, not at odds with it.
It also means making a sustained case for what capitalism actually is, distinguishing it from the various ways free enterprise gets distorted in practice, and opposing those distortions when they occur. At the same time, capitalism is an economic system, not a utopia. Acknowledging the real frustrations people experience within it makes the case more credible.
When it comes to bridge-building, the task is uniting Americans around a shared commitment to economic flourishing. Americans know polarization is a problem. Most feel exhausted by political division, and an all-time high 45% now identify as political independents. Social psychologists use the concept of superordinate group identity to describe a larger identity that members of distinct groups share. When people recognize a broader identity that includes members of both their group and the opposing one, they are more likely to set aside tribal loyalties and work together toward shared goals. Our Progress Pulse data suggest that belief in economic freedom, entrepreneurship, and individual initiative may offer the basis for a shared American economic identity, one that cuts across political and demographic groups.
Deep-seated economic intuitions, definitional disagreement, and growing partisan division all make the case for capitalism difficult. But there also appears to be a shared cultural foundation, one in which Americans favor the bottom-up dynamism of free enterprise over top-down government direction. This is something we can build on.
