2: The Market System: Achieving Equity and Material Abundance

By the end of the twentieth century, the great ideological clash between capitalism and socialism seemed to have been resolved in favor of capitalism. The nations that embraced the capitalist market system had clearly been more successful in achieving material abundance than those that had adopted the centrally planned economics associated with socialism. Sometimes more rapidly and sometimes more incrementally, nearly all of the economies that had operated under central planning (including the two biggest, Russia and China) began to shift toward a market orientation, eventually reaping the benefits of increasing material bounty. Those few nations that refused to make the shift experienced economic stagnation or worse. Market capitalism had won an unambiguous victory. And that was that.