This article originally appeared in the Financial Post. Below is an excerpt from the article.
By Philip Cross, January 22, 2026
Harvard historian Sven Beckert’s 1,300-page Capitalism: A Global History relentlessly critiques capitalism’s alleged failings. But if capitalism is so flawed, why does it stand alone as the world’s only credible economic system? Its many opponents propose regulating it and redistributing the riches it produces but since the collectivist model of public ownership of the means of production was discredited, no serious alternatives have been proposed.
Beckert’s methodology is to deploy “the tools of social history” to analyze capitalism. But these tools evidently exclude both basic principles of economic analysis and any rigorous use of statistics. This results in unawareness of the close relationship between real wages and labour productivity, something documented in my recent study for the Fraser Institute.
Overlooking how real incomes and productivity trend together leads Beckert to subscribe to the popular but false narrative that capitalism’s fundamental dynamic is unrelenting suppression of wages and salaries through an evolving combination of slavery, forced labour, various forms of precarious work, outsourcing, offshoring and technological change. This argument dates to Marx’s discredited theory that capitalism sows the seeds of its own destruction through the growing immiseration of the masses. If real wages did actually lag behind productivity, with income gains hoarded by a small group of greedy capitalists, the resulting drop in mass consumption and decline in living standards would have undermined capitalism long ago. The reality is just the opposite.
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Philip Cross is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
