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Capitalism Failed Us – Here is Why
By Shlomo Maital
David Brooks’ latest NYT column has the fascinating title “Why More People in the World Are Feeling Hopeful (Except Us)” The ‘us’ is of course the US.
Brooks cites results from the Harvard-led Global Flourishing Study published in Nature – Mental, April 30, 2025. Flourishing measures the wellbeing of people, measured by happiness, health, meaning, character, relationships, and finance. In other words, how countries measure up according to material, social and spiritual wellbeing.
The US ranks 12th or 15th out of 22 leading nations. The nations who have done well and risen in ‘flourishing’ are those that find a true balance between those three elements: material, spiritual and social. The US has done poorly, especially among its young people, who report NOT doing well and NOT having much hope for the future.
Why? Brookins recounts: “Why have rich nations lagged behind in this way? [Prof.] VanderWeele [who led the study] theorizes that maybe it’s a question of priorities. “I tend to think you end up getting what you value most,” he told me. “When a society is oriented toward economic gain, you will be moderately successful, but not if it’s done at the expense of meaning and community.”
Brooks continues: “I’d add that we in the West have aggressively embraced values that when taken to excess are poisonous to our well-being. Over the past several decades, according to the World Values Survey, North America, Western Europe and the English-speaking nations have split off culturally from the rest of the world. Since the 1960s we have adopted values that are more secular, more individualistic and more oriented around self-expression than the values that prevail in the Eastern Orthodox European countries such as Serbia, the Confucian countries like South Korea and the mostly Catholic Latin countries like Mexico.”
We sold our souls to capitalism. It gave us vast wealth, billionaires. But it destroyed our souls. Thank economists in part for that. Mea culpa.
Postscript: My country, Israel, now a pariah among nations, vilified, owing to our disastrous leadership, ranks second or fourth (with or without the financial variable). In Israel, social bonds are very strong, especially during times of war and crisis. And so are spiritual values, not necessarily formal religious ones. Plus, our hi-tech has brought us material gain. But we did not sell our souls to the Capitalist Devil.
TIMnovate 