“The future of capitalism”: A 50-year retrospective

In 1974, Business Society and Review/Innovation (BSR) published “The Future of Capitalism: A Symposium,” in which six experts predicted the future of the US economic system. These experts agreed that in the future, capitalism would still be the primary economic system of the United States, but the government would play a more significant role. In 1975, Martin and Lodge surveyed Harvard Business Review (HBR) subscribers about the ideological underpinnings of capitalism and their predictions. Similarly, these subscribers believed that capitalism was dominant then but would evolve into a socially capitalistic format in the future. We updated their work fifty years later by surveying 1,635 managers and professionals in the US. Our findings suggest a growing preference for an ideology that retains some of the fundamentals of capitalism but modifies others. We propose polarity thinking as a framework that may best explain how the future US economy might be both capitalistic and communitarian without being socialist. This quasi-capitalist form is developing, but the specifics of its implementation in the future are unclear.