Creative destruction says winners outnumber losers in the drive to endless progress. We should help losers but keep the process going

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Economics is about there being no free lunch. Capitalism is about eating the other guy’s lunch, which you do by building a better product, or the same product more cheaply, and stealing his business away as consumers opt for your wares, not his. That’s too bad for him but now the world has a better or cheaper product and, in this small way, a higher standard of living.

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Multiply this process over and over and, now not in a small way, you get material social progress. We who were born into progress take it for granted but for most of our species’ existence, progress, when it occurred, petered out. Only in the past 200 years has it been sustained (as a great gapminder.org interactive chart demonstrates in an unforgettable way). The reason progress became self-sustaining, it’s very hard to deny, was the advent of capitalism (or “trade-tested betterment,” to use the term economic historian Deirdre McCloskey prefers).

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The essence of capitalism is “creative destruction,” a phrase Joseph Schumpeter popularized (but