Non-capitalist innovation empirically fails.

Some leftist economists like Mariana Mazzucato argue that governments might be able to step in and become laboratories for innovation. But that would be a historical anomaly; socialist-leaning governments have typically been less innovative than others. After all, bureaucrats and worker-corporate boards have little incentive to upset the status quo or compete to build a better widget. And even when government programs have spurred innovation—as in the case of the internet—it took the private sector to recognize the value and create a market.

And that brings us to a third reason to believe in markets: productivity. Some economists, such as Robert Gordon, have looked to today’s economic problems and suggested that productivity growth—the engine that fueled so much of the progress of the last several decades—is over. In this telling, the resources, products, and systems that underpin the world’s economy are all optimized, and little further progress is possible.

But that is hard to square with reality. Innovation helps economies do more with fewer resources—increasingly critical to addressing climate change, for example—which is a form of productivity growth. And likewise, many of the products and technologies people rely on every day did not exist a few years ago. These goods make inaccessible services more available and are changing the nature of work, often for the better. Such gains are made possible by capitalist systems that encourage invention and growing the pie, not by socialist systems that are more concerned with how the existing pie is cut. It is far too soon, in other words, to write off productivity.