Here is a brief excerpt from an article written by Eric Beinhocker and Nick Hanauer for the McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company. Despite its ability to generate prosperity, they suggest, capitalism is under attack. By shaking up our long-held assumptions about how and why the system works, we can improve it. To read the complete article, check out other resources, learn more about the firm, obtain subscription information, and register to receive email alerts, please click here.

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Capitalism is under attack. The financial crisis of 2008, the stagnation of the middle class in many developed countries, and rising income inequality are challenging some of our most deeply held beliefs about how a fair and well-functioning society should be organized.

Many business leaders are of two minds about the situation. They note that market capitalism has yielded massive increases in human prosperity, particularly in the West in the 19th and 20th centuries. More recently, it has lifted hundreds of millions from poverty in emerging economies. Yet despite these historic accomplishments, it’s also easy to worry that something is wrong with how the system is performing today.

This article will argue that while we have been correct to believe that capitalism has been the major source of historical growth and prosperity, we have been mostly incorrect in identifying how and why it worked so well. By analogy, our ancestors did know that the stars and planets moved in the sky and had various theories to explain their observations. But it wasn’t until the Copernican model replaced the Earth with the sun at the center of the solar system and Newton articulated his laws of gravitation that people understood how and why they move.

Likewise, the conventional economic theories we have relied upon for the past century have misled us about the workings of capitalism. Only by replacing our old theories with better and more modern ones will we build the deeper understanding necessary to improve our capitalist system.

Rocking-horse versus wild-horse economics

For the past century, the dominant economic paradigm—neoclassical economics—has painted a narrow and mechanistic view of how capitalism works, focusing on the role of markets and prices in the efficient allocation of society’s resources. The story is familiar: rational, self-interested firms maximize profits; rational, self-interested consumers maximize their “utility”; the decisions of these actors drive supply to equal demand; prices are set; the market clears; and resources are allocated in a socially optimal way.

Over the past several decades, though, some of the bedrock assumptions of neoclassical theory have begun to unravel. Behavioral economists have accumulated a mountain of evidence showing that real humans don’t behave as a rational homo economicus would. Experimental economists have raised awkward questions about the very existence of utility; and that is problematic because it has long been the device economists use to show that markets maximize social welfare. Empirical economists have identified anomalies suggesting that financial markets aren’t always efficient. And the macroeconomic models built on neoclassical ideas performed very poorly during the financial crisis.

Andy Haldane, the chief economist of the Bank of England, notes that the conventional theory views the economy as a rocking horse that, when perturbed by an outside force, sways for a while before predictably settling back down to a static equilibrium. But, as Haldane has pointed out, what we saw during the crisis was more like a herd of wild horses—something spooks one of them, it kicks another horse, and pretty soon the whole herd is running wildly in a pattern of complex, dynamic behavior.

In the years before the crisis, a new view of economics began to stir. Since the crisis, it has begun to blossom. This view holds that the economy is a constantly evolving, interacting network of highly diverse households, firms, banks, regulators, and other agents, more like Haldane’s wild herd than a rocking horse. The economy—a complex, dynamic, open, and nonlinear system—has more in common with an ecosystem than with the mechanistic systems the neoclassicists modeled their theory on. The implications of this emerging view are only just beginning to be explored. But the two of us believe it has fundamental implications for how people think about the nature of capitalism and prosperity.

Significantly, this view shifts our perspective on how and why markets work from their allocative efficiency to their effectiveness in promoting creativity. It suggests that markets are evolutionary systems that each day carry out millions of simultaneous experiments on ways to make our lives better. In other words, the essential role of capitalism is not allocation—it is creation. Life isn’t drastically better for billions of people today than it was in 1800 because we are allocating the resources of the 19th-century economy more efficiently. Rather, it is better because we have life-saving antibiotics, indoor plumbing, motorized transport, access to vast amounts of information, and an enormous number of technical and social innovations that have become available to much (if not yet all) of the world’s population. The genius of capitalism is that it both creates incentives for solving human problems and makes those solutions widely available. And it is solutions to human problems that define prosperity, not money.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Eric Beinhocker, an alumnus of McKinsey’s Washington, DC, and London offices, is the executive director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford. Nick Hanauer is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author. This article is adapted from “Capitalism Redefined,” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Issue 31, Winter 2014, democracyjournal.org.