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.<a “=”” class=”link-footnote” rel=”#footnote1″ role=”tooltip” tabindex=”0″ aria-label=”Open tooltip”>¹

In the years before the crisis, a new view of economics began to stir. Since the crisis, it has begun to blossom.<a “=”” class=”link-footnote” rel=”#footnote2″ role=”tooltip” tabindex=”0″ aria-label=”Open tooltip”>² 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.

Prosperity redefined

Most of us intuitively believe that the more money people have, the more prosperous a society must be. America’s average household disposable income in 2013 was $38,001, versus $28,194 for Canada<a “=”” class=”link-footnote” rel=”#footnote3″ role=”tooltip” tabindex=”0″ aria-label=”Open tooltip”>³ ; therefore, people believe, America is more prosperous than Canada.

But the idea that prosperity is simply about having money can be disproved with a simple thought experiment. Imagine you had the $38,001 income of a typical American but lived among the Yanomami people, an isolated hunter-gatherer tribe deep in the Brazilian rainforest. You’d easily be the richest of the Yanomami (they don’t use money, but anthropologists estimate their standard of living at something around $90 a year). But you’d still feel a lot poorer than the average American. Even after you’d fixed up your hut, bought the best baskets in the village, and eaten the finest Yanomami cuisine, all of your riches still wouldn’t get you antibiotics, air conditioning, or a comfy bed. Yet even the poorest Americans typically have access to these important elements of well-being.

This is why prosperity in human societies can’t be properly understood by looking just at monetary measures, such as income or wealth. Prosperity in a society is the accumulation of solutions to human problems.

These solutions run from the prosaic (crunchier potato chips) to the profound (cures for deadly diseases). Ultimately, the measure of the wealth of a society is the range of human problems it has solved and how available it has made those solutions to its people. Every item in a modern retail store can be thought of as a solution to a different kind of problem—how to eat, dress, entertain, make homes more comfortable, and so on. The more and better the solutions available to us, the more prosperity we have.

Growth redefined

We typically talk about growth in terms of GDP, though it has been much criticized recently as a measure of progress. There have been a variety of attempts to make GDP account for things such as environmental damage, unpaid work, the progress of technology, or the development of human capital.

In our view, the biggest problem with GDP is that it doesn’t necessarily reflect how growth changes the real, lived experience of most people. In the United States, for example, GDP has more than tripled over the last three decades. Although those increases have been concentrated at the top of the income spectrum, people across the board have benefited from improvements in technology (say, safer cars, new medical treatments, and smartphones). Other changes, though, have been accompanied by unintended consequences (such as the stress many knowledge workers feel from 24/7 connectivity). Is life actually better or worse for most people? How are the gains of growth shared? GDP cannot answer these questions.

If the concept of growth is to have significance, it should represent improvements in lived experience. If the real measure of a society’s prosperity is the availability of solutions to human problems, growth cannot simply be measured by changes in GDP. Rather, it must be a measure of the rate at which new solutions to human problems become available.

Going from fearing death by sinus infection one day to having access to life-saving antibiotics the next, for example, is growth. Going from sweltering in the heat one day to living with air conditioning the next is growth. Going from walking long distances to driving is growth. Going from needing to look up basic information in a library to having all the world’s information instantly available on your phone is growth.

Growth is best thought of as an increase in the quality and availability of solutions to human problems. Problems differ in importance, and a new view of growth must take this into account: finding a cure for cancer would trump many other product innovations. But in general, economic growth is the actual experience of having our lives improved.

This is different from other alternative measures of growth. For example, research shows that happiness does not necessarily correlate with GDP growth—Bhutan has even famously developed a Gross National Happiness (GNH) Index. Likewise, the United Nations created a Human Development Index (HDI) based on Amartya Sen’s theory of human capabilities and freedom. What the two of us are proposing sits somewhere between GDP and these measures. Like GDP, it is intended to be a definition of material prosperity. But it is also a more meaningful way of thinking about material standards of living than GDP.

Can the rate at which solutions appear and their availability be measured? While such a measure has not been tried yet, we believe it is possible. Inflation is measured by looking at changes in the prices of goods and services in a “basket” typically consumed by households. Similarly, it’s possible to look at how the actual contents of such a basket are changing across time or how they differ across countries or levels of income. What kind of food, housing, clothing, transport, healthcare, education, leisure, and entertainment do people have access to?