In its 250th year, America finds itself confronting an age-old question with new urgency: what, exactly, counts as progress?
asserted
what → find → progress
Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, America adopted the Declaration of Independence, and Matthew Boulton and James Watt commercialized the steam engine—three developments that unleashed an age of capitalism, bringing unprecedented growth and unprecedented inequality.
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that → publish → growth
And while growth and inequality are often treated as separate stories, fetishized respectively by the right and the left, corporate America and labor unions, and Wall Street and Main Street, this November’s midterm elections will put them on a collision course.
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elections → treat → course
But they have always gone hand in hand, their fates inextricably intertwined.
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fates → go → hand
It remains a global engine of innovation.
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It → remain → innovation
Its stock market is booming thanks to artificial intelligence, while its capital markets remain the deepest and most powerful in the world.
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markets → boom → world
And despite tariffs, a labor market slowed by restrictive immigration and repeated energy price shocks, its growth—as attested to by its $32.3 trillion GDP, larger than China, India, and Germany combined—appears to defy the odds and remains resilient.
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growth → slow → odds
Affordability has become the defining issue of the moment, and many signs indicate that the midterms in November will be decided on that basis.
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midterms → become → basis
The Pew Research Center has found that the voters place the economy front and center by a wide margin, even as only 24% of Americans describe it as “good” or “excellent.”
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% → find → it
Gallup, meanwhile, reports that voters identify the cost of living as their foremost concern in the election.
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voters → report → election
GDP, the single statistic that now determines a country’s economic might, traces its roots to the scholarship of the American economist Simon Kuznets during the Great Depression, particularly his landmark 1934 report, National Income, 1929-1932.
uncertain
that → determine → Depression
But as the Cambridge economist Diane Coyle points out, Kuznets was, himself, aware of the many flaws and pitfalls of the metric he had developed and warned against confusing economic output with human welfare.
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he → point → welfare
What even fewer people know is that the “godfather” of GDP was also a pioneer in the study of inequality.
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godfather → know → inequality
The Kuznets curve—his famous prediction that inequality would eventually decline as economies grew richer—is not one history has obliged, but it points to the Janus-headed quality of modern capitalism.
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it → decline → capitalism
Indeed, it’s been exactly 15 years since the Occupy Wall Street protests radiated out of Zuccotti Park in New York’s Financial District.
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protests → radiate → District
Born in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008, the movement became the most visible public outcry against economic inequality in recent American history and gave the country an enduring rallying cry: “We are the 99%.”
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We → bear → cry
While the movement dissipated, the issues it raised have not. If anything, the concerns it foregrounded have migrated from the political margins to the mainstream in American politics, championed by progressive figures like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani.
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it → dissipate → Sanders
The World Inequality Report 2026 finds that the top 0.001% of the globe’s population own “three times more wealth” than the entire bottom half of humanity combined, and within “almost every region, the top 1% alone” hold more wealth than the bottom 90% combined.
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% → find → %
Inequality in America is no longer only a question of who has more; increasingly, it is a question of who has enough to make ends meet.
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ends → make → enough
According to the Brookings Institution, 45.5% of American households do not earn enough to cover even basic necessities, with housing, health care, and childcare among the most acute pressures.
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housing → accord → pressures
The problem is that a single statistic can conceal as much as it reveals.
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it → conceal → much
GDP can tell us how the economy is performing without telling us how Americans are faring.
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Americans → tell → us
It can tell us how much an economy produces, but not who receives the rewards, whether those gains improve people’s lives, or what is destroyed and what is sacrificed in producing them.
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what → tell → them
Some of the things on which society most depends—unpaid caregiving, clean air, cohesive communities—barely register in its accounts.
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society → depend → accounts
Economists classify many of these costs as “externalities”: consequences borne by people and places that fall outside the transaction being measured.
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that → classify → transaction
Climate change provides perhaps the starkest example of GDP’s glaring blind spots.
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change → provide → spots
A natural disaster can destroy homes, lives, and ecosystems without being registered as an equivalent loss in GDP; the money spent to rebuild afterward, meanwhile, counts as additional economic activity.
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money → destroy → activity
The meter can rise even as human welfare falls.
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welfare → rise → ?
But the two metrics—GDP, our shorthand for growth, and the Gini coefficient, our shorthand for inequality—are not rival ways of describing the economy so much as incomplete halves of the same story; the two key consequences of capitalism, joined at the hip.
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metrics → describe → hip
One shows us how large the pie has grown; the other, something about how it has been sliced.
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it → show → us
When it comes to growing the pie, the relentless efficiency of global capitalism in allocating resources is hard to match.
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efficiency → come → resources
It has allowed, in the aggregate, societies to eke out more from finite resources than ever before.
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societies → allow → resources
Its advocates point out that most people live longer and better lives: they are better fed, more securely housed, and better protected against diseases that once routinely killed them.
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that → point → them
Capitalism’s champions can reasonably claim that it has helped lift much of humanity above bare subsistence while proving more compatible with individual freedom than its major rivals.
uncertain
it → claim → rivals
It holds out the promise of a game that everyone has an equal chance to play—and win.
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everyone → hold → chance
Its defenders often invoke the specter of repression and unfreedom associated with state-led communism or socialism as a cautionary tale.
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defenders → invoke → tale
Capitalism’s unique two-plus-two-equals-five quality—its capacity to produce more than the sum of its parts—may also have helped pave the way for the material foundations of modernity.
uncertain
quality → produce → modernity
The shift from sustenance to surplus created, in many ways, the foundations for our moral revolutions, from liberalism and feminism to cosmopolitanism.
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shift → create → cosmopolitanism
Yet, beyond some vague gestures toward “trickle-down economics,” the discipline’s approach has largely been to focus on growing the pie and argue about slicing it later.
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approach → trickle → it
Economics has tried to separate the two: markets create wealth; politics distributes it.
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politics → try → it
…and 36 more, not listed.
