Poverty.

Capitalism is not an ideology. In this case, “ism” refers to process, as with “mechanism.” Put certain freedoms in place and free enterprise appears as simply a natural behavior of those able to grasp its potential.

The keys to the ability of capitalism to reduce poverty and increase the standard of living of all are risk and productivity. They make for a rare non-zero-sum game. Here’s how.

In college in the 1960s, I visited the computer on campus, one of the three used to calculate Apollo moon-launch trajectories. The underground room, the size of my house, was the computer. You’d walk through narrow passages between walls of glowing vacuum tubes as though you’d been miniaturized to the size of a cockroach and dropped inside a desktop computer, only minus the solid-state circuitry. Now, in just two generations, each of us carries more computing power in our pocket or purse.

To be a capitalist, you must be willing to put money and time at risk. This is key to the non-zero-sum aspect of capitalism. You have to pay for employees, pay for materials, pay for services, pay for facilities, pay for equipment, all long before you expect to make a dime of profit. It’s all outgo, and it’s all priming the economy.

To be a capitalist, you must also have a productive idea—how can we make more better and cheaper? How can we go from room-sized custom-built computers that cost millions to people walking around with more computing (and communications) power in their pockets?

As a non-capitalist worker bee, your standard of living rises two ways. Raise your real wages or lower the price of goods you want to buy. The competition among capitalists does both.

Prior to capitalism, the well-to-do made their livings unproductively, by fees based on their lands or office. You want my stamp of approval? Pay me. You want to cross my domain? Pay me a toll. We now refer to these modes as corruption as they do produce an I win-you lose zero-sum game.

Meanwhile artisans could eke a living making silver services, dueling pistols, portraits and the like for the well-to-do. But taking a month to make a tea service or two weeks to make a sword is not the route to wealth. And so, once we began to leave that behind some thirteen generations ago, this happened.

Ninety-nine percent of all the wealth in the 300,000-year history of our species has been created, reducing poverty worldwide to one-tenth its former rate and increasing the standard of living of the average worker 80-fold! Why would anyone want to give up on that?

Because socialism? Without capitalism, there is no chance for socialism; there’s only serfdom. Capitalism does not dictate how you live; it only multiplies your choices for how to live your life. Still want to give up on it?

Then consider how Robert Heinlein framed giving up on capitalism:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”