Capitalism has an image problem among college students

One reason I jumped at the invitation from political scientist David Schultz to watch some of his Hamline University classes use AI this fall is because I wanted to hear students' opinions of economic systems.

That topic was reached last week — and his students did not disappoint.

For decades, the examination of capitalism and flirtation with its alternatives has been one of the rites of passage of undergraduate life. But since the 2008-09 recession, more and more Americans routinely criticize capitalism, citing its role in the nation's enormous wealth gap and the evaporation of social mobility.

Today's college students have been hearing attacks on capitalism for most of their lives. Pew Research in 2010 began regularly testing Americans' reactions to the words "capitalism" and "socialism." In 2022, it reported "modest declines in positive views" of both.

Schultz began class last Wednesday with a similar test. He asked students to quickly respond with the first thing that came to mind when he said "capitalism."

"The U.S. economy," the first student replied. "Rich people," said the next.

In order, the rest said: Wealth distribution, monopoly, corporations, wealth gap, capitalist pigs, unethical labor, inequality, unchecked greed, nepotism, transnational corporations, fee-for-service, for-profit health care, profiting off of war.

When Schultz did the same thing with "socialism," the first student replied, "Safety net." In order, the rest said: equality, basic income, closer to equal opportunity, universal health care, social services, lack of economic incentive, strong unions.

Schultz interrupted and, with the pattern of views established, suggested that students turn to ChatGPT and ask it "What does capitalism do well?"

They came back with lower prices, innovation, variety of goods and services, possible upward mobility and productivity.

It was the only time over four class sessions I watched last week that Schultz turned to AI. Chatbots appear useful as stand-ins for an encyclopedia or search engine. They cannot resolve the tensions in the systems of our lives.

Schultz went to college in the 1970s and I went in the 1980s. We both attended small, middle-of-the-road liberal arts schools. Neither of us remember our classmates expressing anger about capitalism.

"It's a much harder indictment now," Schultz said. "It's not completely illegitimate. Capitalism doesn't look like it's working for some of these students or they haven't seen it working for their parents."

In class, Schultz asked students why they thought so negatively about capitalism. Their responses ranged from very broad, such as inequality of opportunities or harms to the environment, to the personal, such as the debt they would face after college.

A couple of students described working in restaurant jobs and feeling it was unfair that a manager made more money than them when they were the ones making or serving food. Schultz turned to a woman in the class whose parents own a restaurant and asked her to describe what they do.

She said they do everything, setting the menu and prices, marketing, hiring and scheduling, buying food, picking up supplies and stepping in when employees don't show up. A manager, she said, is "paid to make the business run."

One student humorously skewered the way that people tend to equate wealth with intelligence. He noted that two of the country's richest people, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, have been "idiots with their money."

Trump, born into wealth, has been through bankruptcy a half-dozen times to preserve it. Musk, of course, vastly overpaid for Twitter a year ago and turned the business inside out trying to fix his mistake.

Schultz pointed out to students that their criticisms came from looking at the effects of capitalism. He then started to build a case for it by walking through the works of political philosophers John Rawls, Karl Marx and Robert Nozick.

He taught that self-interest leads to competition, which leads to the creation of wealth. "We are using self-interest as our grist," Schultz said.

I saw the discussions in Schultz's classes as the normal way people work through complex ideas that compete or conflict. Others may see it as evidence of changing values or norms. Only time will tell.

As an institution, Hamline walked through the minefields of the culture war and worker rights earlier this year after an adjunct art history professor was not rehired following a student's complaint. It is not a school that's out of the social or political mainstream, though.

The political views of Hamline students are more liberal than at Bethel, more moderate than at Macalester, Schultz said. And Hamline students vote — at the highest rate of any private university in 2018.

As they age, they may be more willing to constrain and correct capitalism than those of us who went to college decades ago have been.