The International Economy just put out its latest issue, built around a single question — “Does American Capitalism Need to Be Reimagined?” They posed that question to seventeen economists, historians, and investors. This one was, of course, right up my alley: it’s the core thesis of Capital Evolution. My answer is that the status quo isn’t an option — but neither is a wholesale replacement. What we need is an evolution, not a revolution. The full piece is below; you can find the complete symposium at international-economy.com.
Does American Capitalism Need to Be Reimagined? By Seth Levine — The International Economy, Winter 2026
The status quo is not an option. But neither is replacing capitalism. What’s needed is an evolution, not a revolution.
In 2019, Jamie Dimon led the Business Roundtable in rewriting its fifty-year-old Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation, replacing shareholder primacy with a commitment to all stakeholders. Over 180 CEOs signed it. The left dismissed it as performative. The right called it woke. What it actually signaled was the end of the neoliberal consensus that had governed American capitalism for half a century.
That consensus delivered extraordinary aggregate wealth. But it stopped distributing it through the mechanisms that built the middle class. Between 1978 and 2018, CEO compensation rose more than 900 percent while worker pay barely moved. In 1940, 90 percent of children would outearn their parents; today, only 50 percent of millennials are expected to do the same. It is now easier to climb the economic ladder in Sweden, Germany, France, and Japan than in the United States.
If the biggest economic question of the last fifty years was about the role of government, the biggest question of the next fifty will be about the role of business. Businesses have become the most powerful actors in our economy, in many cases more powerful than governments. The next evolution of capitalism—what we call Dynamic Capitalism—rebalances profit with purpose and innovation with inclusion. It is neither revolutionary nor socialist. It recognizes what made American capitalism great: that it gave people freedom, opportunity, and mobility.
The core challenge is straightforward: we need more capitalists. When the wealthiest 10 percent own 87 percent of corporate equities, we shouldn’t be surprised that large swaths of the population have lost faith in the system. The more members of the capital class our economy creates, the more broadly its benefits will be felt.
Broadening ownership is the most direct path. Nearly seventy million Americans are paid hourly with no equity participation. Yet the evidence for shared ownership is compelling. When KKR sold C.H.I. Overhead Doors in 2022, the average worker received $175,000—because shared ownership improved retention, engagement, and returns. In Rochester, two former Kodak line workers who founded Optimax chose to transfer ownership to their four hundred employees rather than sell. Publix, one of the largest employee-owned companies, ranks number one in customer trust among grocery brands. The ownership economy works across industries and company sizes.
The government’s role should be to provide incentives, not mandates: an Employee Ownership Office within the Small Business Administration, universal baby bonds so every American enters adulthood as a member of the capital class, and expanded access to retirement plans for the fifty-six million Americans who lack them are just a few ideas to consider.
The AI productivity surge will make this more urgent. The last wave of automation devastated families without college degrees. AI threatens an even broader set of workers. We should learn from our past. If productivity gains flow exclusively to the shareholders of a handful of technology companies, the political consequences will be severe. But if we broaden who participates—through ownership, not redistribution—we can build an economy that shares more of its rewards.
American capitalism doesn’t need to be replaced. It needs to remember what made it work so effectively in the first place.