Polls show that many Americans today — particularly younger ones — have a less-than-favorable view of free-market capitalism. A recent Gallup survey found that just 54 percent of respondents had a positive opinion of the economic system.
Yet many of capitalism’s most vocal critics openly ignore the abundant evidence of its success.
The Food and Agriculture Organization this month released its annual report on world hunger. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026 reports continued progress in attacking malnutrition across the globe. The analysis reports that, in 2025, 7.8 percent of the world’s people were undernourished. That’s down from 35 percent in 1970, an astonishing drop over the decades.
In the United States, Canada, Europe and east Asia, the percentage of undernourished residents is just 2.5 percent. The places where hunger remains prevalent today are typically war-torn nations in which violence is routine, primarily in the Middle East and parts of Africa.
These numbers are in line with data on global poverty. Our World in Data reports that, since 1990, the number of people living in extreme poverty has declined by 1.5 billion: “This means, on any average day in the last 35 years, about 115,000 people left extreme poverty behind.”
Conditions have improved all over the world not because of central planning, socialism or government intervention. Quite the opposite. The major factor behind dramatic drops in hunger and extreme poverty has been economic growth driven in large part by more nations easing limits on the free exchange of goods and services.
“Capitalism has done more to overcome hunger and poverty than any other system in world history,” Rainer Zitelmann, an historian and sociologist, wrote recently for the Adam Smith Institute. “The most devastating man-made famines over the past 100 years all occurred under socialism — in the 1930s alone, according to a range of estimates, between 5 million and 9 million people died in the Soviet Union from famines caused by the socialist collectivisation of agriculture.”
Mr. Zitelmann notes that, before the Industrial Revolution and the advent of capitalism, 90 percent of the world’s population lived in poverty.
It’s also important to note that the economic liberty and prosperity afforded by capitalism are also deeply related to property rights and political freedom. The 20th century made abundantly clear that depriving citizens of economic freedom is a hallmark of totalitarianism. Consider North Korea or Cuba today.
Statistics on hunger and poverty reveal that the world has made great progress in recent decades despite dour predictions from progressive doomsayers about widespread famine and destruction.
More work remains, but the prescriptions offered by today’s modern purveyors of socialism with a smile would only sabotage the effort and make further progress much more difficult.
