Is Capitalism Falling Out Of Favor? New AI-Driven Research From BU’s Mehrotra Institute Says Not So Fast

dgutierrez

Tue, May 13, 2025, 12:39 PM 9 min read

Boston University, Questrom School of Business

In an epoch wherever “late capitalism” is regularly invoked arsenic a motion of systemic decay and wherever younger generations explicit increasing doubts astir escaped markets, a caller survey from Boston University’s Questrom School of Business offers a astonishing counter-narrative: capitalism, it turns out, is faring amended successful nationalist sermon than 1 mightiness assume.

Leveraging artificial quality to analyse much than 400,000 quality stories from the mid-20th period to today, the 2 of america —both module members astatine BU Questrom and affiliated with the Ravi K. Mehrotra Institute for Business, Markets and Society—set retired to analyse however sentiment toward capitalism, socialism, and communism has evolved implicit the past 80 years.

The conclusion? Despite predominant claims that capitalism is successful crisis, media sentiment toward capitalism has steadily improved, adjacent outpacing socialism and communism successful affirmative portrayal implicit time.

Given the critiques of capitalism successful caller years—from income inequality to clime change—we expected to spot sentiment turning downward. But what we recovered was the opposite. The press, implicit time, has really warmed to capitalism.”

To contextualize the study, it’s worthy reviewing the 3 ascendant economical systems the probe analyzed:

• Capitalism, emphasizing backstage ownership, marketplace competition, and nett motive with minimal authorities intervention.

• Socialism, wherever the authorities typically owns cardinal industries and redistributes wealthiness to trim inequality.

• Communism, advocating a classless nine with communal ownership and wealthiness distributed based connected need.

In reality, astir modern economies—especially those successful the West—operate as mixed economies, combining capitalist markets with societal information nets, regulation, and nationalist goods. But that hasn’t stopped fierce ideological debates, particularly arsenic Millennials and Gen Z explicit disillusionment with rising pupil debt, lodging costs, and economical insecurity.

To determination beyond anecdotal headlines and survey snapshots, the probe squad used ProQuest’s TDM Studio, a almighty substance mining instrumentality that gives entree to digitized contented from large English-language newspapers including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal dating backmost to the 1940s.

They past trained a ample connection exemplary to measure the emotional tone—positive, negative, oregon neutral—of each nonfiction that mentioned capitalism, socialism, oregon communism. The exemplary detected a scope of sentiments specified arsenic anger, surprise, and joy, past grouped them into broader categories to way changes implicit time.