Capitalism

Capitalism is an economic and political system in which most means of production are privately owned, and the production and distribution of goods rely chiefly on markets rather than central state direction. Its foundations rest on private property, the profit motive, and market competition, with prices and resource allocation emerging from voluntary exchange between buyers and sellers. Capitalism claims no single doctrine of political legitimacy for the state itself; its own legitimating claim is narrower, that individuals hold a right to acquire, use and exchange property without arbitrary interference, a right any legitimate government is understood to protect rather than override. Its origins as a system trace informally to 16th-century England, where investment of accumulated capital into industries such as cloth manufacturing began raising productivity, and modern capitalist economic theory is traditionally traced to Adam Smith's 1776 treatise An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. It remains the dominant economic system across most of the world today, existing in varying degrees of government involvement from largely unregulated to heavily state-managed forms, and is widely and persistently criticized for producing inequality of income and wealth, for instability and unreliability of growth cycles, and for social harms such as pollution and poor treatment of workers. The atlas records no single honest founding year for capitalism, since it emerged gradually as a system rather than being founded at one moment.