In August, I wrote about a 1956 book, The American Business Creed, and how that creed played a central role in building America into the strongest economy in the world. A reader asked if I would speculate on why what was generally accepted in the 1950s is now largely ignored—or even demonized. A few weeks ago, I focused on how changes within the business community itself eroded certain principles. In this follow-on post, I turn to the broader social forces that have launched a wide-scale attack on other values.

Let me reiterate the book’s seven key U.S. business values:

1. Individualism with moral responsibility and freedom
2. Materialism and productivity
3. Practical realism
4. The continuing goal of progress
5. The need for optimism and the spirit of adventure
6. Democracy and universalism
7. Service and social responsibility

One can make a strong case that these principles—held by American businesses and supported by most of U.S. society, including all but the most left-wing elites—were central to establishing and sustaining U.S. global economic leadership.

In Part I, I discussed how business-led changes have eroded, but by no means completely, two specific principles: democracy and universalism, and service and social responsibility. Here, I examine how societal shifts have undermined and accelerated the erosion of four other principles:

• Materialism and productivity
• Practical realism
• The continuing goal of progress
• The need for optimism and the spirit of adventure

These four business principles once reflected the optimism and pragmatism that fueled American growth. Today, each is severely weakened, facing mounting social skepticism and cultural opposition.

Materialism and Productivity

The creed affirms that “material advantages are an essential part of the good society,” but it explicitly rejects “sybaritic enjoyment of wealth.” Music to my ears.

Boosting living standards depends on valuing both materialism and productivity. But over the last half century, each has come under sustained attack. We now live in a world where materialism is portrayed as killing the planet and productivity as killing jobs, while many claim that too many people make too much money.

As I wrote in “The Abandonment of Productivity and the Decline of the West,”

From the founding of the republic to the turn of the millennium, America’s core economic creed was growth. That growth religion enabled the United States to become the world’s richest and most powerful nation, and dramatically improved Americans’ quality of life. Tragically, over the last two decades, many have abandoned their faith in growth. The new prevailing wisdom is that America and other nations should forswear growth for the sake of other goals: saving the planet, redistributing income, living simply, and the like.

Thankfully, most businesses still hold strongly to the value of materialism and productivity. But achieving those goals is difficult when broader culture and policy push back.

Those experiencing scarcity—or who can still remember “want”—tend to find prioritizing growth less challenging. But as more people move into the middle class and those memories fade, it becomes easier to take prosperity for granted. In many cases, complacency, or even outright derision toward growth, takes root.

However, given the vast benefits of economic growth to society—higher incomes across all classes, more tax revenue for public goods, and greater national power—America cannot afford the luxury of deprioritizing growth, at least not without suffering serious consequences.

Practical Realism

The creed hit the nail on the head by warning that “we disregard the basic laws of human nature at our peril.” Yet that principle, too, is now routinely attacked.

We need look no further than the growing attraction to universal basic income, which ignores the simple reality that many people will choose not to work if they do not have to. The same applies to the increasing popularity of socialism, particularly among younger Americans, which similarly discounts human nature.

A healthy society must ground its ideals in realism, not wishful thinking, if it expects progress to last.

The Continuing Goal of Progress

The creed champions a constant dissatisfaction with the existing state of affairs, indicating that America should be in a “continuous revolution” of technical and material advancement. While I could not agree more, that value is also under societal siege today.

Technological advancement, once a source of national pride, is now routinely portrayed in dystopian terms—stealing privacy, killing jobs, destroying the environment, and undermining democracy.

We see this in the widespread demonization of Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” which The Washington Post dismissed as a “self-serving cry for help.” Half a century ago, a statement such as “Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential” would have been widely accepted across both political parties. Today, elite opinion too often mocks such optimism as egotistical or naïve.

When progress becomes suspect, decline is not far behind.

The Need for Optimism and the Spirit of Adventure

“The business[person] or the citizen who finds a new and effective way of doing things is a hero,” rightly states the 1950s creed. But in 2025, the need for optimism and the spirit of adventure have also eroded.

Technological disruption is now treated as something to fear or regulate away. Case in point: Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater dismissed the importance of creative destruction, stating, “Economists call this creative destruction and shrug it off as merely market forces at play. But neoliberal public policy also played a role in enabling this creative destruction, and not always for the better.”

When a society prizes stasis and comfort over adventure and risk, stagnation—and ultimately decline—inevitably follow.

Restoring the Culture of Growth

This year’s Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences recognizes Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt—Mokyr for identifying how technology and invention sustain long-run economic growth and Aghion and Howitt for developing the creative destruction model, which shows how loss and renewal through innovation drive productivity and living standards.

Their work on innovation-driven growth is a timely reminder of what many Americans seem to have forgotten: prosperity depends on valuing productivity, grounding ideals in realism, striving continually for progress, and maintaining the optimism and adventurous spirit to embrace change rather than fear it.

While it is beyond the scope of this series to discuss whether it is possible to reinstate the business values and societal support that characterized the 1950s, one thing is clear: The business creed of that era helped make the United States the strongest economy in the world. If America is to avoid further decline in global techno-economic competitiveness, innovation, and productivity growth, especially relative to China, it must restore a culture that values, rather than demonizes, growth and creative destruction.

Rebuilding this ethos requires more than changes within business; it demands a broader societal commitment to progress, realism, and ambition. Yet given the powerful cultural forces arrayed against these ideals—certainly on the progressive left, but increasingly within the new right as well—this will not be easy. Defenders of progress must once again step up to the battle lines and fight.