For as long as there’s been a Left, there’s been suspicion of innovation. It’s a word long associated with Silicon Valley messianism and the kind of economic mysticism that counts scrolling on one’s phone as human progress. Innovation, along with terms like “dynamism” and “productivity growth,” belong to the political vocabulary of the Right, not the Left. The suspicion runs so deep that many on the Left reckon a truly just world — a socialist one — will be a less productive one.

The Right, for its part, is happy to agree. A century ago, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises declared that socialism enfeebles the entrepreneurial spirit. Today the familiar refrain is that equality, welfare, and worker power all conspire against innovation.

But the data doesn’t bear that out. Consider the figure on the opposite page. On the x-axis is a “socialism index,” a composite measure I developed that aggregates scores across five indicators: social spending, public ownership, public employment, codetermination, and economic decommodification. On the y-axis is a measure of innovation: private research and development spending as a share of GDP. What we find is not a negative relationship but a positive one.