The “rap” on Generation Z, a Forbes magazine contributor noted several months ago, is that they’re “fearful, fragile, and full of themselves.”

More than anything, perhaps, it explains why increasing numbers of young adults “prefer socialism to capitalism.”

After all, capitalism is based on competition, risk-taking, and ultimately, rewards to those who produce the most value for others. It produces winners—and losers. Socialism, on the other hand, gives partisan and flawed government officials vast authority over economic decision-making, minimizes head-to-head competition, and eliminates real winners and actual losers (or “disparity in outcomes,” to use one of today’s preferred euphemisms).

For the fearful, fragile, and timid—those who seek security, rather than progress—socialism (in theory) provides a ready tonic to all of our anxieties.

Gen Z’s mental health problems didn’t arise all of a sudden. A 2022 study by Murmuration and the Walton Family Foundation, “Looking Forward with Gen Z,” found that “relative to their elders over age 25, Gen Z is about twice as likely (42% versus 23%) to battle depression and feelings of hopelessness” and “three times as likely (18% versus 5%) to say their challenges are so severe that they have had thoughts of self-harm or that they might be better off dead.” That’s tough stuff.

While it’s easy to blame the COVID-19 pandemic and government-imposed lockdowns for Gen Z’s feelings of vulnerability and hopelessness, Gen Z’s attraction to socialism predates these tragedies, as an October 2019 Gallup survey showed. In fact, Gallup noted that “young adults’ positive rating of socialism” had “hovered near 50%” since 2010.

Some of this is attributable, of course, to youthful idealism. But there’s a bigger issue: Most young adults don’t understand capitalism, socialism, communism, and most other “isms,” and our education system isn’t doing much to change that.

According to the Council for Economic Education, in 2024, only 27 states and the District of Columbia required students to take an economics course to graduate from high school. And when they did, many states approached economics from a personal finance perspective—how to balance a checkbook, make a budget, and understand the terms of a loan, for example—rather than the study of how individuals and nations peacefully transact and progress together.

Maybe that’s why so many people—including journalists, parents, policymakers, and especially teachers—see economics strictly as a “pocketbook” issue.

A recent Business Insider feature, “How America’s high schools are teaching capitalism,” confirms this, suggesting that the technique that seems to engage students most effectively involves focusing on “the day-to-day aspects” of economics, rather than on the big picture, which teaches that we live in a world of scarcity and must choose between our available options.

To some degree, this focus is being driven by social media – several teachers told the author — and social media’s incessant focus on affordability, fairness, income inequality, student debt, and other topics that fuel Gen Z concern, and angst.

What social media doesn’t usually allow us to see is the fact that free-market capitalism — the economic system that was first described by Adam Smith in the “Wealth of Nations” 250 years ago in Britain and is practiced in the United States and almost all of the advanced countries of the world — has done more to lift people out of poverty and further human well-being than any other economic system known to mankind. (And, yes, some people get very wealthy in the process, as most of us would love to do.)

This is true even in Communist China, where an estimated 800 million peasants were able to shed the yoke of extreme poverty after the country, beginning in 1978, “moved from central planning and autarky to a market-oriented [i.e., capitalist] economy.”

The process was still ongoing 20 years ago when I was a Chinese Studies student in college. I remember discussing how blue jeans (literally called “cow pants” in Chinese) had become a symbol in China, as they had in the former Soviet Union, for American openness and freedom.

Perhaps more than opening our eyes to new possibilities, social media has supercharged our tendency to compare ourselves to others, and, when the comparison is unfavorable, to experience envy.

Social media focuses intensely on the alleged sins of capitalism—greed, ever-rising prices, unfairness—while largely ignoring its vast and no less tangible benefits: abundance, freedom, innovation, opportunity, expression, and variety.

It’s time for both a truce and the truth. If social media influencers wish to expose the system’s flaws (and they should!), they also should expose its virtues.

It’s also time for the adults in the house to tell Gen Zers to “take a deep breath and show us what you’re made of.” And remind them: If you make the economy grow, you’re free to share your wealth however you see fit.

Richard N. Lorenc is president and CEO of Lexandria, an education nonprofit that seeks to reignite the American spirit through innovative classroom content and tools.