Wealth & Money Quote by Esther Dyson

The line lands like a polite confession: Dyson didn’t become a market evangelist by reading theory, but by living through its absence. Its power comes from the reversal of expectation. You’d assume “seeing a non-market economy” would produce a critique of capitalism; instead, it clarifies her affection for markets. That pivot is doing the work, signaling a worldview shaped less by ideology than by comparative experience.

Dyson’s intent is pragmatic, almost empirical. As a tech-world operator and investor-adjacent thinker, she’s pointing to markets not as moral philosophy but as infrastructure: price signals, feedback loops, incentives that actually bite. The subtext is that market economies, for all their inequities, can be surprisingly good at revealing information and coordinating human effort at scale. A non-market system can blunt that information flow, replacing it with bureaucracy, scarcity rituals, or political favoritism. You don’t need to name the Soviet Union or post-communist transitions for the implication to register.

There’s also a quiet rhetorical move here: “what I liked” is deliberately modest. She’s not claiming markets are just, only that they have qualities she learned to appreciate once they were gone. That restraint reads as a scientist’s posture: observation first, sweeping moral certainty last. In today’s culture-war atmosphere, where “capitalism” and “socialism” function like team jerseys, Dyson’s sentence argues for an unfashionable method - comparison, not purity. It’s a reminder that economic systems aren’t vibes; they’re lived constraints that become legible when you try their alternatives.