There’s a lot of talk about socialism these days, despite it’s inherently flawed premise and repeated failures, resulting in millions dying, mass starvation, widespread human suffering, readers here already know the history. Unfortunately, it’s rising again due to new promotion from people who hate America, combined to create the perfect storm since we also recently stopped promoting the story of prosperity and our information ecosystems are deeply propagandized. Also, our biased education system simply ignores past examples that might challenge some of the ideals they’re so keen to promote, which I find both annoying and civilizationally suicidal. Perhaps this is cyclical, and every civilization has to re-learn forgotten mistakes (even though we have parables that try to help, but ofc they’re unhelpful if no one reads them). So all we can do is share stories which are more instructive than dry statistics.
Today we have a fun one which takes us back to the year 1825. Here, a wealthy Welsh industrialist named Robert Owen acquired a complete American town, a plot with 20,000 acres, 160-plus buildings, working mills, workshops, barns, farmland already producing food. He renamed it New Harmony, and 1,000 people showed up in year 1, most convinced they were present at the birth of a new way of running civilization. It’s also notable that Owen wasn’t some kind of crank, before ever setting foot in Indiana he’d already made his name running textile mills in New Lanark, Scotland with shorter hours, real schools, better housing, and the mills still turned a profit. For the early 1800s that’s really impressive and illustrative of his operator skills.
Although, his prior success is exactly what made him dangerous. Owen had convinced himself that people are basically a product of their environment, where you could rearrange the environment and you rearrange the person. Kill private property, kill competition, split the rewards evenly, and cooperation just… happens, naturally, without anyone having to be talked into it, which is of course idealist and ignorant of human nature. As is always the case, a very intelligent person is unable to model the behavior of others, many of whom simply operate differently.
The experiment pulled in serious people. Real optimism, real brainpower, real $ behind it. In January 1826 William Maclure floated an entire boat of scientists and educators down the Ohio River, historians still call it the “Boatload of Knowledge.” Thomas Say, the father of American entomology, was on it, so was naturalist Charles-Alexandre Lesueur along with Geologists, artists, educators, people like this. So this wasn’t some kind of backwoods commune of true believers with no credentials interested in getting high. It was, arguably, one of the highest concentrations of talent in America at that moment. If intelligence and good intentions were sufficient conditions for a new economic system to work, New Harmony had every box checked.
Unfortunately, it fell apart almost immediately.
This week's longform idea, we're talking about the (failed) socialist utopian experiment in America that lasted two years https://t.co/395RsSU4Vp
— Adam Singer (@AdamSinger) July 28, 2026