Book excerpt: The case for a modern democratic socialism is that capitalism is bad, or at least not very good, and that socialism would be an improvement. To fully and fairly assess democratic socialism's desirability, Lane Kenworthy argues in this book, we need to compare it to the best version of capitalism that humans have devised: social democratic capitalism. Kenworthy offers a close look at the evidence about how capitalist economies have performed on an array of outcomes.--