The greatest achievement in human history
15 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
in development economics, economic history, growth disasters, growth miracles Tags: The Great Enrichment, The Great Escape, The Great Fact
The World Bank reported on Oct. 9 that the share of the world population living in extreme poverty had fallen to 15% in 2011 from 36% in 1990. Earlier this year, the International Labor Office reported that the number of workers in the world earning less than $1.25 a day has fallen to 375 million 2013 from 811 million in 1991.
Such stunning news seems to have escaped public notice, but it means something extraordinary: The past 25 years have witnessed the greatest reduction in global poverty in the history of the world.
To what should this be attributed? Official organizations noting the trend have tended to waffle, but let’s be blunt: The credit goes to the spread of capitalism. Over the past few decades, developing countries have embraced economic-policy reforms that have cleared the way for private enterprise.
The reduction in world poverty has attracted little attention because it runs against the narrative pushed by those hostile to capitalism. The Michael Moores of the world portray capitalism as a degrading system in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Yet thanks to growth in the developing world, world-wide income inequality—measured across countries and individual people—is falling, not rising, as Branco Milanovic of City University of New York and other researchers have shown.
Capitalism’s bad rap grew out of a false analogy that linked the term with “exploitation.” Marxists thought the old economic system in which landlords exploited peasants (feudalism) was being replaced by a new economic system in which capital owners exploited industrial workers (capitalism). But Adam Smith had earlier provided a more accurate description of the economy: a “commercial society.” The poorest parts of the world are precisely those that are cut off from the world of markets and commerce, often because of government policies.
Douglas Irwin
Economic Developement in Cuba compared
08 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
in comparative institutional analysis, development economics, growth disasters, growth miracles, politics - USA Tags: Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba
Everything is just getting better and better in the developing world
05 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
in development economics, growth disasters, growth miracles, health economics Tags: infant mortality, life expectancy, The Great Escape
HT: Alex Epstein
The Treason Of The Clerisy: Capitalism And The Intellectuals After 1848
02 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
in development economics, economic history, growth disasters, growth miracles, Marxist economics Tags: capitalism and freedom, Deirdre McCloskey, The Great Enrichment, The Great Fact
Deirdre McCloskey is of the view that the “the clerisy” has been, with notable exceptions, hostile to capitalism and downright contemptuous of the morals and attitudes of the middle class that has flourished under capitalism:
The Germans called it the Clerisei or later the Bildungsbürgertum, the cultivated and reading as against the commercial and bettering bourgeoisie. In the eighteenth century the members of the clerisy such as Voltaire and Tom Paine had courageously advocated our liberties.
But in the 1830s and 1840s a much enlarged clerisy, mostly the sons of bourgeois fathers, commenced sneering at the liberties the fathers exercised so vigorously in the market and the factory.
On the right the clerisy under the influence of Romance looked back with nostalgia to an imagined medieval time without markets, in which stasis and hierarchy ruled…
On the left, meanwhile, the clerisy, likewise influenced by Romance, and then by historical materialism, developed the illiberal idea that ideas do not matter.
What matters to progress, they declared, is the unstoppable tide of history, aided (they declared further, contradicting themselves) by protests or strikes or even violent revolutions directed at the thieving bourgeoisie, movements to be led of course by the clerisy.
Later, in European socialism and American progressivism, the left proposed to defeat bourgeois monopoly of markets by gathering under regulation or central planning or ownership of the means of production all the monopolies into one big monopoly of violence called the state.
Yet the commercial bourgeoisie so despised by the clerisy left and right made the Great Enrichment and the modern world.
The Enrichment gigantically improved our lives, showing that both social Darwinism and economic Marxism were mistaken. The genetically inferior races and classes and ethnicities proved not to be so. The exploited proletariat was not immiserised but enriched.
and
Forcing in an illiberal way the French style of equality of outcome, cutting down the tall poppies, treating people as sad children to be engineered by the experts of the clerisy, we have found, has often had a high cost in damaging liberty and slowing betterment. Not always, but often.
On the other hand, introducing the Scottish style of equality of liberty and dignity, as in Hong Kong and Norway and France itself, has regularly led to an astounding betterment and to a real equality of outcome—with even the poor acquiring automobiles and plumbing denied in earlier times even to the rich, and acquiring political rights and social dignity denied in earlier times to everyone except the rich
The first fridge for a family and whole village
31 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in development economics, growth disasters, growth miracles Tags: capitalism and freedom, global poverty, India, The Great Enrichment, The Great Fact
The world’s poverty – in 50 seconds from BBC
30 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in development economics, growth disasters, growth miracles Tags: capitalism and freedom, global poverty, The Great Enrichment, The Great Fact
Richest queue in India (world perhaps) and cronyism at its best..
28 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in growth disasters, growth miracles, politics - USA, Public Choice, rentseeking Tags: cronyism, India, President Obama, rent seeking
This picture is quite an interesting one. It shows India’s richest businessmen queuing to wait to meet US President Barack Obama patiently. It is ironical in many ways to see the rich and mighty queue like school children waiting for their score card or something. In many ways it is a score card of future where the chosen guys would either get to invest in US or be a partner of US money into India.
It clearly shows the power of politics. Those who keep talking of free markets and so on should see how politics dominates the game. At the end of the day, you have to get closer to the politique to see your empire grow.
But this is also an example of cronyism where business and politics get real close. Deals are signed amidst favorites and it is dubbed as competition. Most of cronyism happens behind the scenes and this is all…
View original post 55 more words
Greece should default and abandon the euro – Jeff Miron
27 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in budget deficits, currency unions, development economics, economic growth, economic history, Euro crisis, fiscal policy, global financial crisis (GFC), growth disasters, law and economics, macroeconomics, poverty and inequality Tags: currency unions, Euroland, Greece, optimal currency area, sovereign default
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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