It would have been hard to know the wisdom of Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman or Matt Ridley or Deirdre McCloskey in August of 1914, before the experiments in large government were well begun.
But anyone who after the 20th century still thinks that thoroughgoing socialism, nationalism, imperialism, mobilization, central planning, regulation, zoning, price controls, tax policy, labour unions, business cartels, government spending, intrusive policing, adventurism in foreign policy, faith in entangling religion and politics, or most of the other thoroughgoing 19th-century proposals for governmental action are still neat, harmless ideas for improving our lives is not paying attention.
Foreign aid is clearly not a necessary condition of economic development. This fact is obvious from the history of the developed countries, all of which began poor and have invariably progressed without government-to-government aid.
It is clear also from the history of many underdeveloped countries — Hong Kong, Japan, Malaya — which have advanced in recent decades without foreign aid.
The lofty moral tone of the opponents of globalization is possible only because they have chosen not to think their position through.
While fat-cat capitalists might benefit from globalization, the biggest beneficiaries are, yes, Third World workers.
After all, global poverty is not something recently invented for the benefit of multinational corporations…
wherever the new export industries have grown, there has been measurable improvement in the lives of ordinary people.
Partly this is because a growing industry must offer a somewhat higher wage than workers could get elsewhere in order to get them to move.
More importantly, however, the growth of manufacturing–and of the penumbra of other jobs that the new export sector creates–has a ripple effect throughout the economy. The pressure on the land becomes less intense, so rural wages rise; the pool of unemployed urban dwellers always anxious for work shrinks, so factories start to compete with each other for workers, and urban wages also begin to rise.
Capitalism has raised living standards worldwide by a thousand fold. Societies that respect innovation and entrepreneurship can expect more of the same.
In the space of just a couple of hundred years real incomes and living standards have risen dramatically. From peasantry to prosperity – how did it happen ?
According to McCloskey in her 2013 John Bonython lecture presented by the Centre for Independent Studies, it was ideological change, rather than saving or exploitation, that created this prosperous modern world.
McCloskey proclaims “it’s OK to be in business” and asks those critical of capitalism to re-think their opposition.
Business and enterprise, she suggests, is altruistic, cooperative and the best way to lift living standards in developing and emerging economies.
In a marvellous speech in India on the origins of economic freedom (and its subsequent fruits), Deirdre McCloskey aptly crystallizes the deeper implications of her work on bourgeois virtues and bourgeois dignity:
The leading Bollywood films changed their heroes from the 1950s to the 1980s from bureaucrats to businesspeople, and their villains from factory owners to policemen, in parallel with a similar shift in the ratio of praise for market-tested improvement and supply in the editorial pages of The Times of India…
Did the change from hatred to admiration of market-tested improvement and supply make possible the Singh Reforms after 1991?
Without some change in ideology Singh would not in a democracy have been able to liberalize the Indian economy…
…After 1991 and Singh much of the culture didn’t change, and probably won’t change much in future.
Economic growth does not need to make people European.
Unlike the British, Indians in 2030 will probably still give offerings to Lakshmi and the son of Gauri, as they did in 1947 and 1991.
Unlike the Germans, they will still play cricket, rather well.
So it’s not deep “culture.” It’s sociology, rhetoric, ethics, how people talk about each other.
Piketty’s method of doing economics involves frequent grand proclamations about "social justice" and economic "evolutions," but he offers no analyses of the dynamics of individual decision-making, often referred to as "microeconomics," that should be central to the issues he raises…
Revealingly, Piketty writes of income and wealth as being claimed or "distributed," never as being earned or produced. The resulting statistics are too aggregated—too big-picture—to reveal what is happening to individuals on the ground…
He imagines that such aggregates interact in robotic fashion through a logic of their own, unmoved by individual human initiative, creativity, or choice…
If we follow the advice of Adam Smith and examine people’s ability to consume, we discover that nearly everyone in market economies is growing richer…
THE U.S. IS THEbête noir of Piketty and other progressives obsessed with monetary inequality.
But middle-class Americans take for granted their air-conditioned homes, cars, and workplaces—along with their smartphones, safe air travel, and pills for ailments ranging from hypertension to erectile dysfunction…
At the end of World War II, when monetary income and wealth inequalities were narrower than they’ve been at any time in the past century, these goods and services were either available to no one or affordable only by the very rich.
So regardless of how many more dollars today’s plutocrats have accumulated and stashed into their portfolios, the elite’s accumulation of riches has not prevented the living standards of ordinary people from rising spectacularly…
Piketty’s disregard for basic economic reasoning blinds him to the all-important market forces at work on the ground—market forces that, if left unencumbered by government, produce growing prosperity for all. Yet, he would happily encumber these forces with confiscatory taxes.
In place of capitalism, she talks of a system of ‘market-tested innovation and supply’:
You have to ask what the source of the inequality is.
If the source is stealing from poor people, I’m against it.
But if the source is, you got there first with an innovation that everyone wants to buy, so you get paid some crazy sum, you ought to be paid so much, don’t you think?
There is noting to be gained by focusing on inequality.
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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