Capitalism's (Near) Miraculous Achievement

A number of the candidates for the Democratic nomination for president have expressed their antipathy for capitalism, opting instead for some variation of socialism.

Polls show that socialism is popular, too, among college students and many of their professors, but this growing support for socialistic nostrums among so many Americans is very difficult to understand given the enormous success of capitalism in increasing the well-being of so many people around the globe.

Here are a few statistics adapted from a site called Human Progress via the Glenn Beck radio show of May 13. The recitation of these statistics begins at about the 1:37:15 mark of the podcast:

• In 1870 the average European life expectancy was 36 years. Globally, the figure was 30 years. Today, the numbers are 81 and 72 years respectively.
• In 1820 90% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty. Today it's only 10%.
• In 1800 43% of the world's children died before their fifth birthday. Today it's 4%.
• In 1816 only 0.87% of the world's people lived in a democratic society. Today it's 56%.
• In 1800 people living in France, at the time one of the world's richest countries, lived on 1846 calories per day. In Africa, the contemporary world's poorest continent, people now live on an average of 2624 calories per day.
• In 1800 88% of the world's population was illiterate. Today only 13% are illiterate.

Since the turn of the century the numbers are equally remarkable:

• GDP per person has risen globally by 52% since 2001, while infant mortality dropped 38% worldwide.
• Since 2001 life expectancy around the world has risen 6% and people in sub-Saharan Africa are living a full decade longer than they did prior to 2001.
• At the same time hunger has declined 33% globally since 2001, and undernourishment has decreased 27%.

These are astonishing statistics. Despite the fact that some people today live in horrendous circumstances the number who do is far less than it was a century ago and many of those who do live in penury exist in socialist dystopias like North Korea, Venezuela and Chad.

It's free markets, not centralized economic control, that have wrought this wonderful advance in human well-being, yet many people will vote in 2020 for politicians who want to kill the goose that's laying the golden eggs.

Here's a graph from Human Progress that shows the stunning explosion in GDP growth that the world has made since capitalism became more widespread in the 19th century:

According to the folks at Human Progress humanity has produced more economic output over the last two centuries than in all of the previous centuries combined. And this burst of wealth-creation led to a massive decrease in the rate of poverty.

In 1820, more than 90 per cent of the world population lived on less than $2 a day and more than 80 per cent lived on less than $1 a day (adjusted for inflation and differences in purchasing power).

By 2015, less than 10 percent of people lived on less than $1.90 a day, the World Bank’s current official definition of extreme poverty.

Why would anyone advocate undoing this modern near-miracle for human well-being in favor of policies that have consistently thrust people who live under them into abject misery? Hopefully, someone will ask Bernie Sanders that question in one of the upcoming debates.