The anti-globalisation anti-capitalists would have us throw all this away!

Adam Smith Institute


By: Tim Worstall
Date: 20 August 2014

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What glories this capitalist free market thing hath wrought

There’s nothing worse than being exploited by some running lackey pig dog of a capitalist, as Deirdre McCloskey reminds us:

The aim of the true Liberal should not be equality but “lifting up those below him.” It is to be achieved not by redistribution but by free trade and compulsory education and women’s rights.

And it came to pass. In the UK since 1800, or Italy since 1900, or Hong Kong since 1950, real income per head has increased by a factor of anywhere from 15 to 100, depending on how one allows for the improved quality of steel girders and plate glass, medicine and economics.

In relative terms, the poorest people in the developed economies and billions in the poor countries have been the biggest beneficiaries. The rich became richer, true. But the poor have gas heating, cars, smallpox vaccinations, indoor plumbing, cheap travel, rights for women, low child mortality, adequate nutrition, taller bodies, doubled life expectancy, schooling for their kids, newspapers, a vote, a shot at university and respect.

Never had anything similar happened, not in the glory of Greece or the grandeur of Rome, not in ancient Egypt or medieval China. What I call The Great Enrichment is the main fact and finding of economic history.

It’s that penultimate sentence which is so important. There have most certainly been many attempts at designing economic systems: there have been even more that just sorta happened out of voluntary interactions. But there’s only one of them that has actually managed what we are all the lucky, lucky, beneficiaries of.

That is, one economic method of organisation that has led to a substantial, sustained, increase in the standard of living of the average woman on the Clapham Omnibus.

Nothing else, nothing planned nor nothing unplanned, has managed this. And that really is the main fact and finding of economic history. It’s the one unique even in it too. McCloskey, you and I, we might differ on the details of how it all happened but we shouldn’t allow minor disagreements over precedence between the flea and the louse to obscure the manner in which we’re all feeding off that larger truth. That nothing else does work as well as those largely bourgeois virtues plus economic and social liberty.