Blog Post
700 million humans have moved out of deep poverty in the 21st century. Thank capitalism
AEIdeas
July 14, 2015
Some astonishing figures from Pew Research. From 2001 to 2011, nearly 700 million people globally moved out of poverty, meaning $2 a day or less. And the share of humans who are either poor or low income ($2.01 to $10.00 a day) fell to 71% from 79% as middle-income nearly doubled to 13% from 7%.
The wonders than can occur with a just a little bit of economic freedom. A little bit of trade and investment and profit seeking. Or as AEI President Arthur Brooks writes in his new book, “The Conservative Heart” (including China’s 35-year economic liberalization): “Capitalism has saved a couple of billion people and we have treated this miracle like a state secret.”
That number includes 39.5 million of Brazilians lifted out of poverty because of the strong socialist programs of the last 10-12 years. Vicariously crediting this to capitalism is dishonest, to say the least.
Brazil is not socialist it is captalist. The money flowing from mid class to lower class people is coming from profit generated by capitalism.
Don’t mix socialist politics with capitalism.
If your socialist govt had of gotten out of the way Brazil may have seen double that number lifted out of poverty
MMM, the number of people that went from “poor” to any of the other categories is over 700,000,000. Even if socialist programs had contributed 40,000,000 – as you suggest – the capitalist method is still over 17 times as successful. Which one would you – as a objective observer – recommend we apply?
This would make for an interesting write-up for empirical evidence of the Ricardo Model (among others)
Too bad sustained and exponential growth is environmentally unsustainable. Wars over commodities like water and food will be here sooner than later. Not to mention Global Warming.
“Exponential growth” is just growth, and it is wonderful. It makes more food on less land, makes us healthier, live longer and better, it keeps lifting everyone higher. Food is always getting cheaper and better, except when govt screws it up (ethanol). There has never been a water war, and never will be, because desalination now costs less than one cent per gallon. Read Julian Simon, Indur Goklany, Matt Ridley …
Bullshit !! never trust internet stuff especially when it say then the current capistalism is good …
Current capitalism is great. It is the socialist welfare state which is crushing growth, jobs, freedom and causing extreme economic instability. Europe, Japan, Greece, Puerto Rico, Chicago, Detroit … All are the same vote-buying, corrupt, doomed Marxist model.