We’re a lot better off than that today. Even the global average life expectancy at birth in 1960, at 52.48 years, would have compared favorably to anything from the past. But in 2015 that same figure was 71.6 years.69
Today, the average person born worldwide can expect to live decades longer than anyone in the past could have reasonably hoped for. Capitalism literally gives the average person “new life” in the sense that old age was, for the average person, an unrealistic ambition. Technology cannot create more time, but it can give us the opportunity to have more of it.
But capitalism gives new life in another way: We are simply more likely to live in the first place.70 In premodern societies, almost one-third of children died before age five. Infant mortality in hunter-gatherer societies was almost thirty times greater than in America today, and child mortality was more than one hundred times greater. The average worldwide population-weighted child mortality rate was 43 percent in 1800. The worst-off countries in 1800 suffered the death of half of all children, but even the best-off countries endured the passing of about a third of all children. In America, as recently as 1890, infant mortality was 22 percent of new births.71
Today, the worldwide, population-weighted child mortality rate is 3.4 percent. Child mortality is 1.3 percent in China, which, along with Brazil, has experienced a fourfold decrease of child mortality over the past four decades.72 Since 1960 the worldwide infant mortality rate has declined from 121.9 per 1,000 live births to 31.7:73
Similarly, the mortality rate worldwide for all ages has decreased from 16.03 per 1,000 people in 1960 to 8.09 per 1,000 people in 2013.74
Think of all the value created because people simply lived.
This has been happening in part simply due to the correlation between health and wealth.75 More specifically, it’s from better medical care. Consider just a few aspects of medical care in the past. Would you like to be treated by the medieval doctors described by William Manchester?
The stars were known to be guided by angels, and physicians were constantly consulting astrologers and theologians. Doctors diagnosing illnesses were influenced by the constellation under which the patient had been born or taken sick; thus the eminent surgeon Guy de Chauliac wrote: “If anyone is wounded in the neck when the moon is at Taurus, the affliction will be dangerous.” Thousands of pitiful people disfigured by swollen lymph nodes in their necks mobbed the kings of England and France, believing that their scrofula could be cured by the touch of a royal hand. One document from the period is a calendar, published at Mainz, which designates the best astrological times for bloodletting. Epidemics were attributed to unfortunate configurations of the stars…76
Would you entrust your teeth to “dentists” in medieval England, who relied on “herbal remedies, charms, and amulets” for both cleaning and removal?77 Would you like to have a limb amputated before the first painless surgery with anesthetic in 1846?78 Would you trust medical examinations before 1896, when blood pressure instruments and X-ray machines—the latter costing only 20 percent in 2012 of what they cost in 191079—were invented? Or before 1901, before electrocardiograms, which weren’t even used widely until the 1920s?80 Or would you even like to be alive in America in the 1920s, when, according to Lewis Thomas, former dean of the Yale and New York University Schools of Medicine, going to a doctor probably lowered your chances for survival and most mothers by necessity became domestic nurses?81 Or around the same time, when sepsis infection killed nearly half of major-surgery patients?82 Even as recently as 1990, the number of women dying in or from childbirth worldwide was far higher than today.83 And as recently as a decade ago, sequencing a genome cost millions of dollars versus $10,000 today.84 The steady advance of medical care has gone a long way toward improving overall health outcomes.
Perhaps the most prominent result of these and other advances has been the steady reduction of death from disease. Pharaoh Rameses V could not with all his power prevent his own death from smallpox. (In fairness, there’s no cure for smallpox today, either, but there is a vaccine that works as a cure up to four days after infection.) Nathan Rothschild, the richest man in the world in 1836, died that same year from what today is an easily treatable infection.85 While Calvin Coolidge was president of the United States in 1924, his son died within a week from infection of a blister he got playing on the White House lawn.86 And, again, these were some of the wealthiest, most powerful people in the world. Life was much worse for most;87 malaria, typhoid fever, and dysentery killed thousands annually.88
Today, however, a wide variety of diseases—mumps, rubella, malaria, measles, sleeping sickness, elephantiasis, and river blindness—are drastically retreating worldwide, suggesting that “the total eradication of many diseases is now a realistic prospect.”89 In America, the death rate from infectious disease was only 2 percent in 2009.90 Other disease indicators have also significantly improved. Malaria, typhoid fever, and dysentery are non-factors in the developed world,91 with the last in particular probably being better known as a video game meme (“You have died of dysentery”) than a deadly disease.92 Seventy-five percent fewer people died from strokes in 2013 than did in the 1960s.93 AIDs peaked in the late 1990s; by 2010 incidence had decreased 20 percent from 1997.94 Cancer is still a terrible scourge, but we’re dealing with it better than ever. Apart from lung cancer, cancer incidence and death rate fell 16 percent from 1950 to 1997 and accelerated thereafter; once smoking decreased, lung cancer began to fall as well.95 As the number of artificial chemicals has dramatically increased over the past four decades, overall cancer death rates and age-adjusted cancer incidence have both declined. Half of all cancer patients died within five years of their diagnosis in the 1970s; 68 percent now live past that. Overall cancer incidence has declined 0.6 percent annually since 1994, saving 100,000 people today who otherwise would have died from the disease. The death rate from leukemia is 7.1 per 100,000, half of what environmental alarmist Rachel Carson fretted over in Silent Spring. An estimated 10,450 children were diagnosed with cancer in 2014, less than 1 percent of overall cancer deaths, and 80 percent of those diagnosed survive five years or more, up from 50 percent in the 1970s.96
Cancer causes 186 of every 100,000 deaths annually, but that’s in large part because far more Americans live past the age of sixty-five, the median age of cancer diagnosis. Americans in the early twentieth century did not live long enough to develop 75 percent of today’s cancers.97 Non-disease-based indicators have improved as well: Disability rates in Americans over sixty-five decreased from 26.2 percent to 19.7 percent between 1982 and 1999 (twice as fast as the mortality rate decreased).98 Historically, if you managed to make it to old age, it was unlikely you could be productive, never mind prosperous. Today, senior citizens in developed countries are a mass class of people.
We’re also more literate and more educated than ever before. For most of human history, most people—and more women than men—were illiterate. The great stories, such as the Iliad, Odyssey, and Beowulf, were told orally long before they were ever written down. Education of any kind was a privilege of the elite. As recently as 1820, only 12 percent of the world’s population was literate. The wealth created by capitalism has changed all of this. By 2014, only 15 percent of the world’s population remained illiterate—almost a complete inversion in less than two hundred years.99
Education has also increased. The average amount of years of education worldwide has increased from 2.97 years in 1950 to 8.99 in 2015:100
Thanks to capitalism, education and literacy are no longer the privilege of the elite but increasingly common to all.*
Capitalism has also completely transformed communication. For the entirety of human history until about 170 years ago, the travel speed of news was limited to the travel speed of people: i.e., by “foot, horse, sail, or, more recently, rail,” as economist Robert J. Gordon points out.101 History records many darkly comic examples of this defect in communic
ation. Thus did the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War, at first having decided to destroy the rebellious Mytileneans, send one boat to do just that. Changing their minds the next day, their only recourse was to send another boat after the first, with instructions to row as fast as it could to arrive in time to dissuade the first boat.102 The Battle of New Orleans, technically the final skirmish of the War of 1812, occurred after the War of 1812 had actually ended.103 The first telegram, sent in 1844, inaugurated a new era in human communication.104 But as impressive as its early innovations must have been to those who experienced them, they seem laughably primitive to us today because of the pace of technological advance. And the technology continues to evolve: In 2010, each American household had nearly 2.6 cell phones; in 2013, 91 percent of American adults had a cell phone.105 Mobile cell phone subscriptions have increased from 0.27 per 100 people in 1990 (think Gordon Gekko and his brick phone in 1987’s Wall Street) to 105.74 per 100 people(!) in 2014.106
The calls made on these devices, moreover, are cheaper. We take for granted today that a fixed-price phone service covers most essentially instantaneous long-distance calls, yet as recently as seventy years ago such a call would require multiple operators and could cost an hour’s wages.107 We even have technology—Facebook, Twitter, Skype—that allows free, instantaneous communication without a phone. For the first time in human history, two people can call one another without even knowing where the other is.108 That is a testament to the incredible transformative power of capitalism.
Markets have also utterly transformed computing. Iron Sky, an absurd science fiction film, illustrates this point. In this 2012 film, a Nazi cadre secretly escaped to the dark side of the moon at the end of World War II and spent the intervening years plotting an invasion of Earth. Their plans receive a considerable boost when they steal an American astronaut’s smartphone, which alone has more computing power than the totality of their equipment up to that point.109 Sound far-fetched? Well, yes. But the computing power differential is highly plausible. ENIAC, one of the first “modern” computers, debuted in 1946, right around the time the Nazis flee to the moon in Iron Sky. It weighed 27 tons, required 240 square feet (22.3 square meters) of floor space, and needed 174,000 watts (174 kilowatts) of power, enough to (allegedly) dim all the lights in Philadelphia when turned on.110 In 1949, Popular Mechanics predicted that one day a computer might weigh less than 1.5 tons.111 In the early 1970s, Seymour Cray, known as the “father of the supercomputer,” revolutionized the computer industry. His Cray-1 system supercomputer shocked the industry with a world-record speed of 160 million floating-point operations per second, an 8-megabyte main memory, no wires longer than four feet, and its ability to fit into a small room. The Los Alamos National Laboratory purchased it in 1976 for $8.8 million, or $36.9 million in today’s inflation-adjusted dollars. But as predicted by Moore’s Law (the number of transistors that can fit on a microchip will double roughly every twenty-four months),112 modern computing has improved and spread beyond even the wildest speculations of people living at the time of any of these computers (certain science fiction excepted). A team of University of Pennsylvania students in 1996 put ENIAC’s capabilities onto a single 64-square-millimeter microchip that required 0.5 watts, making it about 1/350,000th the size of the original ENIAC.113 And that was twenty years ago.
Popular Mechanics’ prediction proved correct, though a bit of an (understandable) understatement. Still, try telling its 1949 editorial staff that today we hold computers in our hands, place them in our pockets, and rest them on our laps. Laptop computers with 750 times the memory, 1,000 times the calculating power, and essentially an infinitely greater amount of general capabilities as the Cray-1 are now available at Walmart for less than $500.114 Bearing out the Iron Sky comparison, a smartphone with 16 gigabytes of memory has 250,000 times the capacity of the Apollo 11 guidance computer that enabled the first moon landing.115 A life’s wages in 1975 could have bought you the computing power of a pocket calculator in 2000.116 In 1997, $450 could have bought you 5 gigabytes of hard-drive storage that is free today.117 A MacBook Pro with 8 gigabytes of RAM has 1.6 million times more RAM than MANIAC, a 1951 “supercomputer.”118 Forget angels on the head of a pin: Intel can fit more than six million transistors onto the period at the end of this sentence.119
What this all means for the consumer is an unprecedented spread of technology. Today’s cell phones exceed the computing power of machines that required rooms mere decades ago. Nearly half the world uses the Internet, up from essentially zero in 1990.120
Today, then, computers are better, faster, smarter, more prevalent, and more connective than ever before. In the 1990s, progressive policy makers fretted over something called “the digital divide.” They convinced themselves that, absent government intervention, the Internet would be a plaything for the wealthy. They raised new taxes, transferred wealth, paid off some constituents, and claimed victory. But the truth is that the Internet was always going to be for everyone, because that is what the market does. It introduces luxuries for the wealthy, and the wealthy subsidize innovations that turn luxuries—cell phones, cars, medicine, computers, nutritious food, comfortable homes, etc.—into necessities. It is the greatest triumph of alchemy in all of human experience, and the response from many in every generation is ingratitude and entitlement.
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Now, none of this is to say that this miraculous explosion in material prosperity has not come with costs. Such is the nature of this life. Everything has trade-offs.
Nor is it to say that government hasn’t played a role in evening out some of the excesses of human enrichment. But paternalistic government is as old as the first Big Man leading the first band of hairless apes running across the savannas of Africa. Paternalism is the logic behind the rule of every Caesar, king, pasha, sultan, commissar, and emperor. Paternalism did not create the Miracle. Human ingenuity unleashed by the miracle of liberty, chiefly economic liberty—which yields political liberty—made this possible.
And yet, in the modern era, every generation takes the Miracle for granted. We are told, by people who should know better, that capitalism is making us sicker, poorer, and more exploited. That we are falling farther behind and therefore must look even farther behind us to some mythological golden age when we had it better. One typical poll result revealed that 66 percent of Americans believe that extreme poverty has “almost doubled in the past 20 years, 29 percent think it has not changed, whereas only 5 percent correctly stated that it has halved.” The numbers are no better elsewhere in the developed world: 58 percent of Britons assumed extreme poverty had increased and a third thought it had stayed the same.121 These pessimists answer in vain Thomas Babington Macaulay’s inquiry: “On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, are we to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”122
The free-market system depends on values, ideas, and institutions outside of the realm of economics to function, a topic I covered in the second half of this book. But for now the important point is this: The free-market system is not merely the best anti-poverty program ever conceived; it is quite literally the only anti-poverty system ever invented. Poverty is the natural human condition, and it remained the steady state of human affairs for nearly all of human history. Socialism as a label is a relatively recent invention. But socialism as an idea is beyond ancient. Socialism is the economics of the tribe. We evolved as a cooperative, resource-sharing species. This is one reason why the idea of socialism keeps coming back. It’s in our brains, alongside myriad other factory-preset ideas and desires: that capitalism is unnatural; individual liberty and free speech are unnatural; liberal democratic capitalism is at war with human nature in every generation.
It is a common theme in literature: Every wish comes with a catch. From Goethe’s and Marlowe’s Faust, to Kipling’s “Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo,” to Hans Christian Andersen’s “Galoshes of Fortu
ne,” to a half dozen episodes of The Twilight Zone, we must be careful what we wish for. The Miracle of now is the answer to a thousand generations of wishes by people whose lives were poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Capitalism is the greatest peaceful cooperative endeavor for human enrichment ever created—by orders of magnitude. The catch? It doesn’t feel like it. It doesn’t feel cooperative. It doesn’t even feel peaceful. It is full of uncertainty and tumult.
Capitalism cannot provide meaning, spirituality, or a sense of belonging. Those things are upstream of capitalism. And that’s okay. Capitalism is an economic system that is fantastic at doing what we claim we want from economic systems: growth and prosperity. The problem is that what we say we want from an economic system and what we actually want are often different things. Economics is a sphere of the larger civilization, and we want more than what mere capitalism can provide. We want meaning. We want to feel like we’re part of the tribe. But just as a hammer makes for a terrible knife, capitalism is a tool ill-suited for filling the holes in our souls.
Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy Page 44