In Defense of Global Capitalism - Brossura

Norberg, Johan; Tanner, Roger; Sanchez, Julian

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1930865473 ISBN 13: 9781930865471

Casa editrice: Cato Inst, 2017

Riassunto

Marshalling facts and the latest research findings, the author systematically refutes the adversaries of globalization, markets, and progress. This book will change the debate on globalization in this country and make believers of skeptics.

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In Defense of Global Capitalism

By Johan Norberg

CATO INSTITUTE

Copyright © 2003 Cato Institute
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-930865-47-1

Contents

Preface..............................................................7I. Every day in every way .........................................19The half truth.......................................................20Poverty reduction....................................................25Hunger...............................................................31Education............................................................36Democratization......................................................38Oppression of women..................................................43China................................................................47India................................................................51Global inequality....................................................54Reservations.........................................................60II. ... and it's no coincidence.....................................63That's capitalism for you!...........................................64Growth-a blessing....................................................72Freedom or equality? Why choose?.....................................84Property rights-for the sake of the poor.............................90The East Asian "miracle".............................................99The African morass...................................................104III. Free trade is fair trade........................................113Mutual benefit.......................................................114Important imports....................................................120Free trade brings growth.............................................128No end of work.......................................................136Freedom of movement-for people as well...............................145IV. The development of the developing countries.....................151An unequal distribution-of capitalism................................152The white man's shame................................................156The case of Latin America............................................163On the trade route...................................................169"Let them keep their tariffs"........................................173The debt trap........................................................177The right medicine...................................................186V. Race to the top.................................................191I'm all for free trade, but .........................................192Child labor..........................................................198But what about us?...................................................203Big is beautiful.....................................................210"Gold and green forests".............................................224VI. Irrational, international capital?..............................239The leaderless collective............................................240Regulate more?.......................................................249Tobin tax............................................................253The Asian crisis.....................................................259Instead of crisis....................................................264The "dictatorship of the market".....................................268VII. Liberalize, don't standardize...................................277The right to choose a culture........................................278The onward march of freedom..........................................286Notes................................................................293Index................................................................307

Chapter One

Every day in every way ...

The half truth

At least since 1014, when Archbishop Wulfstan, preaching in York, declared that "The world is in a rush and is getting close to its end," people have believed that everything is growing worse, that things were better in the old days. Much of the discussion surrounding globalization presupposes that the world is rapidly going to hell in a handbasket. A few years ago, Pope John Paul II echoed his colleague of a thousand years ago by summing up world development in the following terms:

Various places are witnessing the resurgence of a certain capitalist neoliberalism which subordinates the human person to blind market forces and conditions the development of peoples on those forces.... In the international community, we thus see a small number of countries growing exceedingly rich at the cost of the increasing impoverishment of a great number of other countries; as a result the wealthy grow ever wealthier, while the poor grow ever poorer.

The world is said to have become increasingly unfair. The chorus of the debate on the market economy runs: "The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer." This statement is offered as a dictate of natural law, not as a thesis to be argued. But if we look beyond the catchy slogans and study what has actually happened in the world, we find this thesis to be a half-truth. The first half is true: the rich have indeed grown richer-not all of them everywhere, but generally speaking. Those of us who are privileged to live in affluent countries have grown appreciably richer in the past few decades. So too have the Third World rich. But the second half is, quite simply, wrong. The poor have not, generally speaking, come to be worse off in recent decades. On the contrary, absolute poverty has diminished, and where it was quantitatively greatest-in Asia-many hundreds of millions of people who barely twenty years ago were struggling to make ends meet have begun to achieve a secure existence and even a modest degree of affluence. Global misery has diminished and the great injustices have started to unravel. This opening chapter will contain a long succession of figures and trend descriptions that are necessary to correct the very widespread misunderstanding that exists concerning the state of the world.

One of the most interesting books published in recent years is On Asian Time: India, China, Japan 1966-1999, a travelogue in which Swedish author Lasse Berg and photographer Stig Karlsson describe new visits to Asian countries where they traveled during the 1960s. Then, they saw poverty, abject misery, and imminent disaster. Like many other travelers to those countries, they could not bring themselves to hold out much hope for the future, and they thought that socialist revolution might be the only way out. Returning to India and China in the 1990s, they could not help seeing how wrong they were. More and more people have extricated themselves from poverty; the problem of hunger is steadily diminishing; the streets are cleaner. Mud huts have given way to brick buildings, wired up for electricity and sporting television aerials on their roofs.

When Berg and Karlsson first visited Calcutta, a tenth of its inhabitants were homeless, and every morning trucks sent by the public authorities or missionary societies would go around collecting the bodies of those who had died in the night. Thirty years later, setting out to photograph people living on the streets, they had difficulty in finding any such people. The rickshaw, a passenger cart pulled by a barefoot man, is disappearing from the urban scene, and people are traveling by car, motorcycle, and subway instead.

When Berg and Karlsson showed young Indians photographs of what things looked like on that last visit, they refused to believe that it was even the same place. Could things really have been so dreadful? One striking illustration of the change is provided by a pair of photographs on page 42 of their book. In the old one, taken in 1976, a 12-year-old Indian girl named Satto holds up her hands. They are already furrowed and worn, prematurely aged by many years' hard work. The recent picture shows Satto's 13-year-old daughter Seema, also holding up her hands. They are young and soft, the hands of a child whose childhood has not been taken away from her.

The biggest change of all is in people's thoughts and dreams. Television and newspapers bring ideas and images from the other side of the globe, widening people's notions of what is possible. Why should one have to spend all one's life in one place? Why must a woman be forced to have children early and sacrifice her career? Why must marriages be arranged-and the untouchables excluded from them-when family relations in other countries are so much freer? Why make do with this kind of government when there are alternative political systems available?

Lasse Berg writes, self-critically:

Reading what we observers, foreigners as well as Indians, wrote in the 60s and 70s, nowhere in these analyses do I see anything of present-day India. Often nightmare scenarios-overpopulation, tumult, upheaval or stagnation-but not this calm and steady forward-jogging, and least of all this modernization of thoughts and dreams. Who foresaw that consumerism would penetrate so deeply in and among the villages? Who foresaw that both the economy and general standard of living would do so well? Looking back, what the descriptions have in common is an overstatement of the extraordinary, frightening, uncertain (most writers had their personal hobby-horses and favorites) and an understatement of the force of normality.

The development described by Lasse Berg has resulted, not from socialist revolution, but rather from a move in the past few decades toward greater individual liberty. Freedom of choice and international exchange have grown, and investments and development assistance have transmitted ideas and resources, allowing the developing world to benefit from the knowledge, wealth, and inventions of other countries. Imports of medicines and new health care systems have improved living conditions. Modern technology and new methods of production have stepped up output and improved the food supply. Individual citizens have become more and more free to choose their own occupations and to sell their products. We can tell from the statistics how this enhances national prosperity and reduces poverty among the population. But the most important thing of all is liberty itself, the independence and dignity that autonomy confers on people who have been living under oppression.

With the spread of humanist ideas, slavery, which a few centuries ago was a worldwide phenomenon, has been beaten down in one continent after another. It lives on today illegally but, since the liberation of the last slaves in the Arabian Peninsula in 1970, has been forbidden practically everywhere on earth. The forced labor of precapitalist economies is being rapidly superseded by freedom of contract and freedom of movement where the market breaks through.

Poverty reduction

Between 1965 and 1998, the average world citizen's income practically doubled, from $2,497 to $4,839, adjusted for purchasing power and inflation. That increase has not come about through the industrialized nations multiplying their incomes. During this period the richest fifth of the world's population increased their average income from $8,315 to $14,623, or by roughly 75 percent. For the poorest fifth of the world's population, the increase has been faster still, with average income more than doubling during the same period from $551 to $1,137. World consumption today is more than twice what it was in 1960.

Thanks to material developments in the past half century, the world has over three billion more people living above the poverty line. This is historically unique. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has observed that, all in all, world poverty has fallen more during the past 50 years than during the preceding 500. In its Human Development Report 1997, the UNDP writes that humanity is in the midst of "the second great ascent." The first began in the 19th century, with the industrialization of the United States and Europe and the rapid spread of prosperity. The second began during the post-war era and is now in full swing, with first Asia and then the other developing countries scoring ever-greater victories in the war against poverty, hunger, disease, and illiteracy.

The great success in reducing poverty in the 20th century shows that eradicating severe poverty in the first decades of the 21st century is feasible.

Poverty is still rapidly diminishing. "Absolute poverty" is usually defined as the condition of having an income less than one dollar a day. In 1820 something like 85 percent of the world's population were living on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day. By 1950 that figure had fallen to about 50 percent and by 1980 to 31 percent. According to World Bank figures, absolute poverty has fallen since 1980 from 31 to 20 percent (a figure of 24 percent is often mentioned, meaning 24 percent of the population of the developing countries). The radical reduction of the past 20 years is unique in that not only the proportion but also the total number of people living in absolute poverty has declined-for the first time in world history. During these two decades the world's population has grown by a billion and a half, and yet the number of absolute poor has fallen by about 200 million. That decrease is connected with economic growth. In places where prosperity has grown fastest, poverty has been most effectively combated. In East Asia (China excluded), absolute poverty has fallen from 15 to just over 9 percent, in China from 32 to 17 percent. Six Asians in 10 were absolutely poor in 1975. Today's figure, according to the World Bank, is fewer than 2 out of 10.

Even those encouraging findings, however, almost certainly overestimate world poverty significantly because the World Bank uses notoriously unreliable survey data as the basis for its own assessments. Former World Bank economist Surjit S. Bhalla recently published his own calculations, supplementing survey results with national accounts data. This method, he argues convincingly, is far more likely to provide an accurate measurement. Bhalla found that poverty had fallen precipitously, from a level of 44 percent in 1980 to 13 percent at the end of 2002. If those figures are correct, then the last 20 years have seen an extraordinary, unprecedented reduction of poverty-twice that achieved in any other 20-year period on record. The UN's goal of lowering world poverty to below 15 percent by 2015 has already been achieved and surpassed.

"But," the skeptic asks, "what do people in the developing countries want consumption and growth for? Why must we force our way of life upon them?" The answer is that we must not force a particular way of life on anyone. Whatever their values, the great majority of people the world over desire better material conditions, for the simple reason that they will then have more options, regardless of how they then decide to use that increased wealth. As Indian economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has emphasized, poverty is not just a material problem. Poverty is something wider: it is about powerlessness, about being deprived of basic opportunities and freedom of choice. Small incomes are often symptomatic of the absence of these things, of people's marginalization or subjection to coercion. Human development means enjoying a reasonably healthy and secure existence, with a good standard of living and freedom to shape one's own life. It is important to investigate material development because it suggests how wealth can be produced and because it contributes to development in this broader sense. Material resources, individual and societal, enable people to feed and educate themselves, to obtain health care, and to be spared the pain of watching their children die. Those are pretty universal human desires, one finds, when people are allowed to choose for themselves.

The worldwide improvement in the human condition is reflected in a very rapid growth of average life expectancy. At the beginning of the 20th century, average life expectancy in the developing countries was under 30 years; by 1960 it had risen to 46, and in 1998 it was 65. Longevity in the developing countries today is nearly 15 years higher than it was a century ago in the world's leading economy at the time, Britain. Development has been slowest in sub-Saharan Africa, but even there life expectancy has risen, from 41 to 51 years since the 1960s. Average life expectancy remains highest in the most affluent countries-in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries it is 78-but the fastest improvement has been in the poor countries. In 1960, their average life expectancy was 60 percent of that of the affluent countries. Today it is more than 80 percent. Nine out of every 10 people in the world today can expect to live beyond 60, which is more than twice the average only a hundred years ago.

In On Asian Time, Berg describes returning to Malaysia 30 years after his first visit and suddenly realizing that in the meantime the average life expectancy of the population has risen by 15 years. That means that the people he meets there have been able to celebrate every birthday since his last visit having come only half a year closer to death.

The improvement in health has been partly because of better eating habits and living conditions, but also because of improved health care. Twenty years ago there was one doctor for every thousand people; today there are 1.5. In the very poorest countries, there was 0.6 of a doctor per thousand inhabitants in 1980; this statistic has almost doubled to 1.0. Perhaps the most dependable indicator of the living conditions of the poor is infant mortality, which in the developing countries has fallen drastically. Whereas 18 percent of newborns-almost one in five!-died in 1950, by 1976 this figure had fallen to 11 percent and in 1995 was only 6 percent. In the past 30 years alone, mortality has been almost halved, from 107 deaths per thousand births in 1970 to 59 per thousand in 1998. More and more people, then, have been able to survive despite poverty. And even as more people in poor countries survive, a progressively smaller proportion of the world's population is poor, which in turn suggests that the reduction of poverty has been still greater than is apparent from a superficial study of the statistics.

Hunger

Longer lives and better health are connected with the reduction of one of the cruelest manifestations of underdevelopment-hunger. Calorie intake in the Third World has risen by 30 percent per capita since the 1960s. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 960 million people in the developing countries were undernourished in 1970. In 1991 the figure was 830 million, falling by 1996 to 790 million. In proportion to population, this is an immensely rapid improvement. Thirty years ago nearly 37 percent of the population of the developing countries were afflicted with hunger. Today's figure is less than 18 percent. Many? Yes. Too many? Of course. But the number is rapidly declining. It took the first two decades of the 20th century for Sweden to be declared free from chronic malnutrition. In only 30 years the proportion of hungry in the world has been reduced by half, and it is expected to decline further, to 12 percent by 2010. There have never been so many of us on earth, and we have never had such a good supply of food. During the 1990s, the ranks of the hungry diminished by an average of 6 million every year, at the same time as the world's population grew by about 800 million.

Things have moved fastest in East and Southeast Asia, where the proportion of hungry has fallen from 43 to 13 percent since 1970. In Latin America, it has fallen from 19 to 11 percent, in North Africa and the Middle East from 25 to 9 percent, in South Asia from 38 to 23 percent. The worst development has occurred in Africa south of the Sahara, where the number of hungry has actually increased, from 89 to 180 million people. But even there the proportion of the population living in hunger has declined, albeit marginally, from 34 to 33 percent.

(Continues...)

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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Cato Inst
• Data di pubblicazione: 2017
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1930865473
• ISBN 13: 9781930865471
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 260
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile