* For clarity, I bracket feudalists; corporatists and monopolists together, i.e. those sources of income which require the protection of the government.
'Capitalism' on the other hand, isn't an '-ism'. It's just normal human nature expressing itself. People invent and use labor saving devices, those are true 'capital'. (Clearly, some really large scale labour-saving devices, like the National Grid or the road network can only be provided by the State, but they are still capital).
People like having nice stuff, so they want to earn as much as they can for a given level of risk or effort (or minimise risk for a given level of income etc). Somebody else has got to make that nice stuff. People like to keep their earnings rather than seeing them siphoned off in tax or rent or by a monopolistic employer. Human nature.
Sorry for the length of this footnote :-)
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The article is headed: It’s not thanks to capitalism that we’re living longer, but progressive politics.
In recent years prominent pundits including Steven Pinker, Jordan Peterson and Bill Gates have invoked the progress in global life expectancies to defend capitalism against a growing tide of critics.
Pinker is a decent sort (even though he's based his whole career on padding out one chapter from a Jared Diamond book); Peterson is a right wing lunatic; and Gates is a monopolist-corporatist masquerading as a capitalist.
It’s a familiar story. The prevailing narrative is that capitalism was a progressive force that put an end to serfdom and set off a dramatic rise in living standards. But this fairytale doesn’t hold up against the evidence.
Serfdom was a brutal system that generated extraordinary human misery, yes. But it wasn’t capitalism that put an end to it. As the historian Silvia Federici demonstrates, a series of successful peasant rebellions across Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries overthrew feudal lords and gave peasants more control over their own land and resources.
Those serfs wanted to run their own small businesses (farms). Life under feudalism (or Communism) is miserable and there is no point in working any harder than you are forced to. So this was a revolt by people wanting to run their own small businesses for their own benefit i.e. a revolt by capitalists against feudalists.
The fruits of this revolution were astonishing in terms of wellbeing. Wages doubled and nutrition improved. It was a period of dramatic social progress by the standards of the time.
Hardly surprising. Capitalism works better than feudalism.
Then the backlash happened. Upset at the growing power of peasants and workers, and angry about rising wages, a nascent capitalist class organised a counter-revolution. They began enclosing the commons and forcing peasants off the land, with the explicit intention of driving down the cost of wages.
Those weren't capitalists, those were feudalists re-asserting themselves.
With subsistence economies destroyed, people had no choice but to work for pennies simply in order to survive. According to the Oxford economists Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila Hopkins, real wages declined by up to 70% from the end of the 15th century all the way through the 17th century.
Yes, the employers in towns and cities took advantage of the cheap labor (most quite cruelly so, but if all your competitors do it, you have to do it as well). Better to eke out a miserable living in a town that starve in the countryside.
Famines became commonplace and nutrition deteriorated. In England, average life expectancy fell from 43 years in the 1500s to the low 30s in the 1700s. In short, the rise of capitalism generated a prolonged period of immiseration.
For sure, we've established that. Successful peasants' revolt = wages doubled and nutrition improved. Feudalists re-assert themselves = the opposite happens.
He's also jumping the gun a bit here. The industrial revolution started sometime after 1760, depending how you define or measure it.
Drawing on a wide range of studies, Szreter shows that populations directly affected by industrial growth in Britain experienced a steady decline in life expectancy, from the 1780s through the 1870s, down to levels not seen since the Black Death in the 14th century.
Yes, that was because of poor nutrition (see above); employers exploiting the cheap labor that the feudalists had turfed off the land (see above); and appalling living conditions in towns and cities...
It wasn’t until the 1880s that urban life expectancies finally began to rise – at least in Europe. But what drove these sudden gains? Szreter finds it was down to a simple intervention: sanitation.
Agreed.
And yet progress toward this goal was opposed, not enabled, by the capitalist class – libertarian landlords and factory owners refused to allow officials to build sanitation systems on their properties, and refused to pay the taxes required to get the work done.
Their resistance was broken only once commoners won the right to vote and workers organised into unions. Over the following decades these movements leveraged the state to intervene against landlords and factory owners, delivering not only sanitation systems but also universal healthcare, education and public housing. According to Szreter, access to these public goods spurred soaring life expectancy throughout the 20th century.
OK, broadly correct.
Democracy is inherently a good thing, and it leads to universal healthcare/education which are clearly also good things (why the government should get involved in these rather than 'leaving it to the markets' is a separate topic). But proper free-market capitalism (as opposed to corporatism and cronyism) is part and parcel of democracy, each requires the other. I don't think it's possible to have one without the other. PR China is a totalitarian system which does not have free-market capitalism; it has crony capitalism.
But the interventions that matter when it comes to life expectancy do not require high levels of GDP per capita. The European Union has a higher life expectancy than the United States, with 40% less income.
The '40% lower' appears to be true. GDP in Europe has flat-lined since 2008, in the USA, it rebounded quite nicely, so well done them! (glossing over the fact that incomes/wealth are even more unequally distributed in the USA than in Europe, so median American is not better off than in 2008 either). I think the point here is that European countries spend on average 8% of GDP on price-regulated healthcare. For a similar level of service, the medical-industrial bloc in the USA is allowed to charge two or three times as much.
Costa Rica and Cuba beat the US with only a fraction of the income, and both achieved their greatest gains in life expectancy during periods when GDP wasn’t growing at all.
So why are people trying to flee Cuba and get to Florida, and not the other way round?
So let’s give credit where credit is due: progress in life expectancy has been driven by progressive political movements that have harnessed economic resources to deliver robust public goods. History shows that in the absence of these progressive forces, growth has quite often worked against social progress, not for it.
How is Cuba 'progressive'? LOLZ.
He's missed the point anyway; the optimum is proper democracy and proper free-market capitalism, where the government restricts itself to doing what it does best (e.g. providing; or subsidising and regulating privately-provided universal healthcare and education) and lets the private sector to do what it does best (anything it wants, basically).
We do not know what the Industrial Revolution would have looked like if it hadn't been fueled by cheap labour/peasants driven off the land. Factories would have had to offer much higher wages to tempt people off the land, for a start, so it might have been slower, but with much more favourable outcomes for all concerned.