The following was adapted from remarks recently delivered on a Munk Debate podcast.
I’m on the capitalism side of this debate because poverty is what I care about the most. I remember as a young boy seeing the haunting images of poverty from the east African famine of the early 1970s. It was the first time most Canadians and Americans had ever seen the face of true, grinding poverty; the boy with flies on his face and a distended belly in the National Geographic magazine. You remember it, so do I.
It haunted me. I wanted to know what could be done, but the implication was that nothing could be done. The world couldn’t get better. Time passes and it seemed like attention to that boy and the poorest people in the world had waned. I asked, had he been forgotten? Had the poorest been forgotten?
In my early 30s I decided to find the answer to what had happened to the poorest people in the world. I found something that shocked me and changed my life. I had assumed that poverty had gotten worse since I was a child. I was wrong. According to the best data in the world, compiled by the World Bank and economists at MIT and Columbia University, four-fifths of starvation-level world poverty had been eradicated since the 1970s. That is a humanitarian achievement beyond our wildest dreams.
Two billion people had been pulled out of poverty since I was a young child. What happened? It was globalization, which is much maligned today. It was free trade, despised on the right and the left. It was property rights and the rule of law. It was the culture of entrepreneurship that brought your ancestors to this great country, that pulled two billion of your brothers and sisters out of poverty. That is the essence of how capitalism saves lives.
I am not a radical. I will not tell you that we need no regulations. I will not say that we do not need reform. I will not tell you that capitalism is perfect. But let’s remember the truth here.
This is not a partisan or political statement. We have a humanitarian opportunity to repeat the achievements of the past 50 years, not by curbing capitalism or getting rid of capitalism, but by spreading capitalism more widely. People need to throw off the tyranny of their poverty and the tyranny of the leaders who want to hold them in statist regimes.
The debate before us is whether we should turn our backs on capitalism. Like I said before, reform it. Find better ways to regulate it. Tax people more. But to turn our backs on capitalism per se is to turn our backs on the people around the world whom we’ve never met and will never see, but who we have the privilege of lifting up with our system, with the gift to the world that is our values of freedom and competition. To reject that is to pull the ladder up behind us. It’s not right.
If we let capitalism thrive, if we share it, if we spread it widely, then we can lift up the next two billion people together.
Arthur C. Brooks is an academic, author and contributor to The Washington Post.
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