Market antipathies and neo-Malthusian
doomsday talk are widespread and go hand-in-hand. There is much that they miss. Deirdre McCloskey celebrated the Great Fact.
And the world now knows that Nobelist
Angus Deaton celebrated The Great Escape.
Deaton notes in his Preface that, “The Great Escape is a movie about men escaping from a prisoner-of-war
camp in WW II. The Great Escape in this book is the story of mankind’s escape from deprivation and early death, how people
have managed to make their lives better and led the way for others to follow.” (p. ix) Read the book.
Note Deaton's last phrase. One can say that
there is “good inequality and “bad inequality.” The former refers to earned success and is enlightening;
the latter refers to entrenched and sclerotic rent-seeking, the bread and butter of our political class.
Here is much more on Deaton. Even more at Marginal Revolution,
Back to Facts and Escapes. Steven Landsburg put it this way:
“Modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years ago. For
the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened. Well, not quite nothing. There
were wars, political intrigue, the invention or agriculture – but none of that stuff had much effect on the quality of
people’s lives. Almost
everyone lived on the modern equivalent of $400 to $600 a year, just above the
subsistence level. True there were
always aristocracies who lived far better, but numerically, they were quite
insignificant …” Steven Landsburg (WSJ, 2007)
William Baumol and his colleagues
wrote:
“The most astonishing thing about the extraordinary growth
and innovation that the U.S. and other economies have achieved over the past
two centuries is that it does not astonish us.” (W.J. Baumol, R.E. Litan and C.J.
Schramm, Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth andProsperity, 2007)
There is more shouting from many rooftops left to do. Great that the relevant Nobel Committee is on the case.
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