Bill Polley calls our attention to this column by Cafe Hayek's Don Boudreaux on the living standards of those living in today's westerrn world.
Every semester, I start my Introduction to Economics class at George Mason University by asking my students "How many of you are wealthy?" Although each of my classes has an enrollment of about 200 students, no one ever has raised a hand.
"But you are wealthy!" I insist. "Each of us in this classroom today is among the wealthiest human beings ever to breathe."
My students think me mad. "I'm not rich; I'm middle-class," is what most of them think to themselves in response to my question. Fortunately, though, to be middle-class in America today means to be superrich by historical standards.
Here's just a tiny sample of the many ways in which ordinary Americans today are Bill Gates-like rich compared to almost all humans who've ever lived:
None of us has ever starved to death Each of us has indoor plumbing Above our heads, each of us has a solid roof rather than a vermin-infested earthen roof Each of us can converse in real time to people one mile or 1,000 miles away None of us has died of smallpox Every one of us born since the mid-1950s is successfully inoculated against polio Our life expectancy is decades longer.
Unfortunately, many people note that we live in an unequal society - with that attention on inequality being on the inequality of outcome. But is that the right comparison? Consider a world with 100 people. Which would be the better society to live in, the one where all the people live in mud huts next to a squalid creek that serves for both drinking water and a sewer or the one where half the people live in solidly-built 1-story houses with two bedrooms and one bath and an unfinished basement while the other half lives in two story houses with 4 bedrooms and 3 baths?
He argues that it is not technological advances that have improved standards of living over the past 200 or so years. For one, there had to be some impetus to get those advances going. For another, not all citizens of all countries have access to many technological advances. There must be something else at work:
Again, that something else is economic freedom.
As described by the Cato Institute, "The cornerstones of economic freedom are personal choice, voluntary exchange, freedom to compete and security of privately owned property." And as shown again and again by researchers who study the relationship between prosperity and economic freedom, the greater is economic freedom, the greater and more widespread is prosperity.
Economic Freedom comes in countries where private individuals are free to provide others with stuff with value. The extent of that freedom depends on things such as minimum wage laws, tax laws, property rights, etc. The more a society allows its citizens to provide stuff of value to others, the better off those people will be.