I recently went to a talk on slavery in my hometown of
Warren Rhode Island where the slave population like the rest of Rhode Island
was 10% of the population before the Revolutionary War. Since the rate in
Massachusetts was 2% and Connecticut was 3% Rhode Island was the hotbed for
slavery in New England. What to me is
astounding is not that the rate was so high in Rhode Island but that it was so
low in the rest of New England. The fact that it was so low elsewhere amazes me
because for all of human history up to that point slavery in some form was
normative behavior. If you consider colonialism as a means of offshoring the
institution then slavery really didn’t become universally institutionally
condemned until the last half of the last century.[1]
I don’t think this happened due solely or even principally as
a result of a great moral awakening but was largely the product of new
technologies, abundant cheap energy sources (i.e. fossil fuels) and
capitalism.
Paul Kennedy, in the introduction to his book, The Rise and
Fall of Great Powers, makes the case that Europeans and their descendants
became the world leaders for at least the last 250 years because they lived in
a system where relatively small nation states were constantly competing
culturally, militarily, and perhaps most importantly economically. As a result
in this hyper-competitive environment, virtually every significant technological
and engineering advance from the steam engine to the microchip originated in
Europe or the United States. These engineering marvels allowed man to replace
manpower with brainpower and fossil fuels. At this point mankind could finally
afford to see that slavery (at least when it is right next door) is morally
repugnant. *
As with slavery the liberation of the “weaker” sex has only
come as a universally acceptable standard in the last 50 to 100 years.[2]
Prior to that for most of human history, societies were heavily patriarchal and
dominated by men. I would maintain that when the value of brainpower exceeded
that of brawn both actually as well as symbolically women were allowed for the
most part to take their rightful place in the world. Women are taking full
advantage of this. Colleges and profession, that were almost or actually
exclusively men only clubs, (My alma mater and profession) are now majority
female.
To be sure, indentured servitude and slavery as well as
gender bias still exist in the world but civilized mankind universally condemns
them. We are not perfect but, in the
spirit of the founding fathers, we are more perfect.
And the driving force behind all this liberating creativity
is capitalism. It is capitalism that
unleashes the creative spirit of inventors and artists and entrepreneurs to
continually come up with services and products that increase human productivity
and make the enslavement of our fellow man obsolete.
During the 20th century mankind ran an experiment. For most
of the first half capitalism competed with communism (not socialism). Communism
failed and in the process killed more people in absolute numbers and perhaps as
a % of mankind than any other
institution** in human history. After the collapse of the communist economic
system and the more or less the universal embrace of capitalism throughout the
world more people have been raised out of poverty both as an absolute number
and as a percentage of mankind than any time in human history.
For most all of human history the problems of mankind were
problems of “not enough,” not enough food, water, shelter. Today for all those who have escaped poverty in
the last three or four decades those are no longer problems. Another way of
looking at this is that the maldistribution of wealth has improved more in the
last 4 decades than any time in human history.
Yes our over abundant life style causes us problems. This
also is unique in human history. We have too much trash in our landfills, we
put too much CO2 into our atmosphere, and perhaps we have too many of us. If we
have to have problems these are the kind of problems we want to have. They are
solvable collectively (see Paris Climate Agreement) but also we have the freedom
to make choices around them individually. We can choose how much trash we
create, how much carbon we use, how many kids we have.
On the one hand I think we take for granted the blessings of
the abundance that surround us. Furthermore, it relies on a vast complex
interconnected set of systems, institutions, and relationships to function. It
is not clear to me exactly how fragile the system is. Certainly when large air
carriers are grounded world wide because their computer system goes down, this
is a hint at how fragile the system might be. War, pestilence, or environmental
upheaval could upset the system on a global scale and send us back to an
earlier darker age.
On the other hand there is a darker side to the present age
we live in as it is. There is a feeling
in all our abundance that something is not quite right with the world we are
living in. There are a lot of ideas of
just exactly why we feel that way. In my
next blog I will touch on a few of them.
* de
Tocqueville notes that in Athens their were 20,000 citizens in a population of
more than 350,000; the rest were slaves. [3] I am
not sure the treasures of Archimedes ***, Aristotle, or Aeschylus would have
been there to pass down to us if they had day jobs. So while we have assigned,
hopefully permanently, slavery in all its forms to the dustbin of history, I
would like to acknowledge a profound sense of gratitude to the servile classes
who for eons were the engine that propelled civilization forward. They gave the
leisure class the time to enrich themselves, admittedly, first but then all of
us to the point that we could forgo their exertions in favor of more humane
means of production and a more abundant lifestyle for all of us.
**Genghis Khan may be responsible for a higher percentage of
deaths but the data on this is hard to find.
*** Yes, Archimedes lived in Syracuse not Athens but the
principle is the same and I couldn’t forgo the alliteration.
Addendum: Last Tuesday I attended a lecture at Brown titled What Money can Buy;
Entrepreneurship, Ethics, and Human Flourishing by Peter Boettke, professor of
Economics and Philosophy at George Mason University. Over the course of his
lecture he made many of the same points I have above, of course in a much more
learned and erudite manner. Two points he made I would like to reiterate here.
The
first is graphically illustrated below.
Around 1950 there is a flex point where the number of people not living
in poverty accelerates (probably coincident with recovery from World War II).
Then around 1980 there is a steep and persistent plunge in the number of people
living in absolute poverty (probably coincident with the end of communism). The
result is that the number of people living in absolute poverty has gone from
more than 90% of the world’s population to less than 10% with most of that
change occurring in the last 50 years.
The other point that he made was that while life as Hobbes
described it may be ugly brutish and short mankind’s propensity to barter and
trade as Smith said gives mankind the opportunity to build lasting trusting
relations with non-related peoples on the other side of the river, on the other
side of the border, on the other side of the world. Boettke suggests that
capitalism is not only the wellspring of unprecedented prosperity it has the
salutary effect of fostering what peace we currently have.
Geoff Berg
