Hot tak: the general improvement in things like health, poverty etc. has happened regardless of or despite capitalism. You could agrue that capitalism in fact slows all these down, but people conflate the cooccurance of these things as causality.
Even hotter take: The World Bank's poverty line is a laughably low measurement ($1.90/day) and using a more reasonable figure reveals that poverty has remained proportionally the same for decades. This means that with all the end-of-history, neoliberalism-has-won celebrations of the past few decades, the raw number of people in poverty has increased.
But it's not all bad, there has been one place where poverty has been aggressively reduced and the quality of its citizens' lives have improved, let me just check my notes here...oh my mistake it's Communist China. Welp sorry capitalism.
The improvement in living standards (including health) is due to the use of fossil fuels.
The ability to harness fossil fuels was due to a bunch of rich well-off people mentally masturbating in Britain for 300 years.
Britain had so many rich well-off people because the Black Death killed 50% of all Europeans, freeing up resources and reducing the power of the king and elites.
The increase in living standards, as well as everything Europeans invented in the last 500 years, is directly due to Bubonically-enforced socialism. Other regions lagged behind because they were mostly unaffected by Plague, and thus remained in hypercompetitive societies since nobody died.
Hot tak: the general improvement in things like health, poverty etc. has happened regardless of or despite capitalism. You could agrue that capitalism in fact slows all these down, but people conflate the cooccurance of these things as causality.
Even hotter take: The World Bank's poverty line is a laughably low measurement ($1.90/day) and using a more reasonable figure reveals that poverty has remained proportionally the same for decades. This means that with all the end-of-history, neoliberalism-has-won celebrations of the past few decades, the raw number of people in poverty has increased.
But it's not all bad, there has been one place where poverty has been aggressively reduced and the quality of its citizens' lives have improved, let me just check my notes here...oh my mistake it's Communist China. Welp sorry capitalism.
Even the UN acknowledges that this whole "the crusade against poverty is going amazingly" talking point is bullshit.
Yoo thanks for this stuff, really appreciate it
In short: capitalism =/= technological development.
The improvement in living standards (including health) is due to the use of fossil fuels.
The ability to harness fossil fuels was due to a bunch of rich well-off people mentally masturbating in Britain for 300 years.
Britain had so many rich well-off people because the Black Death killed 50% of all Europeans, freeing up resources and reducing the power of the king and elites.
The increase in living standards, as well as everything Europeans invented in the last 500 years, is directly due to Bubonically-enforced socialism. Other regions lagged behind because they were mostly unaffected by Plague, and thus remained in hypercompetitive societies since nobody died.