In defense of global capitalism. (Pfizer forum: advertisement).(Brief Article)

The current debate about globalization presupposes that the world is rapidly going to the dogs. In particular, the world is said to have become increasingly unfair. The chorus of the debate on the market economy runs: "The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer." If anything, this is regarded as a dictate of natural law, not a thesis to be argued. Yes, the first half is true: the rich -- not all of them everywhere, but generally speaking -- have indeed become richer. But the second half is, quite simply, wrong. The poor have not, generally speaking, come to be worse off in recent decades. On the contrary, extreme poverty has diminished, and where it was quantitatively greatest -- in Asia -- many hundreds of millions of people have begun to achieve a secure existence and even a modest degree of affluence.

Between 1965 and 1998, the average world citizen's income almost doubled, from $2,497 to $4,839. For the poorest one-fifth of the world's population, the increase has been faster still, with average income more than doubling during the same period from $551 to $1,137. In China, the World Bank has spoken of "the biggest and fastest poverty reduction in history."

By the 1990s, when the Swedish author Lasse Berg and the film-maker Stig Karlsson returned to Asian countries in which they had travelled thirty years earlier, they could not believe how wrong they had been to view socialist revolution as the only way out of the misery they had seen on their earlier visit. In India and China, more and more people were extricating themselves from poverty, hunger, and insanitary conditions.

The biggest change of all is in people's thoughts and dreams. Television and newspapers bring ideas and impressions from the other side of the globe, widening people's notions of what is possible. This development has resulted not from socialist revolution but, on the contrary, from a move in the past few decades towards greater individual liberty. International exchange and the freedom to choose have grown; investments and development assistance have transmitted ...