I want to point you to this study. The conservative narrative is that something like 99% of the world’s population was living in poverty until capitalism came and saved the day.
Well instead of just focusing on GDP, this study looked at three trends: real wages, mortality, and height which shows how well nourished people were. See at the beginnings of the free market as we know it, people earned less got shorter and died earlier. Just looking at GDP doesn’t tell the whole story.
Things didn’t really start to improve until the 1880s at the earliest, and the reason they got better wasn’t because of capitalism. It was anti-colonial movements, investments in public services, and organized labor. I’m not saying capitalism is all bad, but let’s get our facts straight, it’s a system that makes things worse without intervention.
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