There are some who (unfortunately) think of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., as being something of a political dinosaur, recommending nothing but bigger government in that Old Democrat style. Everything can be solved by just taxing ever more, pouring the money through the D.C. swamp, and all will be better as more and more of life is subject to politics, not individual liberty nor desires.
It would be most unfortunate if that view became more general, but there is good evidence that the distinguished Solon is somewhat out of date. In The Guardian, Sanders writes that:
Difficult as it is to comprehend, the fact is that the six richest people on Earth now own more wealth than the bottom half of the world’s population – 3.7 billion people. Further, the top 1% now have more money than the bottom 99%. Meanwhile, as the billionaires flaunt their opulence, nearly one in seven people struggle to survive on less than $1.25 (90p) a day and – horrifyingly – some 29,000 children die daily from entirely preventable causes such as diarrhoea, malaria and pneumonia.
It's entirely true that far too many children die of things we could and should prevent. But the rest of that betrays how out of touch Sanders is.
The $1.25-a-day stat is not a measurement that anyone’s really undertaken. The current definition of absolute poverty is $1.90 a day, so says the World Bank. Before 2015, it was $1.25 a day, as Sanders mentions. But today it's less than 10 percent of the world population living beneath $1.90 a day, not the one-in-seven that Sanders claims. That's still too many people, but the last time it was one-seventh of the population was perhaps a decade ago. So the numbers are rather out of date, if not wrong.
But much more importantly, Sanders is some 40 years out of date. In the reduction of this absolute poverty, we gave up on what Sanders tells us is the way to do things. We did try a lot of government planning, we did try to direct industry, we limited trade, and so on, up until about 1980. Then we let the market rip globally and that’s when that absolute poverty began its vertiginous fall, from some 40-45 percent of humanity to less than 10 percent today.
It’s the largest reduction in poverty in the history of our species. And it came about because of that globalization that so many decry.
We started to get good economic growth in the poor places and countries as a result of neoliberalism. Yes, inequality has increased inside countries as a result, but global inequality has fallen at the same time. Swift economic growth does increase inequality within nations. The obverse is not also true — it’s possible for inequality to increase because of political favors, glad-handing, and political manipulation without reducing poverty. But those growth rates of 5, 7, and 10 percent that have been reducing the stain of abject destitution are also the very things that have been increasing inequality rates.
I agree entirely with Sanders that the world isn’t perfect, and that it would be a better place with less absolute poverty in it (preferably none). The thing is, these past few decades have shown us the way to eradicate poverty, so much so that it is predicted that we will have vanquished it in a decade or two. Where I don’t agree with Sanders, of course, is how we get there.
Sanders wants us to stop doing the things which reduce poverty, while I insist that since it’s working we should do more. These past decades of neoliberal globalization have, as I’ve already said, caused the greatest reduction in absolute poverty in the history of our species. Why wouldn’t we continue to do more of that?
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute.
If you would like to write an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, please read our guidelines on submissions here.
