Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Though intellectuals are apt to do a spit take when they read a defense of capitalism, its economic benefits are so obvious that they don’t need to be shown with numbers. They can literally be seen from space. A satellite photograph of Korea showing the capitalist South aglow in light and the Communist North a pit of darkness vividly illustrates the contrast in the wealth-generating capability between the two economic systems, holding geography, history, and culture constant. Other matched pairs with an experimental group and a control group lead to the same conclusion: West and East Germany when they were divided by the Iron Curtain; Botswana versus Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe; Chile versus Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro—the latter a once-wealthy, oil-rich country now suffering from widespread hunger and a critical shortage of medical care.³⁴ It’s important to add that the market economies which blossomed in the more fortunate parts of the developing world were not the laissez-faire anarchies of right-wing fantasies and left-wing nightmares. To varying degrees, their governments invested in education, public health, infrastructure, and agricultural and job training, together with social insurance and poverty-reduction programs.³⁵

Radelet’s second explanation of the Great Convergence is leadership. Mao imposed more than communism on China. He was a mercurial megalomaniac who foisted crackbrained schemes on the country, such as the Great Leap Forward (with its gargantuan communes, useless backyard smelters, and screwball agronomic practices) and the Cultural Revolution (which turned the younger generation into gangs of thugs who terrorized teachers, managers, and descendants of “rich peasants”).³⁶ During the decades of stagnation from the 1970s to the early 1990s, many other developing countries were commandeered by psychopathic strongmen with ideological, religious, tribal, paranoid, or self-aggrandizing agendas rather than a mandate to enhance the well-being of their citizens. Depending on their sympathy or antipathy for communism, they were propped up by the Soviet Union or the United States under the principle “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”³⁷ The 1990s and 2000s saw a spread of democracy (chapter 14) and the rise of levelheaded, humanistic leaders—not just national statesmen like Nelson Mandela, Corazon Aquino, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf but local religious and civil-society leaders acting to improve the lives of their compatriots.³⁸

A third cause was the end of the Cold War. It not only pulled the rug out from under a number of tinpot dictators but snuffed out many of the civil wars that had racked developing countries since they attained independence in the 1960s. Civil war is both a humanitarian disaster and an economic one, as facilities are destroyed, resources are diverted, children are kept out of school, and managers and workers are pulled away from work or killed. The economist Paul Collier, who calls war “development in reverse,” has estimated that a typical civil war costs a country $50 billion.³⁹

A fourth cause is globalization, in particular the explosion in trade made possible by container ships and jet airplanes and by the liberalization of tariffs and other barriers to investment and trade. Classical economics and common sense agree that a larger trading network should make everyone, on average, better off. As countries specialize in different goods and services, they can produce them more efficiently, and it doesn’t cost them much more to offer their wares to billions of people than to thousands. At the same time buyers, shopping for the best price in a global bazaar, can get more of what they want. (Common sense is less likely to appreciate a corollary called comparative advantage, which predicts that, on average, everyone is better off when each country sells the goods and services that it can produce most efficiently even if the buyers could produce them still more efficiently themselves.) Notwithstanding the horror that the word elicits in many parts of the political spectrum, globalization, development analysts agree, has been a bonanza for the poor. Deaton notes, “Some argue that globalization is a neoliberal conspiracy designed to enrich a very few at the expense of many. If so, that conspiracy was a disastrous failure—or at least, it helped more than a billion people as an unintended consequence. If only unintended consequences always worked so favorably.”⁴⁰