April 29, 2024
I’ve posted here repeatedly about my forthcoming book, co-authored with Art Carden.
With our publisher’s permission, we present a draft of Chapter 1. Email me through the contact information found here if you catch errors or want to share feedback!
Chapter 1: They Feast on the Abundance of Your House: Hobbesian Horrors and Walmart Wonders
The rich got rich through economic growth, and the poor didn’t become poor at all, but rather remained poor because of an absence of economic growth. Dan Moller (2014)[1]
The much-maligned “capitalism” has raised the real income per person of the poorest since 1800 not by 10 percent or 100 percent, but by over 3,000 percent. Deirdre McCloskey (2019)[2]
Joan of Arc, Beethoven, and the Sun King Walk into a Walmart
Have you ever felt like the fate of the world was riding on one assignment?[3]
In the 1989 comedy Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, high school students Bill S. Preston (Alex Winter) and Ted Logan (Keanu Reeves) didn’t know it, but the fate of the world was riding on their report. Their mission: to describe how historical figures would think of life in 1980s San Dimas, California. Their problem: they were terrible students without a clue. If they failed, Ted would be sent to an Alaskan military school, and their band Wyld Stallyns would never make the music that created a future utopia.
Fortunately, a time traveler from 2688 arrived to help. Bill and Ted traveled through history, picking up Billy the Kid, Socrates, Sigmund Freud, Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc, Napoleon Bonaparte, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Abraham Lincoln. These befuddled icons visited a water park, ice cream parlor, bowling alley, and mall before appearing as part of Bill and Ted’s report. The future was saved.
If we got this assignment, we would take this crew to a Walmart Supercenter.[4] We can’t take them, of course, but we can take you. This chapter will document the “facts of flourishing” and set the stage for subsequent chapters. So, let’s grab a cart and go shopping.[5]
In our opinion, Walmart is the poster child for what legendary twentieth-century economist Joseph Schumpeter called the “capitalist achievement” of improving goods at falling prices.[6] The largest private employer in history welcomes any and all into a brightly lit, air-conditioned palace stocked from floor to ceiling with food, clothing, office supplies, garden implements, electronics, books, exotic fruits, furniture, sporting goods, and much more that even our ancestors’ rulers could not have imagined. Save money, live better.
The goods don’t tell the whole story, however. The mega-store is remarkable for its clientele. Walmart is a palace open to the peasantry. Walmart wonders are not only available to powdered lords, Party members, or ostentatiously coiffed Capitol residents. Walmart’s customers are overwhelmingly ordinary people of underwhelmingly modest means. At Walmart, they can exchange the fruit of a few hours’ labor for a shopping-cart-sized cornucopia.
A 1979 episode of the game show The Price Is Right displayed a microwave oven with a retail price of $499—roughly $2,000 in today’s money. Today, you can get a much better microwave from Walmart, Target, or Amazon for under $100. You don’t even have to go to the store. With a few flicks of your thumb, a microwave will arrive on your porch tomorrow. If this is the much-maligned “late-stage capitalism,” then sign us up.
The difference between “then” and “now” is astounding. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) described our ancestors’ lives in the hypothetical stateless “state of nature” as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”[7] The Hobbesian jungle features “a war of all against all,” where people’s rights to their possessions and persons are not secure. Hobbes got much wrong. For one, his governments often make life nastier (chapter 12), and people have sometimes escaped Hobbesian horrors without the creation of a state. Still, Hobbes’s adjectives are colorful and analytically useful for describing our ancestor’s plight. Things started changing mightily in Northwest Europe about two and half centuries ago, with the improvements having since gone global. The data tell a compelling story about lives that are no longer solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short but connected, rich, clean, peaceful, and long.
Solitary?
We haven’t “filled and subdued” the earth yet, but life with eight billion neighbors is less solitary.[8] Our ancestors knew very few people and rarely ventured beyond their villages. Jesus didn’t go far. The five-day walk from Jerusalem to Nazareth is a two-hour car ride today, and travel time from one side of the world to the other is measured in hours rather than months. You can converse with people from every tribe and tongue and nation online in real time.[9]
Poor?
But we must be much poorer with all these new people, right? Estimates from Great Britain going back eight centuries suggest things didn’t change much for eons, but then average income per person in the United Kingdom has increased about thirty-fold since the 1700s. Two weeks’ income now equals a year’s worth in the not-too-distant past.[10] Global historical estimates of per capita gross domestic product since 1820 show where the action is. The increases in western Europe and its overseas offshoots (the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) have been most remarkable—so remarkable that they obscure the not-much-less remarkable growth in the rest of the world. Even in Sub Saharan Africa, per capita income has roughly tripled.
Spreading prosperity has not been confined to a few islands in Northwest Europe. About four in five people worldwide lived in extreme poverty 200 years ago, and the fifth guy was poor by today’s standards. Today, it’s about one in ten in a population eight times larger. The actual number of people—not just the share of the population—living in extreme poverty has declined in our lifetimes. Between 1950 and 2019—a period shorter than US life expectancy—average inflation-adjusted per-person US income quadrupled, from $15,183 to $62,589.[11] Methuselah saw less economic progress in his 969 years than moderns see in a decade.[12]
Worldwide, people put in fewer hours for these higher incomes. Industrial workers in Western European countries and the United States used to work an astonishing average of more than 3,000 hours annually. Now? In hard-working Germany, the 2017 average was 1,354 hours.[13] The upshot: more time for friendship, spiritual pursuits, family, and leisure. Whether we use our new time for these noble pursuits is a separate question.
Time cost—the amount of time the average person must work to afford something—has plummeted worldwide. An American worker buying a twenty-five-inch color TV in 1980 would have required, on average, 68 hours of work. A much better TV in 2022 took 4.4 hours.[14] Similar jaw-droppers exist for washers, dryers, ovens, clothing, tools, exercise equipment, and food. In India, the time cost of daily rice fell from 7 hours in 1960 to less than 1 hour today. In Indiana, it has fallen from 1 hour to 7.5 minutes.[15] Notice too that the gains going to the relatively poor (Indians, 6 hours) are far larger in absolute terms than those accruing to the relatively wealthy (Indianans, 52 minutes).
These massive gains mean today’s American or European has three first-world problems: obesity (too much food, not too little), clutter (too many possessions, not too few), and packed calendars (too many opportunities to connect, not unending stretches of isolation).[16] What’s more, these gains are spreading around the world. If he were writing it today, Ronald Sider would have to title his book Rich Christians in an Age of Obesity.
Superabundance is everywhere.[17] You may see a homeless person with a smartphone in your local park. In housing projects, clotheslines are unused and many units have DirecTV.[18] We wouldn’t care as much about the “Great Enrichment” if it only helped the wealthy, but the Walmart-shopping poor have gained the most.[19] Truly, our cart runneth over.
Nasty?
Life today is cleaner than it has ever been. Garbage trucks and indoor plumbing whisk waste away.[20] We bathe regularly instead of mucking about in our own filth for months at a time, and our closets overflow with clean clothes.[21] We use clean tools and clean electricity or natural gas to cook in cleaner kitchens than our ancestors could have imagined. While we might try to avoid Walmart bathrooms whenever possible, that is only because our standards have changed. Data on safely managed drinking water sources, safely managed sanitation, and hand-washing facilities show steady improvements over the last two decades.
Brutish?
Homicide rates in European countries have fallen steadily over the last millennium, and despite the popular view that the world has never been more dangerous, the world’s homicide rate has fallen in our lifetimes. Today, we get our brutal thrills vicariously through spectator sports, and worldwide, you’re less likely than ever to die at someone else’s hands.[22] Journalists took to the internet with articles lamenting football’s violence after the Buffalo Bills’ Damar Hamlin nearly died on the field on January 2, 2023. But we’ll take football’s vicarious war over actual war every time.
Short?
Again, no. Today’s poor countries feature longer life expectancies than rich countries did on the eve of industrialization. Boxer George Foreman named each of his five sons “George,” and people laughed at the quirk. Parents in the Middle Ages named each of their five sons “John” because only one or two would reach adulthood. No one was laughing.
Life expectancy at birth in England and France in 1800 was about 40 years, half of what it is today in the United States, England, and Japan. Even in low-income countries like Nigeria, life expectancy is over 60. Economics Nobel laureate Angus Deaton writes, “A white, middle-class girl born in affluent America today has a 50–50 chance of making it to 100. This is a remarkable change from the situation of her great grandmother, born in 1910, say, who had a life expectancy at birth of 54 years.”[23] Global average life expectancy rose from 52.6 to 72.4 years between 1960 and 2017.[24] Child mortality has also plummeted worldwide. Statistician Hans Rosling notes that in 1960, 242 out of every 1,000 children born in Saudi Arabia would die a child. In the blink of an eye—thirty-three years—that figure dropped to 35 out of 1,000, roughly an 85 percent decrease in a single generation.[25] Of course, all people of goodwill want the number to be zero, but wanting something and effecting something are not the same.[26]
Life today is far, far better than life has ever been, and this is true for almost everyone.[27] If you don’t believe us, go to the website Our World in Data and refute us.[28] We will be in your debt.
Whereas the average American takes Walmart for granted, France’s so-called Sun King, Louis XIV (1638–1715), would have been dumbstruck by what Walmart offers. He had legions of servants and lived in the magnificent Palace of Versailles. Enviable? Not after you consider what he didn’t have: antibiotics, lightbulbs, painkillers, airplanes, modern toilet paper, modern dentistry, endless consumer goods, and the internet.[29] “Kings and queens lived under conditions that were better than average,” observes philosopher Dan Moller, “but ones that we would nevertheless view as unbearable by contemporary standards.”[30]
Yet, importantly, we’re not primarily interested in royals like Louis the Sun King.[31] No. We want to know how billions of descendants of ground-scratching peasants, slaves, and factory girls can pick from 142,000 items at a Walmart Supercenter or 400 million units in inventory from Walmart.com.[32] We want to know how we all came to live better than the Sun King. That is “the capitalist achievement.” As the economist Joseph Schumpeter put it:
There are no doubt some things available to the modern workman that Louis XIV himself would have been delighted to have yet was unable to have—modern dentistry for instance. On the whole, however, a budget on that level had little that really mattered to gain from capitalist achievement. Even speed of traveling may be assumed to have been a minor consideration for so very dignified a gentleman. Electric lighting is no great boon to anyone who has money enough to buy a sufficient number of candles and pay servants to attend to them. It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars, and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man. Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.[33]
Progress continues. Schumpeter wrote in the dark years of World War II, arguably Western civilization’s nadir, but the wealth-explosion was obvious even then. “Good Things in Life Up a Gazillion Percent” is a headline you haven’t seen but should have.
The West and the Rest
“But,” some object, “surely, the West got this way by impoverishing the Rest!”[34] If you keep up with current events, you might have heard that we owe modern prosperity to long legacies of cruelty, oppression, and exploitation. High standards of living in the West, it is said, descend from an unholy trinity of slavery, imperialism, and colonialism.
So goes a popular and emotionally wrenching attempt at explaining the Progress Puzzle. But it’s a fantasy. As historian Niall Ferguson puts it, imperialism was “the least original thing Europeans did after 1492.”[35] Imperialism is ancient. And if slavery leads to widespread economic progress, then the Great Enrichment would have happened thousands of years before it did, and it would have happened somewhere other than Northwestern Europe and its overseas extensions. Portugal and Brazil, not England and the United States, would have been the great industrial powers of the last two and a half centuries. Regions where slavery existed recently would be the world’s biggest economic winners, but they’re so obviously not. Mauritania didn’t abolish slavery until 1981, but we’ve never heard of anyone planning to move to its prosperous shores. In fact, it is one of the poorest countries in the world precisely because we can’t create prosperity with brutality.
That’s not to say people didn’t try. Revolutionary movements have tried to create economic progress through widespread theft and slaughter with miserable results. In the 1970s, revolutionary economic change for the poor happened with Walmart in Bentonville, Arkansas, not in the killing fields of Cambodia.[36]
Exploitation didn’t do it. Rather, the world was Greatly Enriched by Rules that protected private property and by changing Rhetoric that honored the merchants, managers, entrepreneurs, and innovators people had formerly disdained. “Innovation” went from meaning “heretical readings of Scripture” to “introducing new and better ways of doing things.” Our ancestors embraced hierarchy and stability. In the 2020s, everyone wants to be a “disruptor.”
These rules and rhetoric in turn emerged from a complex interplay of various social forces. First, Reading material poured forth from difficult-to-censor presses in a politically fragmented Europe. “Political fragmentation” sounds negative, but it actually meant that no sovereign had the power to tax his people into the ground, which gave commercial enterprise room to breathe.[37] Reformation of the church and our understanding about the relationship between God and humanity changed to grant more dignity and agency to the everyman. Revolt by the Dutch against the Spanish decapitated (literally?) the Dutch nobility and left the merchants to rule the bourgeois towns. Finally, Revolution in England (1688), the United States (1776), and France (1789) changed our political relationships. Did we get it perfect? No, but we did better than before, and it was enough to create a world where nearly everyone has “First World Problems” like obesity, clutter and FOMO (“fear of missing out”).[38]
Fuller recently talked with someone who challenged him that “humans weren’t ready for this level of wealth.” Wealth means new problems, including new spiritual problems, but who among us would choose our ancestors’ travails over our own? Which of us would forsake superabundance to live a medieval peasant’s short, dirty, disease-ridden, and isolated life? These aren’t hypothetical questions. Our ancestors’ lives are waiting in the wilderness and the desert. Lamentations notwithstanding, almost everyone opts enthusiastically for the wealth for which we are allegedly “not ready.”
But were people in the past more virtuous than we are? Surveying history and its expansive account of prodigal, profligate domination it’s hard to say “yes.” True, the modern world is chock-full of atrocities no Christian should have trouble reciting. Guess what? So was the ancient world.
How Should We Then Live?
First, rejoice. If you are reading these sentences, your “lines have fallen in pleasant places.”[39] Take a few moments to reflect on what you have inherited. Spend time in prayer thanking our good God for showering his children with good gifts.
Second, lament. Over 500 million people still live in grinding poverty. We write amid wars and rumors of wars. The 1,187 chapters (inclusive) between Genesis 4 and Revelation 22 testify to humanity’s depravity and the misery it creates.
Third, zoom out and embrace hope. Whether 500 or 5,000 years ago, you would have almost certainly been an illiterate, ground-scratching peasant covered in scat and lice. But today, the poorest person living in Rome, Georgia, enjoys wonders the Roman Caesars could not have . One-way tickets on a time machine to the past would not cost much. The past is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.[40]
Lastly, heed Scripture’s admonition to “Get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight.”[41]
Mere economics is insight’s wellspring, and it helps us understand the world we’re told to fill and subdue. Chapter 2 explains some economic essentials and errors, then chapters 3 through 8 explain cooperation’s causes and consequences. Chapters 9 through 12 explore what happens when we obstruct cooperation. Chapter 13 revisits our magnificent economic inheritance in light of what the earlier chapters teach. Chapter 14 will urge you “further up and further in!”
References
[1] Dan Moller, “Justice and the Wealth of Nations,” Public Affairs Quarterly 28, no. 2 (2014): 95–114, 95.
[2] Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), x.
[3] This section is adapted from Art Carden, “Bill and Ted Take Joan of Arc to Walmart,” American Institute for Economic Research, May 29, 2023, https://www.aier.org/article/bill-ted-take-joan-of-arc-to-walmart/.
[4] Art Carden, “Retail Innovations in American Economic History,” in Routledge Handbook of Major Events in Economic History, ed. Randall E. Parker and Robert Whaples (London: Routledge, 2013), 402–14; Art Carden and Charles Courtemanche, “The Evolution and Impact of the General Merchandise Sector,” in Handbook on the Economics of Retailing and Distribution, ed. Emek Basker (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016), https://doi.org/10.4337/9781783477388.00028; Art Carden and Charles Courtemanche, “Wal‐Mart, Leisure, and Culture,” Contemporary Economic Policy 27, no. 4 (2009): 450–61; Art Carden, Charles Courtemanche, and Jeremy Meiners, “Walmart and Values: Painting the Town Red?,” Business and Politics 11, no. 2 (August 2009): 1–16; Art Carden, Charles Courtemanche, and Jeremy Meiners, “Does Wal-Mart Reduce Social Capital?,” Public Choice 138, no. 1–2 (January 2009): 109–36; Charles Courtemanche and Art Carden, “Supersizing Supercenters? The Impact of Walmart Supercenters on Body Mass Index and Obesity,” Journal of Urban Economics 69, no. 2 (March 2011): 165–81; Charles Courtemanche and Art Carden, “Competing with Costco and Sam’s Club: Warehouse Club Entry and Grocery Prices,” Southern Economic Journal 80, no. 3 (2014): 565–85; Charles Courtemanche et al., “Do Walmart Supercenters Improve Food Security?,” Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy 41, no. 2 (June 2019): 177–98, https://doi.org/10.1093/aepp/ppy023; Art Carden, Charles Courtemanche, and Reginald Harris, “The Vital Two: Retail Innovation by Sol Price and Sam Walton,” Essays in Economic and Business History 40 (2022): 188–209.
[5] For an economist’s perspective on why shopping carts get bigger, see Steven E. Landsburg, “Attack of the Giant Shopping Carts!!!,” Slate, April 27, 2000, https://slate.com/culture/2000/04/attack-of-the-giant-shopping-carts.html.
[6] Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper, 1950), 110.
[7] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civill (The Green Dragon in St. Paul’s Churchyard: Andrew Crooke, 1651; Urbana, IL: Project Gutenberg), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207–h/3207–h.htm.
[8] See Gen 1:28 for the language of “filling” and “subduing.”
[9] This chapter’s charts come from the fantastic website http://ourworldindata.org. We recommend exploring the site to get a sense of just how much life in this vale of tears has recently improved. See this link for the chart showing population growth: https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth.
[10] See this link for the chart showing English GDP per capita: https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth.
[11] Max Roser et al., “Economic Growth,” Our World in Data, accessed January 31, 2024, https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth.
[12] Gen 5:27.
[13] https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours#are-we-working-more-than-ever.
[14] https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/24–charts-that-show-were-mostly-living-better-than-our-parents.
[15] Marian L. Tupy and Gale Lyle Pooley, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2022), 17.
[16] Art Carden, “Too Much: Three First World Problems,” American Institute for Economic Research, March 21, 2024 https://www.aier.org/article/too-much-three-first-world-problems/.
[17] Tupy and Pooley, Superabundance.
[18] See this link for the chart showing the share of population in extreme poverty: https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief.
[19] Courtemanche et al., “Do Walmart Supercenters Improve Food Security?”
[20] See this link for the chart showing the percentage of the population with access to clean water: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-using-safely-managed-sanitation.
[21] Donald J. Boudreaux, “Capitalism Is Cleaning the World Every Single Day,” American Institute for Economic Research, April 22, 2019, https://www.aier.org/article/capitalism-is-cleaning-the-world-every-single-day/.
[22] See this link for the chart showing the fall in homicide rates: https://ourworldindata.org/homicides.
[23] Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 24.
[24] Tupy and Pooley, Superabundance, 289.
[25] Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (New York: Flatiron Books, 2018).
[26] See this link for the chart showing the increase in life expectancy: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy.
[27] Rosling, Rosling, and Rönnlund, Factfulness; Tupy and Pooley, Superabundance.
[28] Here is the link: https://ourworldindata.org/.
[29] Government did invent the internet. But capitalism made it great. See Peter G. Klein, “Government Did Invent the Internet, but the Market Made It Glorious,” Ludwig von Mises Institute, June 8, 2006, https://mises.org/library/government-did-invent-internet-market-made-it-glorious.
[30] Moller, “Justice.”
[31] Art Carden, Sarah Estelle, and Anne Bradley, “We’ll Never Be Royals, but That Doesn’t Matter,” Independent Review 22, no. 1 (2017): 83–92.
[32] Jena Warburton, “Walmart Might Stop Selling a Popular Product from This Beloved Brand,” TheStreet, October 16, 2023, https://www.thestreet.com/retail/walmart-might-stop-selling-a-popular-product-from-this-beloved-brand.
[33] Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 67.
[34] The following discussion follows Deirdre N. McCloskey and Art Carden, Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020), particularly 95, 171. Also, see Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell Jr., How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
[35] Niall Ferguson, “The 6 Killer Apps of Prosperity,” filmed September 19, 2011, TED video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpnFeyMGUs8.
[36] R. J. Rummel, Death By Government (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997), 166–76; Niemietz, Socialism.
[37] Ralph Raico, “The Theory of Economic Development and the ‘European Miracle,’” in The Collapse of Development Planning, ed. Peter J. Boettke (New York: NYU Press, 1994), 37–58.
[38] Carden, “Too Much.”
[39] Ps 16:6.
[40] Art Carden, “The Past Is a Nice Place to Visit. You Wouldn’t Want to Live There,” American Institute for Economic Research, July 18, 2019, https://www.aier.org/article/the-past-is-a-nice-place-to-visit-you-wouldnt-want-to-live-there/.
[41] Prov 4:7.
Edit 6/22/24: Mere Economics is now available for pre-order!