Reasons to be cheerful 1, 2, 3 and 4

As a libertarian optimist I am constantly struck just how well humans are doing as a species and this general disposition is rightly be supported by the latest United Nation’s Development Program key statistics.

1. Infant mortality

In the Middle Ages more than 200 infants out of every 1,000 live births died before their first birthday. In the middle of the last century 157 per 1,000 died within the first year. By 2003 this number had dropped to 57 per 1,000 live births with average global life expectancy increasing to 66.8 years and in the developed nations 78.5 years. These facts are even more remarkable when you consider that the average global figure was only 31 years in 1900.

2. Nutrition

As a result of increased global agricultural productivity, the inflation-adjusted price of food commodities has fallen 75 percent since 1950. This is despite the fact that the world’s population has increased during that period by more than 150 percent. With global daily food supplies currently at 2,804 calories per capita, the average person on this planet has never had the opportunity to be so well fed if only we can institute a genuine free market trading system.

3. Wealth creation

From the year 1 to 1,000 A.D., the average person on this planet lived on the equivalent of a dollar a day. By 1800 this figure had doubled to $2 a day. In 2000, the average world per capita annual income stood at $6,000.

4. Education

Between 1970 and 2003 global illiteracy fell from 46 percent to 18 percent of the world’s population.

Moreover during the last 200 years the world’s population has increased from 900 million to 6.3 billion. As such, modern capitalism with all its creative dynamism has meant that when it comes to key areas of concern capitalism has substantially increased the well being of an ever growing majority of the world’s people.

This is not to deny the fact that there are still more than 1 billion people in absolute poverty or that more than 50 million new cases of malaria occur in Africa each year alone.

What these facts from the United Nations do highlight is that there are truly profound historic reasons for libertarians to be cheerful and optimistic when thinking about the future.

The Business is The Business

In preparation for last Friday evening’s LA Putney Debate with Tom Burroughes – who was excellent on the subject of ‘investment banks, hedge funds and private equity firms: what they are and what their wealth says about modern financial capitalism’, I picked up and read in advance a copy of the magazine that he writes for.

Aptly named The Business and edited by the classical liberal journalist Allister Heath I found it to be generally a better read than The Economist.

If you are a British libertarian and you are interested in commerce, investments and current affairs then I highly recommend this publication. You can currently get the first five editions for only £1. 

The Boris thing hots up; Polly Toynbee despises him, so it’s obvious that he must be the Right Man!

The Grauniad has made it onto this bolg! Here. Never thought I would do that, but the positively palpable plangency of Polly’s prose permits publication.

Boris Johnson for Mayor of London!

It ought to be more like “Boris Johnson for Prime minister”, insofar as we are forced to have one of these plus all the attendant and increasing governmental burden of bureaucrats. But I suppose we shall have to wait quite some time for a party to form, with sufficiently liberal-capitalist values and the accompanying minimalist programmes, to carry him. The Tories won’t do at all; they are in fact finished, dead, gone***; perhaps Boris knows this and is sliding out gracefully while he still can, to the possibility of winning the “next best thing” in power terms.

Paul Johnson, in the spectator about the time of Major’s premiership, predicted the current state of the Conservative Party. There is clearly no hope any more for popular, talented individuals with the merest streak of humanity left in them. I can’t think, moreover, what David Davis is still doing there.

***In many towns and cities here in the North, there is now in fact no functioning Conservative Party organisation “on the ground” whatsoever. Replacing them are “Lib Dem” offices, often in converted shops, acting as permanently manned “drop-in” sites, with a girl (or sometimes a young man) just out of “Uni” and with no job to go to, a computer, tea, and the usual stuff. The MP (often a libdem now, not just boring old Labour) uses it as his surgery, and campaigning is conducted quite efficiently. I can’t see the Tories managing this any time soon.

Perhaps the time has come for London to elect a Mayor that looks like the city thinks it does, in the way that Reagan got elected in 1980 as he looked and behaved like America’s image of itself. At least he only had Carter before him.