"Humanity existed for thousands of years at a level of existence that was at or sometimes even below bare subsistence. The images still shown on our television screens of starving, diseased, and seemingly hopeless children in what used to be called “third world” countries, with appeals for charitable giving to save those young lives, was, in fact, the general condition for the vast majority of human beings everywhere around the globe just a few centuries ago.
But such circumstances have been diminishing in a growing number of places in the world, first in Western Europe and North America starting in the nineteenth century, then in areas outside of “the West” in the twentieth century, and now in the twenty-first century in more and more parts of Asia and Africa and Latin America. It is not impossible to imagine that, before the end of the twenty-first century, abject poverty may very well be a thing of the past for practically all of humankind.
What has made this transformative process possible over the last two or three hundred years—a blink of the eye in terms of all the time that human beings have been on this planet—has been a political philosophy of individualism and an economic system based on market-based and -oriented relationships. The idea and spirit of individualism heralded a cultural shift that moved society away from a view that the individual human being was an object of control, manipulation, and sacrifice for a wider collective group or tribe. And that an individual had a right to peacefully live for himself, pursuing what he considered to be in his best interest for himself and those he cared about. Slavery and servitude were replaced with the belief that human association should be based on mutual benefit through voluntary exchange."
https://fee.org/articles/reasons-for-anti-capitalism-ignorance-arrogance-and-envy/
But such circumstances have been diminishing in a growing number of places in the world, first in Western Europe and North America starting in the nineteenth century, then in areas outside of “the West” in the twentieth century, and now in the twenty-first century in more and more parts of Asia and Africa and Latin America. It is not impossible to imagine that, before the end of the twenty-first century, abject poverty may very well be a thing of the past for practically all of humankind.
What has made this transformative process possible over the last two or three hundred years—a blink of the eye in terms of all the time that human beings have been on this planet—has been a political philosophy of individualism and an economic system based on market-based and -oriented relationships. The idea and spirit of individualism heralded a cultural shift that moved society away from a view that the individual human being was an object of control, manipulation, and sacrifice for a wider collective group or tribe. And that an individual had a right to peacefully live for himself, pursuing what he considered to be in his best interest for himself and those he cared about. Slavery and servitude were replaced with the belief that human association should be based on mutual benefit through voluntary exchange."
https://fee.org/articles/reasons-for-anti-capitalism-ignorance-arrogance-and-envy/