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Quotation of the Day…

… is from page 293 of my colleague Peter Boettke’s 2021 paper “Liberalism, Socialism, and Our Future,” as this essay appears in Pete’s 2021 book, The Struggle for a Better World (original emphasis):

If we take the current definition of extreme poverty, which is living on or below $1.90 a day, then in 1990, there were 1.9 billion (or 36 percent of the global population) living in extreme poverty. In 2015, that number had fallen to 730 million (or 9.9 percent of the global population). That was the first time in recorded human history that less than 10 percent of the global population was living in extreme poverty.

DBx: This enrichment is the result of market-driven innovation and globalization.

How anyone can today insist that ‘capitalism doesn’t work’ is beyond me. What such people are really complaining about – although they don’t realize this fact – is that the world isn’t perfect (or that the world fails to conform to their individual fancies). Well, the world will never be perfect. There will always be problems that in principle can be solved. There will always be injustice and bad actors. No change in human institutions will rid society of these unfortunate realities. When assessing reality, mature people ask “As compared to what?” and choose as the comparison plausible alternatives. Immature people, when they bother to ask “As compared to what?”, choose as the comparison impossible ideals and then condemn reality for not being heaven.