Philip Cross: A critique of capitalism that's short on facts but long on woke |
The most important fact about capitalism is that it works, as evidenced by the astonishing rise in living standards over the past 200 years
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Harvard historian Sven Beckert’s 1,300-page Capitalism: A Global History relentlessly critiques capitalism’s alleged failings. But if capitalism is so flawed, why does it stand alone as the world’s only credible economic system? Its many opponents propose regulating it and redistributing the riches it produces but since the collectivist model of public ownership of the means of production was discredited, no serious alternatives have been proposed.
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Beckert’s methodology is to deploy “the tools of social history” to analyze capitalism. But these tools evidently exclude both basic principles of economic analysis and any rigorous use of statistics. This results in unawareness of the close relationship between real wages and labour productivity, something documented in my recent study for the Fraser Institute.
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