Loons are a market too

Oliver Wiseman has a piece in CapX in support of Bill Gates' claim that from a historical perspective the world is getting better, particularly in relation to poverty but also on many other measures such as education, infant mortality and literacy.

Bill Gates is right. The world really is getting better

The proportion of the world’s population living in poverty is going down, not up

Why do some seem so determined to turn the clock back on human progress?

For the vast majority of human history life really was nasty, brutish and short

Things aren’t nearly as bad as you think. In fact, slowly and away from the headlines, they have been getting better – quite a lot better, in fact, and not always that slowly.

However the Guardian has tried to pour cold water on Bill Gates' claim so Wiseman has a go at the Guardian as one must every now and then. That's what it is for. Rather than join in the fun it may be better to offer a slice of the Guardian argument and leave it at that.

Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity. They had little if any money, but then they didn’t need it in order to live well – so it makes little sense to claim that they were poor. This way of life was violently destroyed by colonisers who forced people off the land and into European-owned mines, factories and plantations, where they were paid paltry wages for work they never wanted to do in the first place.