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The expansion of capitalism led to a deterioration in human welfare, according to new study
| This is according to a study carried out by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) in collaboration with Macquarie University, Australia, which shows that this new economic system saw a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and a marked upturn in premature mortality.
| The study analyze three empirical indicators—real wages (with respect to a subsistence basket), human height, and mortality—in five world regions (Europe, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and China) from the rise of the capitalist world-economy in the 16th century.
| Their analysis points to three conclusions. First, they find it is unlikely that extreme poverty was a normal or universal condition prior to the 19th century. Data on real wages indicates that, historically, unskilled urban laborers tended to have incomes that were sufficient to meet their basic needs, for food, clothing, and shelter.
Extreme poverty tended to arise during periods of dramatic social dislocation, ie wars, famines, and dispossession, particularly under colonialism.
| "If one assumes that extreme poverty was near universal in the past, then it may appear as good news that only a fraction of the global population lives in this condition today," says Dylan Sullivan, the study's lead author and researcher at Macquarie University, Australia. "But if extreme poverty is a sign of severe distress, relatively rare under normal conditions, it should deeply concern us that hundreds of millions of people continue to suffer this way today," he states.
| The second conclusion is that, far from delivering progress in social outcomes, the rise and expansion of capitalism saw a dramatic deterioration in human welfare.
In all the regions they review, the process of incorporation into the capitalist world-system was associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and a marked upturn in premature mortality.
| "This is because capitalism is an undemocratic system where production is organized around elite accumulation rather than human needs," explains Sullivan. "To maximize profitability, capital often seeks to cheapen labor through processes of enclosure, dispossession, and exploitation."
| Finally, the authors find that recovery from this prolonged period of immiseration occurred only recently: progress in human welfare began in the late 19th century in Northwest Europe and the mid-20th century in the global South. Sullivan and Hickel note that this coincides with the rise of the labor movement, socialist political parties, and de-colonization.
| "These movements redistributed incomes, established public provisioning systems, and attempted to organize production around meeting human needs," Jason Hickel says. "Progress appears to come from progressive social movements."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169?via%3Dihub
https://phys.org/news/2022-09-expansion-capitalism-deterioration-human-welfare.html
| I linked the scientific study too because the graphs are really interesting.
| Define poverty.
| >>898897 Your village has a lake that you fish in for work/food. Life isn't great but you can survive. A foreign company comes to mine nearby gold and use mercury to separate gold from other materials. Mercury goes in the lake. Can't fish, can't survive but company gives you a shiny phone as compensation.
| >>898910 Yeah, some people will say the first scenario is poverty, and some people (like myself) will say the second scenario is poverty.
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| Since beginning in 16th century Europe, capitalism worsened mass living standards often below substinence there & worse in rest of world. Living standards rose only in late 19/20th centuries when labor, socialist, anti-colonial movements made it.