The After Age has brought an astoundingly high standard of living to billions of people around the world. This improvement happened over generations, and the greatest advances occurred, in many places, before most people alive today were born. In other words, most people living in the After Age do not know what it was like to live before it. All evidence suggests it was, at the very least, a hassle, and often miserable.
The average per-capita income has gone up 1500% – 2000% over the last 200 years. This is in absolute terms. In other words, if you were living in 1820 and were as rich as the average inhabitant of the After Age today, you would be 20 times richer back then.
However, this statistic does not really do justice to the amazing improvements in living standards. For example, even if you were the richest person alive in 1820, you still might die from a disease that is easily treated today. You still had to read by candle light. You still had to travel by carriage to most places. And so on. How much more valuable is a light bulb than a candle? Ten times? A hundred times? Economists attempt to measure these improvements, but it is difficult to know exactly. Suffice to say, things have gotten better. By a lot.
The number one reason for all of the prosperity we have now is what we call capitalism. Despite its obvious success in helping billions of people escape poverty, we have mixed feelings about capitalism, and we should. There is a long list of capitalism’s crimes, and they’re all true. Capitalism is exploitative. It rewards greed and selfish behavior. It feeds on the destruction of the natural world. It undermines community, morality, and existing ways of life. It takes away individual purpose and identity.
You get what you pay for, or rather, you pay for what you get. We have gotten quite a lot from capitalism, and we have paid dearly, with our entire way of life, and our entire sense of self.
That said, every attack on capitalism is like striking a mirror. Capitalism is a word we use to describe human behavior, exercised freely, in the realm of economics and money. Exploitation, greed, environmental destruction, immorality – all of these things have existed without capitalism. The only way we could remove these from capitalism would be by removing them from human nature. Replace capitalism with some other method of economic organization and these flaws will show up in another form. We can escape from capitalism’s flaws, but only if we can master ourselves first.
In the meantime, we must keep making money. We’ve got nearly eight billion mouths to feed, and counting. Capitalism is a critical part of bringing those of us not yet in the After Age into the After Age because it converts self interest into greater prosperity for everyone. Since capitalism works best when everyone participates, turning our backs on capitalism now is not merely foolish but cruel to those using it to build a better life for themselves and future generations. This is true even if it can sometimes seem that capitalism is the cruel one.
Capitalism is not noble. Greed is not good. Human beings are noble and good and also greedy, selfish, and crass. It takes a certain maturity, resolve, and willpower to both recognize the inequities and cruelties of capitalism, and yet tolerate it as a whole for the greater good it brings to humanity. It is a test of our ability to hold two conflicting ideas in our minds at the same time, and still retain our good judgment. Which, as should be clear by now, is one of the fundamental demands of the After Age.
As individuals, by allowing ourselves to see the dual nature of capitalism we are better equipped to make the right choice when it comes to the countless economic decisions we make in our lives. I am not talking about what sort of economic policy to support, but how we want to behave when it comes to running a business, working for or employing others, buying, selling, or making money in any way.
It’s about money, not fairness. The wealth gap between the richest and poorest human beings is wider today than it has ever been in the history of the world. Much, much wider. We live in an age when a single person might spend as much money in a day as tens of thousands of others do in their entire lives. An age when one child might be chauffeured around the world in a private jumbo jet, while other children starve to death for want of a crust of bread. Today, inequality is so severe that ten of the world’s richest people have more wealth than 50% of the rest. This is an extremely unfair state of affairs.
But here’s the thing: The After Age isn’t about those ten people. It’s about all of us. Remember, the goal in reach is to bring the prosperity of the After Age to all of humanity. Given this, the fact that some people have much more than others is irrelevant, provided that fact does not prevent the goal from being achieved.
As with so much in this book, I am not asking you to change your behavior, only to reconsider how you see the world. Changing our focus from what the wealthy have to what the rest of us lack does not necessarily change any of our goals, or the methods used to achieve them. Do we need better health care, infrastructure, public security, or a cleaner environment? If we cannot afford them, a good place to look for the cash would be in the bank accounts of the wealthy.
Inequality is at the heart of capitalism. So are lies, manipulation, and exploitation. When you buy something, you pay what you are willing to pay, not what is “fair”. When you work for someone else, your salary is what they offer and you accept, not what is “fair”. Capitalism is whatever we can get away with to make a buck. Anything else you could say about capitalism – good or bad – is just a side-effect.
If you don’t like this state of affairs the best revenge is not to rage against the machine, but to use capitalism the way it uses us. Capitalism can help make us all rich. Then, maybe, we can say goodbye to capitalism, if we want. But by that point, we may not care.
Opposition to free trade is wrong. In the United States, and elsewhere, opposition to free trade or “globalization” is often the only thing that both the left and the right agree on. Both oppose free trade because it hurts local workers by forcing down wages and moving jobs overseas where wages are lower. The left also dislikes that free trade waters down worker’s rights, unions, and environmental standards. The right dislikes that free trade allows foreign nations to “get rich off us” by using cheap exports to rich countries to pull themselves up economically and catch up in wealth and status. Workers, whatever their politics, are scared of losing their jobs.
I do not disagree with any of that. Low-cost foreign competition for work hurts workers in wealthier countries like the United States. I personally feel this competition in my own career. But there is a much bigger moral issue here we all must consider. It is easily ignored, perhaps because it is hiding in plain sight.
The reason the jobs go overseas is because wages are lower there. The reason wages are lower there is because people are poorer. Not just poorer, but poor, period. They have no money. The hardships of the unemployed in the US or France or Japan are, on average, mild compared to those of the unemployed in rural China, India, or Nicaragua.
This is also true with respect to immigrants, legal or otherwise, who offer their work for lower wages and with fewer demands than native-born workers. Generally speaking, the reason someone is willing to work for less is because they need the money more. For them, the alternative may be a life of dire poverty.
You may recall from the introduction why I have written this book. It is not for your benefit, dear citizen of the After Age, though I hope you do benefit from it. It is for everyone else who does not live in the After Age yet. When we try (or succeed) in pulling up the drawbridge and keeping factories and jobs at home, or low-wage immigrants out, we may think we are doing the right thing. And we are helping some people – our people. But the people who could most use help, objectively speaking, are being screwed.
If pulling a billion people out of poverty in China means layoffs in America, the richest country in the world, so be it. I’ll never get elected president saying that. But there are a lot of obviously true things that presidents never say.
None of the common criticisms of free trade are incorrect. I am well aware that the ideal of free trade can and is weaponized by greed to harm people on both sides of the bargain. I am also aware that trade is not the only way to get rich, and that nations exploit free trade for unfair advantage. Nor am I arguing for open borders or more immigration. In fact, I am not advocating any specific policy one way or the other. I am simply pointing out the moral contradiction here. As with so much in the After Age, we must find a way to balance this contradiction in our own heads when we think about the world around us.
Free trade and free markets, broadly speaking, were critical to achieving the weath, health and freedom we enjoy in the After Age. If today they hurt people that once benefited from them, we should find some solution to help that does not hurt others who are worse off. To deny them their chance to get rich, now that we’ve gotten ours, is obscenely selfish, and wrong.
If you can think of the lives of people not like you as valuable, then the benefits of free trade can fill you with pride and joy. People’s lives all over the world are steadily improving. The net amount of human prosperity is increasing. This is a profoundly good thing that dwarfs in importance our petty resentments over borders and trade. If you have just lost your job to someone on the other side of the world, I do not expect you to agree with this, or want to hear it at all. But it is still true.
Good enough is glorious. Inequality is hard to stomach. Wide gaps between what some have and others don’t does not feel right to many people, especially when some struggle with the basic necessities of life. This feeling is only made worse when those with so much wealth manipulate government and society to get more.
But there are other reasons for our unhappiness with inequality. No matter how much we have, someone else will have more. We compare ourselves to them and feel bad about ourselves. We feel anxiety that we are not keeping up with them, so we work harder, sacrificing the finite moments of our life to something we dislike. We feel that we are somehow lesser than those with more money, and that inferiority seeps into our relationships with others, and with ourselves. We feel jealousy that we don’t have what they do, and we get angry, bitter, and resentful. Or if it is not other people’s wealth and status that bothers us, it is some perceived material lack in our own lives. We become obsessed with possessing a bigger house, better car, or some other thing we want. We know having it will improve our lives, but we lose track of the fact that the improvement it brings is likely to be small and superficial.
Capitalism did not create these feelings, but it certainly feeds off of them. Whether you blame this situation on capitalism, or human nature (to me there’s not much difference) it is clear that capitalism makes it worse.
But capitalism can also make those feelings better. Anyone who lives in the After Age is richer than 99% of all the human beings who have ever lived. If you live in the After Age, it gets easier and easier to say “I have everything I need, and most of what I want, and I just don’t care anymore.”
Where that line is drawn is not something that can be dictated from on high. Governments can try, but ultimately being satisfied with your life is something you must achieve on your own. You can achieve it by working to get it (or demanding it as a right). But you can also achieve it by accepting what you have as good enough. That acceptance is different for everyone. One of the great things about capitalism, for all its flaws, is it makes it easier for everyone to draw that line, eventually. But it will never draw it for you.