economics, or any economic thinking, good or bad, or any pizza, or anything else. We would sit around and stare at rocks, and maybe later have some for dinner. Wealth is based on productivity, and productivity is expandable. In fact, productivity is fabulously expandable, as Angus Maddison has shown in Monitoring the World Economy. Yet a person who is worried about fairness can look at Maddison’s figures and say that they are just averages. Per-capita GDP does not show us who actually got the cash. The worrier about fairness can recite the old saw: “The rich get richer and the poor . . .” “Get entertained by People magazine stories about divorces among the rich.” That is not how the worrier was going to finish his sentence. “Get lower mortgage rates because banks have more money to lend.” That is not it, either. “Get better jobs because there’s more capital to be invested in businesses.” No, the cliché is, “The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.” Except there is no evidence of this in recent history. Per-capita GDP is a tricky figure and doesn’t tell us much about the well-being of individual people. But there are other statistics that don’t present the same problems of averaging. Life-expectancy and infant-mortality rates do tell us how things are going for ordinary folks. No matter how rich a nation’s elite, its members aren’t going to live to be 250 and wildly skew the numbers. And a country can’t fake a low infant-mortality rate by getting a few rich babies to live while letting all the poor babies die. The United Nations study World Population Prospects: 1996 Revision contains historical statistics on life expectancy and infant mortality. Figures are given for Most Developed Regions, Less Developed Regions, and Least Developed Regions. The last being places that are truly poor, such as Tanzania. In the early 1950s the richest countries had an average infant-mortality rate of 58 deaths per 1,000 live births. By the early 1990s the average was down to 11. During the same period the infant-mortality rate in the poorest countries dropped from an average of 194 deaths per 1,000 to 109 per 1,000. Infant-mortality rates declined in both rich and poor countries, and so did the gap between those rates. A difference of 136 deaths per 1,000 had diminished to a difference of 109 deaths forty years later. This is still too many dead babies (and it’s hard to imagine a number of dead babies that wouldn’t be too many, unless the fair- minded worrier is also a zealous pro-choice advocate). But infant-mortality rates give us some hopeful information about world economic growth. Yes, the rich
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online