[Skybird]

From Switzerland's Basler Zeitung, but in principle the same is true in Germany and from a German perspective as well.

https://translate.google.de/translat...225&edit-text=

This narrative is so powerful because it is based on old, ultimately Marxist legends, which have been used again and again for more than one hundred and fifty years. That does not make them any truer, but they are always believed - far into bourgeois, even anti-Marxist circles. Why are we rich in the West? Why are the rest so poor? Karl Marx could explain this only as a kind of conspiracy of the entrepreneurs and rich against the "wage-dependent" and the poor. Marx has already started from an unfair exchange between employer and employee, where the employer succeeds in over-skimming the surplus value created by the worker. Marx therefore expected that in the long run the worker would be worse and worse, while the entrepreneur, the bourgeois, would become more and more powerful and above all fat.

This left-wing, pseudo-scientific conspiracy theory was easily transferred to the relationship between rich and poor countries. Was not the Third World the proletariat, while in the West the bourgeoisie triumphed-and was not this relationship as one-sided and unfair as that between employer and worker on a small scale? Trade kills, trade makes poor. We have to be ashamed.


Lust for self-flagellation

Perhaps it is this profoundly moralistic, even almost religious content, that this story of poverty and exploitation so captivates and tempts people in the West to deny their own success and think the miracle of modernity is a lazy magic. Indeed, it seemed outrageous how wealthy the West had become within a short time since the so-called Industrial Revolution had taken place in England towards the end of the eighteenth century. By the year 1800, all people in the world lived on average $ 3 a day per capita, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa. This amount, the latest economic-historical research confirms, has been virtually unchanged for more than 10,000 years since humans settled down.


Certainly, this income could fluctuate, if not to a very impressive extent. If certain advanced civilizations settled down, as in ancient Rome or the ancient Chinese Empire, Renaissance Italy or Spain under Arab rule, this number could increase to $ 6 or $ 7, and then back to $ 3 as soon as this high culture collapsed to fall back or even deeper.
In other words, with very few exceptions, man practically always lived on the edge of subsistence, and that everywhere. This did not change until the eighteenth century - when a new economy prevailed first in Holland, then in England, then in Belgium, in Switzerland and in Saxony, and finally in the whole of the West.


Later they called it (following Marx) capitalism, which is misleading. Admittedly, however, a new concept came to mind, for it was an outrageous development that American economist Deirdre Nansen McCloskey describes much better than "The Great Enrichment," the Great Enrichment. Crucial, however, so McCloskey, by no means the accumulation of capital - it had previously been elsewhere, but completely new was the extraordinary increase in productivity, means: A single worker produced in the same time more and more goods, always better Goods, increasingly cheaper goods - thanks to machines, thanks to smarter organization, thanks to resourceful minds, thanks to gifted entrepreneurs, thanks to intensive working hours. This had nothing at all to do with Africa's plight: Europeans did not become more productive at the expense of Africans or Asians, but because a very unique culture of continual improvement, of continuous innovation, spread to the West.

German original: https://bazonline.ch/schweiz/standar...story/10477225


Self-flagellation has become a Western art form and a collective hobby, and the West excels at it.