this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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Accepting the ambiguity you point out, saying that capitalism inherently promotes poverty is a stretch. It’s demonstrably the spread of liberal free market capitalism over the last 50 years has been the key to dragging more people out of poverty than ever before. It sure ain’t perfect, and needs to be moderated with appropriate democratic oversight and regulation, but it’s worked better than anything else we’ve tried
I am not a fan of the CCP at all, but the amount of people they've lifted out of abject poverty in the past 30+ years has been staggering.
So no.
With capitalism and the adoption of a free market economy. Less on the democratic oversight
its difficult to say that that has been the key to that in my view, because the primary mechanism by which this has happened has been a spread of industrial infrastructure (and thus both automation and the capacity to trade more things with other places) into areas where it was previously lacking, which has a tendency to reduce the amount of labor needed to produce many common goods and thus their relative price. Making more things and for cheaper is likely to reduce poverty under just about any economic system, and theres nothing about industrial development that implies that it must be done under capitalism, so I dont think we can say that it was key so much as one of the options, which most places have gone with.
That being said, say for the sake of argument that I accept this, that capitalism has been the key to driving a lot of people out of poverty. Would that actually change anything that I had said previously? The notion that a transition to capitalism has lowered poverty, and that capitalism inherently promotes poverty arent contradictory, if the conditions that the capitalism replaced trend towards an even higher level of poverty than capitalism does. Under that circumstance, you would expect to see a dramatic drop in poverty when first adopted, but then for that progress to stall without poverty's elimination once the level that capitalism trends to under the circumstances is reached. Were the question something like "would you prefer to live under capitalism, or something like feudalism or an authoritarian command economy?" then sure, it'd be the least bad among these. But its still not good enough, and if nothing else we've tried has got there, then if we want the actual elimination of poverty, which I think we should, we're going to need to experiment with new ways of doing things.