The Pinker-preached faith that markets are in the business of maximizing flourishing often operates as fancy conscience management camouflage. As currently practiced, markets don’t distribute flourishing (or much of anything else) in an ethically sound way. Surely, the right thing to do is to always prevent avoidable suffering, before further enhancing rich lifestyles. By what logic can we square squandering resources on rich toys when so many obvious gains in basic suffering reduction are within relatively easy reach? While this isn’t quite as simple as redirecting financial resources from ice cream and face cream to poverty alleviation, it’s also not that much more difficult. Why are toys and trinkets for the world’s wealthy more important than food to prevent those 150,000,000 kids from being stunted? Surely much less flourishing arises from the incremental last 1% of billionaire bauble buying than would for example by educating the world’s hundreds of millions of kids who aren’t presently schooled. A 1% wealth tax on the $13 trillion of the world’s 3,000 billionaires (meaning they might have to make do with a smaller second superyacht) versus the vastly improved flourishing of 250,000,000 kids. Why is that a hard trade off if you really are interested in maximizing flourishing? By ignoring such noxious nightmares of distributional sins, neoliberalism operates like a nerdier form of imperialism (with extra-advanced emperor’s new-clothes tailoring courtesy of Pinkering pundits, in our era’s version of Kipling’s conscientious conquerors—“The Bright Man’s Burden”—cognitive supremacy (assessed by flimsy tests like SAT scores) grants divine rights to hugely disproportionate share of global resources, and control of how horribly slowly the not-so-bright looser-layers can gain.
Free Market Genocides: The Real History of Trade
