ONCE MORE ON POVERTY IS MORE IMPORTANT A PROBLEM THAN INEQUALITY

On the Adam Smith Blog (Adam Smith Institute HERE http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/) 

Tim Worstall 20 August) posts on “What glories this capitalist free market thing hath wrought”.

It is quite briliant as we have come to expect from Tim Worstall.  Follow the link and read why.

I posted the comment below on his piece”

“Tim and Deirdre are both right: poverty is a more important problem than inequality. It wasn’t the desire for equality that drove Homo Sapiens and their immediate predecessors to develop speech and toolmaking from which human consumer products evolved, lifting them, albeit marginally at first, from the norms associated with the consumption possibilities of animals in nature.

Adam Smith lectured on these great transformations, hindered as he was by no knowledge of evolution or the circumstances and the millions of years and hundreds of millennia of pre-history involved, and without direct knowledge of modern anthropology and basic archeology, hence his summary efforts could not be taken any further by his student listeners:

“All other animals find their food in the state they desire it and that which is best suited to their                                                                         several natures, and few other necessaries do they stand in need of. But man, of a more delicate frame and more feeble constitution, meets with nothing so adapted to his use that it does not stand in need of improvement and preparation to fit for his own use” (Adam Smith (1762-3): Lectures on Jurisprudence, p. 334. vi.9).

It was, and is still, the unrelenting power of those needs for improvement to fit human use that drove human progress and adaptation, or what Deirdre McCloskey calls the “Great Enrichment” that defines “the main fact and finding of economic history”, (including of course our pre-history).