HOW CAPITALISM CHANGES CONSCIENCE. By Jonathan Haidt

HOW CAPITALISM CHANGES CONSCIENCE. By Jonathan Haidt

https://www.humansandnature.org/culture-how-capitalism-changes-conscience

Excerpt: Let’s start with the graph below, which is my nomination for “most important graph in the world.” It shows GDP per capita from the year 1 to the year 2001, broken out by region. You can see the moment when Western Europe’s economy began to eclipse China’s—that first little bump upwards in the blue line, around 1500, when Europeans developed mercantile capitalism. Europeans created nautical and financial technologies to move vast quantities of stuff around using ships. But that bump is nothing compared to the leap upwards in the nineteenth century as Europe—and even more so the United States—developed industrial capitalism. People learned to make things quickly and cheaply, using factories. (Jonathan Haidt, the well-known psychologist from New York University, started as a "typical" liberal intellectual, but came to appreciate the awesome ability of free markets to improve the lives of the poor.--HP)