It’s not thanks to capitalism that we’re living longer, but progressive politics

[SydneyRover]

Excellent piece by Jason Hickel, anthropolgist.

"It wasn’t until the 1880s that urban life expectancies finally began to rise – at least in Europe. But what drove these sudden gains? Szreter finds it was down to a simple intervention: sanitation.

Public health activists had discovered that health outcomes could be improved by separating sewage from drinking water. And yet progress toward this goal was opposed, not enabled, by the capitalist class – libertarian landlords and factory owners refused to allow officials to build sanitation systems on their properties, and refused to pay the taxes required to get the work done''

I'd like to hear what those that read it think.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/22/progressive-politics-capitalism-unions-healthcare-education

[Colemans Left Hook]

it's funny reading the above ... by co-incidence i discovered the following a couple of weeks ago..

 in 1871 the future King Edward VII (naturally referred to as "The Prince") here almost died due to the above

"Lord Chesterfield was one of a house party of 27 Marlborough House setters invited to Londesborough Lodge in Scarborough in 1871. Somewhat unusually for the philandering Prince, he was accompanied by his wife Alexandra, Princess of Wales. Londesborough Lodge was a relatively cramped house built on a cliff top with what transpired to be a fetid drainage system. The Princess of Wales then the Prince complained of feeling unwell and returned to their Norfolk estate Sandringham where the Prince was diagnosed with typhoid fever. Typhoid had carried off his father Prince Albert, the Prince Consort almost a decade to the day of the Prince of Wales’s near-fatal illness.

Such was the seriousness that Queen Victoria was summoned from Osborne House to hold vigil at his bedside with a distraught Princess Alexandra. The Prince of Wales recovered after evading the Grim Reaper by a whisker. On the same day of the heir to the throne’s recovery, it was announced that Lord Chesterfield had died of typhoid fever at Bretby Hall. The ill humours at Londesborough Lodge were blamed for the 7th Earl’s demise."

Conclusion
Disease has no respect even for Royalty

[BillyStubbsTears]

Capitalism is an excellent driver for raising the average economic conditions of huge numbers of people. It's done wonders in Europe and East Asia. I've never believed that a full command economy such of the old China and East European model could come anywhere near matching that.

But it has to be controlled. That's the key political issue of our time. If you let Capitalism off the leash and allow the State to take a back seat, the results are always disastrous. Our problem in the West is that we've done precisely that for nearly half a century. And the results have been exactly what could have been predicted. Wealth and power has been concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

After the Great Depression and WWII, we realised we had to control capitalism. That led to a Golden Age of high growth, but more equitable sharing of the proceeds of growth. And a long, slow dilution of the wealth of the very richest. Since the 1970s, that's gone into reverse. Across the West, but in particular in the UK and USA, the proportion of wealth concentrated in the hands of the very richest is now back to what it was in the 1920s. And that is the root of many of our societal problems. Under-investement in public infrastructure and services. Assets like houses, too expensive for the young to buy into. Us being told that the nation can't afford decent pensions or benefits for people. It doesn't have to be that way. It's a choice of how you want to manage society.

If you see it in those terms, what Corbyn and Labour are trying to do is to reset the balance closer to what is was a couple of generations ago, when Capitalism still worked perfectly well. But it also worked a lot more fairly then too.