If we turned all the wealth of the super rich of history and we made the current ranking of the wealthiest people of all time, we would see that the top of the list is the emperor Mansa Musa I of Mali who lived between 1280 and 1337. His empire drew huge amounts of gold which he used to create cities, universities, palaces, mosques and madrasas and promote culture, science and art. Musa became the most important city of the empire, Timbuktu, one of the world capitals of commerce, culture and the intelligentsia, with palaces and buildings designed by the best architects of the Spanish era.
It is said that in 1324, Mansa Musa organized a pilgrimage to Mecca accompanied by 60,000 men and 12,000 slaves, all dressed in Persian silk, each loaded with a gold bar two pounds of weight. They were accompanied by 80 camels loaded with 120 pounds of gold dust each. Since this was a pious pilgrimage, Musa was giving gold to the poor that stood in the way. The trip ended up described in the books as one of the most lavish and extravagant history. Historian to Humari visited Cairo 12 years after Mansa Musa passed around, and saw that people still spoke with affection and nostalgia, the generosity of the emperor of Mali. Some scholars (*) have been estimated personal fortune of Mansa Musa 400,000 million at current prices, three times higher than that of Bill Gates in the prime of his life (at the time of maximum wealth is estimated that the founder of Microsoft had 136,000 million dollars in the bank).
Despite its immense and obscene wealth, Mansa Musa never eat pizza or chocolate, never went to the movies, could never take an aspirin when I had a headache. He could never turn the TV with a remote control when he got tired of his palace, and could flush the water for their bowel will take, or pull the switch to turn on or off light. In his famous voyage, it took several months to go riding 5,000 kilometers that separate Mali from Mecca, a journey that takes a modern plane in about 6 hours and 34 minutes. The palaces of Mansa Musa had no air conditioning. Even though at the time, Timbuktu was an intellectual center, its sages had no access to books or scientific articles that were developed in other universities worldwide. They had access to Google or newspapers around the world instantly and for free. Their children could not play with the Playstation or Wii, or kill pigs angry birds throwing from his ipad. To communicate with fellow sultan an-Nasir Cairo, Mansa Musa had no Whatsapp nor Facebook, or mobile phone. I had to write a letter that was transported on horseback through the desert and, if not desert pirates intercepted, took months to arrive. Oddly enough, all the richest man in history could never do, by the average worker in a capitalist economy.
Throughout history human societies have been formed by a few very rich people and overwhelmingly poor. 99.9% of the citizens of all societies in history, from hunter-gatherers of the Stone Age, to the peasants Phoenicians, Greeks, Etruscans, Romans, Goths or Ottomans of old, passing by farmers of medieval Europe or the America of the Incas, the Aztecs or the Mayans, the dynasties of imperial Asia or precolonial Africa, lived in extreme poverty. Absolutely all these societies had the majority of the population to the limit of subsistence to the point that, when the weather was not with a significant part of them died of starvation. All this began to change in 1760 when a new economic system born in England and Holland, capitalism, precipitated an economic revolution that changed things forever in just over 200 years, capitalism has made the average worker in an economy average market has not only ceased to live on the border of subsistence, but even pleasures have access to the richest man in history, Emperor Mansa Musa I could not even imagine.
Yup! I know some will tell me that today's workers can enjoy all the comforts of technological progress, not because of the market economy. The question, however, is: why aspirin, air conditioning, the Whatsapp, the "Angry Birds" or the mobile phone invented? Why were invented in capitalist economies? The answer is that the inventors sought to benefit financially from their innovations, and the capitalist system gave them the right incentives for that to happen.
In 1970, 30% of the world population living on less than a dollar a day. In 2011 (the latest year for which data are available), the poverty rate was less than 5%. That is, the poverty rate has been divided by 6 since 1970. What happened since 1970? Well, among other things, the most populous and poorest in the world abandoned the socialist planning system that condemned them to poverty and adopted capitalism as a form of economic organization. The most spectacular case is the most populous of all: China. When Mao Zedong died in September 1976, 66% of 1,200 million Chinese living on less than a dollar a day (one dollar a day is the definition of extreme poverty that the United Nations used to declare the objectives Goals in 2000). A couple of years later, his successor Den Xiaoping introduced capitalism as an economic system in which until that time had been a Maoist socialist country. After four decades of market economy, the percentage of Chinese who live below the poverty line is less than 0.3%: When Mao died, there were 615 million poor people in their country. Of these, a total of 612 million people are no longer poor because the economic system has changed.
A similar thing happened in India, which in 1991 abandoned its socialist system of five-year planning a shy and introduce market liberalization. That led to the economic growth of the giant of Southeast Asia and has led millions of people left to live below the poverty line. And since 1995, including most African countries began to follow the path of growth and reduce poverty rates.
Do not! Capitalism is not a perfect economic system. But when it comes to reducing poverty in the world, is the best economic system man has ever seen.
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