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Since 1970, the percentage of the world’s population living on starvation’s edge has decreased by 80 percent. That’s about 2 billion people pulled out of poverty, over six times the number of people who currently reside in the United States.
I learned that this weekend while watching “The Pursuit,” an AEI documentary now available on Netflix that follows Arthur Brooks around the globe in search of the answer to one question: How did this happen?
The answer is free-market capitalism, a deceptively simple phrase for a complex and delicate cocktail of private property rights, the rule of law, entrepreneurial competition, free trade, and globalization. It’s the combination that has made the United States the most prosperous nation on earth, and that is responsible for changing the fundamental trajectory of India, the world’s largest democracy. Without India’s liberalizing reforms, we learn over the course of the film, there would be 375 million more poor people in the country today.
But this answer isn’t widely accepted, perhaps least of all in the countries that have benefited most from capitalism’s creative but destructive impulses. A great irony of our times is that people across the political spectrum, in the wealthiest countries in the world, are increasingly turning against the very system that lifted them out of poverty.
One goal of “The Pursuit” is to change this, to persuade viewers of the overwhelmingly positive influence democratic capitalism has had on the world. But it’s not tendentious or sermonizing. The setting is more Bond film than lecture hall, jetting between set pieces in the teeming streets of Mumbai, the comfortable rowhouses of Copenhagen, and the Dalai Lama’s Buddhist monastery in the Himalayan foothills, featuring interviews with anti-capitalist street protestors in Barcelona and left-behind coal miners in Kentucky along the way. The picture it paints of global capitalism isn’t Pollyannaish, but one of steady material betterment — progress that could stall out if we forget what brought it about in the first place.
“The Pursuit” is available to stream on Netflix and for purchase on iTunes. Released earlier this year, it was a 2019 Official Selection for the Dallas International Film Festival, the Cleveland International Film Festival, and the Mountainfilm documentary festival. You can view the trailer below, and visit the website here.
The picture it paints of global capitalism isn’t Pollyannaish, but one of steady material betterment — progress that could stall out if we forget what brought it about in the first place.
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