Good news about children’s welfare

Published 10:22 pm Saturday, September 14, 2013

The news isn’t all bad. In fact, much of it is pretty good. We were troubled by the images of children who were victims of a chemical weapons attack in Syria last month, but now UNICEF is releasing a report showing that worldwide, children are much better off than they’ve ever been. Child mortality is falling dramatically.

“In 2012, approximately 6.6 million children worldwide — 18,000 children per day — died before reaching their fifth birthday,” the report says. “This is roughly half the number of under-fives who died in 1990, when more than 12 million children died.”

UNICEF head Anthony Lake said “millions of lives have been saved… this is a positive trend.”

He’s right. Still, much of the press coverage focused on “global action” as the reason child mortality rates have dropped.

“The lives of 90 million children have been saved in the last two decades as a result of global action to cut mortality rates, a new report shows,” says the (London) Metro. “Better health treatment, improvements in mothers’ nutrition and advances in education have seen major strides being made, according to UNICEF.”

But that’s not exactly true — at least, it’s not the whole truth. The real reason there’s better health care, better nutrition and better education is that capitalism is lifting more and more people out of destitution.

“International organizations and aid groups have a terrible record at improving the lives of the people in developing countries,” the Cato Institute points out. “Child mortality in the developing world is declining because poor countries are getting richer.”

In fact, “4.9 billion people — the considerable majority of the planet — [live] … in countries where GDP has increased more than fivefold over 50 years,” the Center for Global Development says. “Those countries include India, with an economy nearly 10 times larger than it was in 1960, Indonesia (13 times), China (17 times), and Thailand (22 times larger than in 1960).”

Aid is nice, and can help alleviate short-term suffering, but economic development is key to improving the lives of the poor.

Rock musician Bono, lead singer for the band U2, recently spoke up for capitalism.

“Aid is just a stop-gap,” said the musician, who has made a second career of winning foreign aid for impoverished nations. “Commerce — entrepreneurial capitalism — takes more people out of poverty than aid … In dealing with poverty here and around the world, welfare and foreign aid are a Band-Aid. Free enterprise is a cure.”

Bono’s words contradict the claims of many on the left; it’s trendy now to blame capitalism for all of humanity’s ills. But they’re ignoring capitalism’s accomplishments.

“It is simply a fact that capitalism, even hampered by the state, has dragged most of the world out of the pitiful poverty that characterized all of human existence for millennia,” economist Anthony Gregory said in 2011. “It was industrialization that saved the common worker from the constant tedium of primitive agriculture. It was the commodification of labor that doomed slavery, serfdom, and feudalism.”

And today we see it preserving the lives of children. That’s good news.