With my book Hayek’s Modern Family just a few months from publication, I thought I’d provide a little preview of one strand of my argument there.
Whatever the scientific merits of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it serves as a useful heuristic to capture the upward progress of humanity over the last two or three centuries. From millennia of poverty in which ensuring the basics of food and physical safety were day-to-day challenges for the vast majority of humanity, an increasing proportion of the population has reached a point where those struggles are non-existent. In the Western world, the overwhelming majority of the population does not worry moment-to-moment about their physical safety or where their next meal is coming from. The percentage of people living on less than $1.25 a day continues to fall, and fall rapidly, while people in other parts of the world continue to climb close to Western levels of wealth and comfort. Pulling ourselves out of poverty is perhaps humanity’s greatest achievement. Creating a world in which a substantial majority of the seven billion people on the planet live at least relatively long lives of reasonable comfort is a feat sometimes overlooked.
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