The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

18 apologyUNICEF announced that half the world’s population now had clean waterpiped into the home, and 83 percent were within half an hour’s walk of a cleanwater source. If that sounds awful, then you don’t grasp how bad it once was,and how important water-borne disease has been in human history. From1990 to 2002 Angola, the Central African Republic, Chad, Malawi, and Tanzania,some of the poorest countries in the modern world, have increased accessto clean water by 50 percent. 39 Remember why a third of the grain crop wentinto water-preserving beer in the European Middle Ages. Remember cholerain Chicago in 1852 and 1854 and 1873, typhoid in 1881 and 1891.You will say that social, humanitarian, and cosmopolitan forces haveachieved the improvement. Your opinion deserves sympathetic scrutiny. Butfor now consider that you might be mistaken, that enrichment rather thanregulation is the main cause of our better human environment. Consider,too, that the social, humanitarian, and cosmopolitan forces you admire,supporting the United Nations and the relief of disasters, were themselves aresult of liberal capitalism.Consider.IV.Probatio B: And Lets Us Live LongerClean water, inoculation, better food, and penicillin purchased with thehigher income raised the expectation of life at birth in the world fromroughly 26 years in 1820 to 66 years in 2000—with variation, but no placeleft behind: from 39 to 77 in the United States, for example; from 23 to 52(before AIDS) in Africa; up in Russia, then down during its halfheartedmove to capitalism, now up again. 40Goodness: 26 years to 66 years. Linger a while on those numbers, if youlike that sort of thing. They imply that over the past two centuries the adultyears over age 16 have increased in expectation for the average newbornfrom the 10 years from 16 to 26 to the 50 years from 16 to 66. The expectationof adult life in other words has grown by a factor of 5. Not 5 years or5 percent, but 5 times.This would be the relevant statistic for someone, say a father, gazing onhis son and heir and speculating about what length of adult life he could beexpected to have. An economist would claim that a father would think thisway when deciding at the birth how much to invest in him. With 50 adultyears in prospect the father might well plan for a thorough education, in