Mssrs. Sanders and Varoufakis want to tell us where it all went wrong

Bernie Sanders and Yanis Varoufakis are insistent that the entire global economy took a serious wrong turn some 40 odd years ago. Therefore progressives must gird their loins and fight to overturn the extant world order.

We disagree, obviously enough, for we’re liberals and that world out there took a more liberal - classically liberal - turn those decades back. We disagree on theory that is.

However, we also disagree on the basis of empirical reality. The great claim of the progressives was always that they cared about, concerned themselves with, poverty in a manner in which classical liberals did not. We were the ones accused of preferring theory about liberty and freedom over the pernicious effects they had as a result of an uncaring attitude towards reality.

Well, yes, except think of the effects of that last 40 odd years of this New World Order. Absolute poverty has fallen from some 40% of humanity to under 10%. The best predictions we’ve got are that it will entirely vanish by 2030. This has indeed been brought about by that neoliberal globalisation which is being so complained about.

We do think the grand problem is and has been that absolute poverty. We revel in the fact that is has fallen and is falling. The idea that we should change horses just as the finish line comes into sight strikes us as absurd.

Global economic policy of the past 40 years, that system so being whined about, has just produced the greatest fall in human poverty in the entire history of our species. We cannot see that this is a failure requiring a change in policy. Mssrs. Sanders and Varoufakis disagree - what say you?