Al Gore, who came within a few hundred votes of being elected president in 2000, has designed a blueprint to overhaul capitalism to create a sustainable capitalism that will support lasting economic growth. He says that the way capitalism is now practiced does not “...incorporate sufficient regard for its impact on people, society and the planet.”
Up until the Industrial Revolution in the mid-1700s most people lived at a subsistence level of income, and starvation was a constant threat. Only since that time, thanks to capitalism, has the world ever seen “lasting economic growth.” Most of human history has been the search for sufficient calories to survive, and people who lived prior to the twentieth century would have been astounded to witness people today who actually have too much food, and are trying to lose weight.
Fifty years ago nobody had cellular telephones, microwave ovens, or personal computers. Air conditioned homes and automobiles were a rarity, and color television was new and equally rare. Today we take all these things for granted, as we have hundreds of available television channels, even more content on the internet, as we drive around in our air conditioned automobiles and travel anywhere in the world in a matter of hours in jet aircraft.
All this happened in a few hundred years, thanks to capitalism.
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