Earn your stripes

“Don’t it always seem to go / That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”

Joni Mitchell, arch-priestess of the hippy movement, might have been singing about the environment but, somewhat ironically, her words ring true for capitalism, and its cousin, globalisation.

These two forces have done much more than shape the modern world – they have proven more effective at combating the four horsemen of the apocalypse than any other system of government or economics.

We live in a time of unprecedented global peace, a new Pax Romana, where conflicts are more often resolved through sanctions than kinetic warfare. The private sector has been far more successful than nation States at eradicating diseases like polio and malaria (witness the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for example).

Meanwhile, the number of people living in poverty more than halved between 1990 and 2013 thanks largely to the greater opportunities provided by the world economy, while private organisations are helping to elimi­nating hunger through, among other means, biotechnology.

None of these achievements would have been possible – and certainly not on this scale – if it weren’t easy for people...