Capitolism And Data

 https://x.com/brivael/status/2048149849569190221?s=51&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw

 

 ""Everyone should be anticapitalist," declares Lucie Castets. 500k views on the video. Nobody bats an eye. It's the intellectual equivalent of saying "2+2=8" in front of an audience that applauds politely. A quick educational reminder is in order. Capitalism is, throughout human history, the only system that has massively lifted people out of poverty. Not "one system among others." The only one. In 1820, about 90% of humanity lived in extreme poverty. Today it's less than 9%. This drop didn't fall from the sky; it exactly follows the curve of the spread of market economies. Look at China. Under Mao, 88% of the population lived in extreme poverty, and the country experienced the greatest famine in modern history (Great Leap Forward, 30 to 45 million deaths). Deng Xiaoping opens the economy in 1978. Result: 800 million people lifted out of poverty in 40 years. The greatest economic miracle in human history, achieved by abandoning socialism and adopting market mechanisms. Same story in Vietnam after the Đổi Mới in 1986. Same story in South Korea vs. North Korea. Same story in West Germany vs. East Germany. Same story in Taiwan vs. Maoist China. The natural experiment has been run dozens of times, on identical populations, with the same result every time. Countries that adopt market economies get rich. Those that oppose them collapse or stagnate. Capitalism isn't "the system of the rich." It's literally the only known mechanism that turns a starving peasant into middle class in two generations. No other system has ever accomplished that. None. Contemporary anticapitalism is a luxury of post-scarcity society. It can only exist because capitalism has already solved the subsistence problems that its critics no longer have to worry about. It's exactly like a kid born in a heated apartment who criticizes central heating because he finds it "vulgar." So when someone with a platform calmly asserts "everyone should be anticapitalist," there are three possibilities: they don't know economic history, they know it but lie for ideological reasons, or they're both. None of these options is flattering. And the worst part isn't the statement. It's the 223 likes below it. It's the total absence of pushback. It's the fact that in France, in 2026, spouting a statistically refutable absurdity on the level of a high school economics textbook passes for respectable political thought. We'll never escape collective mediocrity as long as we treat this level of analysis as a legitimate opinion rather than what it is: a factual error."