Inequality is the midwife of progress, which depends on the flourishing of the talented.
Marian L. Tupy —
Summary: Private entrepreneurs are opening up new frontiers of space tourism and innovation. Inequality is a driver of progress, and competition and efficiency is likely to eventually make space travel more affordable and accessible. This article challenges the negative portrayal of these pioneers as exploitative and greedy, instead celebrating their achievements as examples of human ingenuity and freedom.
On July 11, 2021, the British businessman Richard Branson fulfilled his lifelong dream of flying into space. At 8:40 a.m., Branson’s Virgin Spaceship (VSS) Unity 22 and its mothership Eve took off from Spaceport America in New Mexico. Having reached an altitude of over 50 miles, which is the U.S. government’s definition of space, and zero gravity, Unity 22 delivered the crew, consisting of Branson and five Virgin Galactic staffers, safely back to Earth. The flight, which was a culmination of 17 years of planning, research, development, and extensive safety testing, could mark the beginning of commercial space tourism.
It is difficult to overestimate Branson’s accomplishment. Our ancestors used to stare at the night sky, imagining an ethereal world populated by powerful and vengeful deities in need of appeasement. Today, a number of private companies, including Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, are pursuing goals that are similar to Branson’s: to bring space travel to the masses. Initially, the thrill of space flight will come at a steep price—Virgin Galactic tickets sell for $250,000 per flight—but thousands of relatively well-off people throughout the world can look forward to seeing our beautiful planet from above in the coming decade.
How, then, did parts of the American clerisy choose to commemorate Branson’s achievement? The headline “British billionaire Branson flies above 50 miles in his space plane, becoming first ‘space baron’ to qualify for astronaut wings” conjures up images of 19th-century American businessmen, such as Astor, Carnegie, Hearst, Mellon, Morgan, and Vanderbilt, who used supposedly exploitative practices to amass their wealth. Perhaps the most hated of these figures was J. D. Rockefeller, whose Standard Oil Company’s share of the refined-petroleum market increased from 4 percent in 1870 to 85 percent in 1880. Often forgotten is that Standard Oil reduced the price of refined oil from more than 30 cents per gallon in 1869 to 8 cents in 1885.
Sure, Branson, Bezos, and other space entrepreneurs are going to grow richer still, but competition, economies of scale, and the concomitant efficiency gains are bound to reduce the price of space tourism over time. The cost of the Ford Motor Company’s Model T, for example, fell from $825 in 1909 (or 4,853 hours of work at a blue-collar wage of $0.17 per hour) to $360 in 1927 (or 692 hours of work at a blue-collar wage of $.52 per hour). That amounts to a time-price reduction of 86 percent. The once-close-to-unattainable luxury is now ubiquitous, with 93 percent of U.S. households having access to at least one car in 2019, according to the Federal Highway Administration.
The same is true of electricity, plumbing, radios, refrigerators, clothes washers and dryers, air conditioners, dishwashers, color television, microwaves, computers, cellphones, VCRs and DVD players, etc. What’s more, the speed of adaptation of new technologies, as W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm of Southern Methodist University have shown, is increasing. It took about half a century from the invention of the telephone to the time when 50 percent of U.S. households owned one. In contrast, after only twelve years of smartphones hitting the stores, 50 percent of individual Americans possessed one. That is what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter had in mind when he noted that the
capitalist engine is first and last an engine of mass production which unavoidably also means production for the masses. . . . It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man. Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within reach of factory girls.
In fact, I am willing to extend a $10,000 wager to the editor at the Washington Post who came up with the “space baron” headline that in ten years’ time, a Virgin Galactic flight equivalent to the one taken by the British billionaire will cost less in terms of hours of work than it costs today.
Over at NBC News, the headline read “Richard Branson space flight beats out Jeff Bezos. But all of humanity loses.” According to the author, Chandra Steele, “the stratification of who gets to leave the stratosphere is not another division we need.” In the past,
astronauts did not go in the stead of the rest of the planet; they were pioneers on behalf of the rest of the population. . . . It seems unlikely that the billionaires who travel to space will engage in a meaningful way with the broader population afterward, in part because they’re so far removed from other people. In fact, their privilege has put them at such odds with Earth’s inhabitants that many don’t want them to come back.
Where to begin? First, the word “privilege” does not mean what Steele appears to think it means. The English word “privilege” derives from the Latin privilegium, which, in turn, consists of two Latin words: privus (private) and lex (law). And so, for about 2,000 years, privilege meant “a law for just one person, a benefit enjoyed by an individual or group beyond what is available to others.” In a highly stratified society, such as Europe before the Enlightenment, different groups enjoyed different privileges and guarded the latter jealously and, sometimes, violently.
During the Enlightenment, privileges, such as serf duties owed to the nobility and the tax-exempt status of the clergy in France, came under sustained attack from the advocates of equality before the law. Since the French Revolution in 1789, which “adopted equality of taxation and redemption of all manorial rights” (in the words of the historian Georges Lefebvre), the use of the word privilege steadily declined, Google’s nGram viewer shows, until it was resurrected about seven years ago by the American Left and perverted to denote “luck,” “fortune,” “advantage,” or “opportunity.”
Branson’s success rests in the British billionaire’s propensity toward entrepreneurial insight and a good measure of hard work, rather than an entitlement or “privilege” granted by the state. Though, in fairness to Steele, it is perfectly understandable why the equalitarian Left would want to blur the lines between privilege as “good fortune” and privilege understood as inequality before the law. In the world inhabited by Homo progressivus, talent and conscientiousness (not to mention other important desiderata, such as intelligence) are distributed equally and differences in socioeconomic outcomes must be a result of systemic forces, rather than sheer dumb luck. And that, progressives believe, is a legitimate subject of government interest and correction.
Second, Steele asserts that “all of humanity loses” from commercial space tourism, presumably because, as she notes elsewhere in her article, space exploration used to lead to “a unifying commitment” to “improving life on the planet,” whereas now space tourism is at risk of becoming just a plaything of the wealthy. That’s nonsense. Branson and Bezos do not detract from space exploration; they add to it. The dawn of commercial space tourism does not mean that Steele’s preferred way of space exploration (i.e., one paid for by the taxpayer) has to stop. The European Space Agency, NASA, and the Russian and Chinese governments are in no way impeded from doing what they have been doing for decades—albeit slowly and expensively.
Third, Steele writes that unequal access to space, which she calls “stratification,” is “divisive.” That assertion, which is unsupported by any empirical evidence, could be interpreted as an expression of Steele’s personal disappointment at being unable to do what Branson did. The conclusion of her article, in which she notes that “it’s unsettling to watch them [Branson, Bezos, and Elon Musk] flex the power to leave the planet, particularly in such troubled times,” certainly points in that direction. Be that as it may, Steele misunderstands the role that “inequality” plays in fueling all kinds of human progress.
Let’s start with economics. The financially well-off, who will be the initial customers of Branson’s and Bezos’s ventures, will infuse both enterprises with cash that will, in turn, result in more spaceships being built. Attracted by the scent of profit, other space-travel companies will be launched. Competition and additional supply will reduce the price of space travel until, one day, it will come within reach of NBC columnists. That’s how a mobile phone went from the “greedy” hands of Gordon Gekko in the 1987 movie Wall Street into the pockets of Kenyan farm workers and Bangladeshi fishermen.
Let’s now turn to politics and society. The American Revolution led to a representative form of government that set the United States apart from all other political entities on earth. True, the franchise was highly restricted (mostly, though by no means exclusively, to propertied white men), but a much greater share of Americans got to choose their own government than was the case elsewhere. That resulted in a kind of institutional inequality—one that other nations first observed, then found uncongenial, and finally deemed worthy of eliminating by becoming more democratic.
Or take the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason, liberty, and dignity, as well as religious toleration, freedom of expression, pursuit of happiness, equality before the law, etc. It took centuries before the values of the Enlightenment were more or less fully implemented in the West. But, over time, Western societies grew more tolerant and freer. That too resulted in global inequality in such things as the treatment of women, ethnic and racial minorities, homosexuals, children, etc. And while the values of the Enlightenment may be in retreat in some parts of the world, including the West itself, remember that for decades oppressed people in dozens of countries aspired to close the Enlightenment gap and become more Western.
Finally, let’s look at culture. The Soviet bloc was economically stagnant and socially retrograde, and culturally (as well as environmentally) it was a wasteland. Relative to the West, communist art was highly stylized and uninspiring. Its literature (with the important exception of persecuted writers, such as Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak) was stultified and unreadable. Its film industry was primitive, ponderous, and propagandistic. Its fashion and design industries were close to nonexistent. And so, throughout the communist period, the captive nations behind the Iron Curtain longed to wear American jeans, read American magazines, watch American movies, and listen to American music. In a word, they wanted to close the cultural gap by becoming more American.
The Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker once quipped that “intellectuals who call themselves ‘progressive’ really hate progress.” The question is: Why? Perhaps one of the reasons for that curious attitude is not the clerisy’s opposition to progress as such, but to the means by which that progress is being achieved. Since the Enlightenment, we have become richer, healthier, better fed, longer-lived, more educated, and, as Pinker himself showed, gentler and nicer. Not only did most of that progress come about in free-enterprise countries during the free-enterprise era, but progress happened despite the constant warnings from the clerisy that free enterprise would achieve the exact opposite.
Inequality of outcome is inherent to a free economy, which tends to reward the most talented. Since talent is unequally and arbitrarily distributed, free enterprise and its resulting inequality of outcome are unpalatable to the equalitarian Left. Yet progress depends on the flourishing of the talented. That means that inequality is truly the midwife of progress. And that’s why progressives hate progress.
1.1 Million Mexicans Lifted Out of Poverty Thanks to Remittances
“During the first nine months of 2025, remittances to Mexico totaled 45,681 million, 5.5% less than the 48,360 million received during the same period in 2024.
Despite this decrease, remittances increased in several states in the central-southern region during the first nine months of the year, notably Chiapas (+1.2%), Oaxaca (+2.0%), Puebla (+1.9%), Guerrero (+4.2%), Veracruz (+0.9%), and Morelos (+1.3%).
1.1 million people in Mexico have been lifted out of multidimensional poverty thanks to remittance transfers. If remittance income is not included in the 2024 measurement, the population living in poverty in Mexico would increase from 38.5 million to 39.6 million people.”
The System Everyone Hates Is the One That Has Actually Worked
Despite its bad reputation, neoliberalism has been a global success story.
Richard Hanania —
Summary: Neoliberalism is often blamed for inequality, lost jobs, and social decay—but its record tells a different story. Emerging from the crises of the 1970s, market-oriented reforms revived growth, stabilized economies, and lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty worldwide. From Reagan and Thatcher to India and China, freer markets proved far more effective than state control. Critics confuse cultural discontent with economic failure, but the evidence shows neoliberalism succeeded at curbing inflation, fueling development, and creating global prosperity unmatched in any prior era.
Despite the polarization of our times, there is widespread agreement regarding the economic approach pursued by global elites between, roughly speaking, 1980 and 2008. If the term “neoliberalism” is used today, it is usually as an epithet for that era. Progressive critics including Joseph Stiglitz frame neoliberalism as a destructive ideology that widened inequality, weakened democracy, and commodified social life. To populist and national conservatives, neoliberal globalization hollowed out national industries, undermined communities, and empowered elites at the expense of ordinary citizens.
These critics are wrong. Neoliberalism emerged to deal with real problems, had strong intellectual foundations, and largely accomplished its goals. The anger at neoliberalism does not reflect its failures but instead represents scapegoating for complaints that are largely unrelated to economic issues. Critics of neoliberalism are wrong on economics, and there is little reason to believe that most of their preferred policies provide a better alternative.
Neoliberalism was a response to stagnation and malaise around the globe. Outside the Communist Bloc, the mid-20th century was dominated by Keynesianism in the West and state-led development in the Global South. Governments regulated industries, controlled capital flows, and expanded welfare states. By the 1970s, cracks appeared in this system: stagflation (low growth and high unemployment) in the United States and Europe and recurring fiscal crises discredited state-centered models. In the developing world, mounting debt and balance-of-payments problems forced governments to seek assistance from international institutions, setting the stage for policy change.
This atmosphere of crisis created an opening for market-oriented thinkers who had been marginalized in earlier decades, perhaps most notably the Chicago University economist Milton Friedman, who would win the Nobel Prize for economics in 1976 and become highly influential as a public figure advocating for deregulation. The law and economics movement, centered on figures including Ronald Coase, Richard Posner, and Gary Becker, also emerged at the University of Chicago, and they began to apply cost-benefit analysis to government regulations that had previously gone unquestioned. They called for taking efficiency concerns into consideration when interpreting legal doctrine.
Neoliberalism was characterized by taking seriously classical liberalism’s commitment to free markets and limited government. In the context of the world created by the 1970s, this approach meant slowing the growth in the money supply, deregulating industry, taking a skeptical approach to labor unions and industrial policy, opening markets up to the free flow of capital and trade, and in some cases, trying to shrink or at least prevent the expansion of the welfare state.
This cross-partisan convergence toward such ideas beginning in the late 1970s and continuing into the early 2000s has been called hegemonic neoliberalism. The first wave was identified with the right, associated with the tenures of Ronald Reagan (1981–1989) and Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990). The second came in the 1990s in the form of the “Third Way” leaders, notably Bill Clinton (1993–2001) and Tony Blair (1997–2007). Far from rejecting their conservative predecessors, they consolidated the new order: Clinton championed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), welfare reform, and financial deregulation, while Blair’s New Labour accepted Thatcherite economic reforms.
The impacts of neoliberal ideology were felt well beyond the Anglo-American world. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank began to make financial aid to the developing world, much of it in disarray due to failed post-independence economic policies, conditional on adopting neoliberal reforms. Across Africa, Latin America, and Asia, governments privatized industry, cut public spending, and began to open up to international trade. The impacts of neoliberalism can clearly be seen in India and China, the two largest nations in the world. Beginning in late 1978, China introduced market mechanisms during the reign of Deng Xiaoping. In 1991, facing a balance-of-payments crisis, India implemented sweeping reforms under International Monetary Fund guidance. That involved cutting tariffs and the dismantling of the “License Raj,” which created strenuous permit requirements to import goods or operate a business. The old system placed limits on imports, set tariffs as high as 300 percent, and “made India virtually a closed economy.”
Neoliberalism made two major promises. It would put Western nations on a better economic track and also turbocharge development in the third world. On both accounts, it worked. The UK, in particular, saw growth increase in the 1980s and 1990s. Growth was about the same in the US in the 1980s and 1990s as it was in the 1970s, but with lower inflation, more stability, and lower unemployment. Refusing to follow Thatcher’s approach of taking on unions and limiting the expansion of the welfare state, the other major economies of Western Europe—France, Germany, Italy, and Spain—saw slower growth than either the US or the UK in subsequent decades. While growth rates in the Western world never returned to the those of the golden age of the 1950s and 1960s, the crisis of the 1970s had been overcome.
To put it another way, the US has been more neoliberal than the UK, which has been more neoliberal than most of the rest of Western Europe. And since the neoliberal revolution, the US has grown fastest, followed by the UK, and then Western Europe. Moreover, many economists believe that the main issue hindering even greater economic success in the UK and the US is their inability to build enough housing, due to government regulations getting in the way. That indicates that the US and the UK are suffering from too little, rather than too much, free market capitalism.
Together, China and India accounted for about 40 percent of the world population in 1980, and an even higher portion of the third-world population, so their trajectories are not just national stories but also tell us much about what has happened to the global economy. After market-oriented reforms, both nations experienced dramatic improvements in growth and poverty reduction. China’s opening up, beginning in 1978, unleashed decades of double-digit expansion, lifting more than 700 million people out of extreme poverty and transforming the country into the world’s second-largest economy. After India’s 1991 liberalization, annual growth rates increased, fueling the rise of a vast middle class and massive reductions in poverty. According to a 2022 World Bank report, China alone has accounted for nearly 75 percent of the global reduction in extreme poverty over the last four decades.
It is often said that China did not adopt all aspects of neoliberalism but pursued a hybrid model. Yet although China has grown impressively, it still remains much poorer than other East Asian nations. Its growth is slowing while its people are still at middle-income levels, whereas Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan maintained much higher growth until they became wealthier. China was able to improve its standard of living due to adopting pro-market reforms, and there is reason to believe that its growth would have been even more spectacular if it more fully embraced neoliberalism, which it hasn’t in part because free markets are potential threats to the centralized Communist Party control. Contrasting the nation with Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and Taiwan, the economist Garrett Jones notes, “China is, by far, the world’s poorest majority-Chinese country.” He also points to Chinese success in Southeast Asia and the New World, indicating that there are deep cultural factors and individual traits behind the remarkable consistency we see. With that context, China’s hybrid model doesn’t look nearly as impressive. It was beneficial for China to move away from communism, but its growth has likely occurred despite practices like large state-owned enterprises and government-directed resource allocation, rather than because of them.
After the fall of communism, Eastern Europe became another major laboratory for neoliberal reform. Beginning in the early 1990s, countries such as the Czech Republic, Estonia and Poland embraced “shock therapy,” which was characterized by rapid liberalization of prices, trade, and capital flows, coupled with the privatization of state-owned enterprises. The results were relatively painful in the very short run: output collapsed, unemployment soared, and inequality spiked. But over the medium to long run, many of these economies stabilized, integrated into the European Union, and experienced sustained growth. Poland in particular became a post-communist success story, avoiding recession during the 2008 financial crisis and seeing consistent income gains. Russia’s path was harsher, with extreme volatility marking the 1990s. Many reforms were started, then abandoned. It took about a decade and a half for Russian living standards to reach what they had been before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Still, across the region, neoliberal prescriptions defined the initial transition away from central planning, making Eastern Europe a critical chapter in the global diffusion of market-oriented policies.
The terrible state of Russia in the 1990s has often been cited as a blow against the ideas of neoliberalism. In fact, there is an argument to be made that in some ways Russia’s problems resulted from it not being willing to reform far or fast enough. After losing much of its economic base due to the collapse of money-losing state-owned enterprises, Russia carried the burden of subsidies, state pensions, and state wages into the post-communist era. Rather than cut spending it printed money, which led to runaway inflation, as standard economic doctrine predicted. Inflation would reach 2,500 percent in 1992. Moreover, when it came to privatization, many Eastern European states sold state assets to foreign investors rather than insiders, as was the case with Russia. That allowed the domestic producers to access better technologies, accounting practices, and so on.
If the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that neoliberalism has succeeded, why have intellectuals turned against it? It is important to understand that any idea that develops hegemonic status is likely to be challenged by aspiring elites. Neoliberalism dominated intellectual discourse, and the phrase began to be used as a stand-in for every problem that people saw in the world. Modernity is in many ways alienating, and every cultural, psychological, or public health issue that arose was placed at the feet of the dominant ideas of a previous era.
In fact, neoliberalism might have succeeded too well. In an influential 2016 paper, the political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris showed that as countries have become wealthier, politics has centered less on economic issues and more on cultural ones, like gay rights and immigration. While social class used to be a strong predictor of how people voted, that was no longer the case by the 2000s. In effect, when Western economies faced crises in the 1970s, people cared first and foremost about the economy, and neoliberalism largely solved the most pressing issues of that decade. Instead of declaring victory, Western publics began fighting about cultural issues. To be fair, the main cultural issue they fight over is widescale immigration, which has often been justified on neoliberal grounds. That is the only issue where widely held political values directly clash with neoliberal doctrine, and the idea that neoliberalism is not a cause of widespread discontent must be qualified by admitting that immigration is an exception to that rule.
When material fears come to the forefront, people go back to caring primarily about the economy, as was the case during the Great Recession in particular. But interestingly, there have been fewer recessions during the era of neoliberalism, freeing people to argue about cultural issues. From the nineteenth century through the Great Depression all the way up to the early 1980s, recessions were a regular occurrence in the United States and Europe. They often came every few years as policymakers struggled with inflationary cycles, more limited tools for stabilizing demand due to the gold standard, and eventually oil shocks. In the US, in the years immediately before the neoliberal consensus, recessions had become routine, with such downturns happening in 1969–1970, 1973–1975, 1980, and 1981–1982. That created a sense that economic instability was an unavoidable fact of life. Yet since the mid-1980s the frequency and severity of recessions have dramatically declined because central banks embraced credible anti-inflation policies, unions lost the power to hinder necessary structural adjustments to the economy, free trade allowed capital and resources to be quickly deployed to more efficient uses when necessary, and governments learned to use fiscal and monetary stabilization more effectively.
Both the US and much of Western Europe have experienced what economists call the “Great Moderation,” a period of steadier growth and fewer, shorter downturns. While the Great Recession of 2008 was a major exception, it stood out precisely because it interrupted what had become an era of relative economic stability compared to the turbulence of earlier decades. The only other serious economic crisis since the mid-1980s was the COVID-19 downturn, but that was due to government shutdowns and voluntary social distancing resulting from the pandemic. That said, the COVID-19 recession was followed by an exceptionally rapid recovery.
There has also been a greater societal turn towards pessimism, related to, but in a sense independent of, the culture war. The increasing use of smartphones and social media has been linked to greater anxiety and depression among young people. Trust in institutions—from Congress to the media and organized religion—has plummeted over the last several decades. Meanwhile, there has been no similar decrease in economic optimism. The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index polls 500 Americans every month to measure their attitudes toward their personal finances and expectations. Consumer sentiment had collapsed in the late 1970s during stagflation but then shot up and remained high until the Great Recession. It picked up again as the economy recovered, before falling to around the level of the late 1970s during COVID-19, where it has been stuck since.
Note that 2020 was not only the year the pandemic began, but also the year when Joe Biden was elected president; Biden ran an administration that moved away from the neoliberal consensus and spent large amounts of money while adopting measures to ostensibly revitalize manufacturing. As predicted by the Harvard economist Larry Summers and other mainstream economists, that led to high inflation and, ultimately, contributed to the reelection of President Donald Trump. In other words, Americans were most optimistic about their finances during the period of hegemonic neoliberalism, and were more pessimistic before the consensus formed and after it broke down.
To take another indicator, the American National Elections Survey, conducted every two years since 1956, has been asking Americans whether they think their finances are likely to get better, worse, or stay the same over the next year. The two years with the greatest pessimism were 1974 and 1978, with more Americans saying they expected their finances to get worse than better. Yet from 1980 to the present, Americans have been more likely to respond that they expect to be better off than worse off. The increasing pessimism that we see regarding American governance and institutions does not apply to people’s individual finances. Data on sentiments and economic growth tell the same story.
Free markets do not have the answers to all of life’s problems, as postliberals of both the right and left have been correct to point out. Neoliberalism was a consensus that emerged from a long history of experimentation to address problems such as high inflation, high unemployment, and stagnant economic growth. It largely succeeded in its goals, and out-of-control housing prices in the era of NIMBYism indicate that policymakers have, if anything, not leaned in enough to the magic of markets. Turning back to strong labor unions, tariffs, and the state trying to decide which industries succeed or fail would simply make people around the world poorer without solving any of the underlying issues that inspire their discontent.
If someone wants to argue that neoliberalism itself is the cause of noneconomic social and political issues, the burden is on them to prove it. Simply pointing out that, for example, the birth rate or trust in government has decreased over the last few decades and indicting neoliberalism—which does not directly speak to such indicators—will not do. Causation must be established in order to justify a return to failed economic policies. At the very least, postliberals of the right and left should be able to point to countries that rejected neoliberalism and succeeded on the specific measures that they care about. But they cannot do that. Neoliberalism is an economic theory that has had positive economic results—it is not a religion that provides meaning, or ethical and spiritual guidance. Those concerned most with men’s souls should focus on shifting the culture in their preferred direction, rather than dismantling a system that has been working well for most of the world.
Caribbean Nations’ Deal to Let Citizens Work Across Borders
“A historic EU-style free movement agreement comes into force in four Caribbean countries on Wednesday, in a deal which officials hope will stem the flow of skilled professionals leaving the region for North America and Europe.
The agreement between Barbados, Belize, Dominica and St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) follows decades of discussions and negotiations among members of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) – a regional grouping of 15 member countries.
The ‘full free movement’ will allow nationals of the four countries to reside, work and remain indefinitely in any of the countries without the need for a work or residency permit.”
The premier American brand has sold a trillion burgers.
Gale L. Pooley —
Summary: With plausibly up to a trillion burgers sold worldwide, McDonald’s has become one of the most recognizable symbols of abundance and convenience. Its cheeseburger now takes far less work time to afford than in the past, reflecting broad gains in prosperity. McDonald’s has grown into a cultural touchstone, serving communities across the globe.
In 1948, McDonald’s offered nine items on its menu. This helped simplify operations and lower costs. McDonald’s stopped officially counting its hamburger sales after surpassing 100 billion burgers in 1994. However, based on recent estimates of roughly 75 burgers sold every second—or approximately 2.36 billion per year—the total number of burgers sold by McDonald’s is likely in the hundreds of billions, with some sources suggesting McDonald’s has already sold its trillionth burger.
My favorite McDonald’s item is the cheeseburger. It’s been my top choice since 1973, when McDonald’s first came to my hometown. This product will provide you with 300 calories, 15 grams of protein, 31 grams of carbohydrates, 13 grams of fat, and 720 milligrams of sodium. I think it’s delicious and a great food value.
In 1948, entry-level workers were earning around 66 cents an hour. A 19 cent cheeseburger would cost them around 17.4 minutes. Today they’re $1.99 and entry-level food service workers are earning $18.67 an hour, putting the time price at 6.4 minutes. The time price has dropped by 63 percent: You get 2.7 cheeseburgers today for the time price of one in 1948.
Today, with over 41,800 stores in 118 countries and global sales of $130 billion, chances are, wherever you go in the world you can find the Golden Arches calling you. Approximately 93 percent of the restaurants are owned and operated by independent franchisees, which has made many of them millionaires.
Chris Arnade has written extensively about how important McDonald’s is to American culture. He has a PhD in physics from Johns Hopkins University and worked for 20 years as a trader at an elite Wall Street bank before leaving in 2012 to become a photojournalist. His writings include many beautiful photographs that reveal the central role McDonald’s plays in many communities. Please take a few minutes to enjoy his work here.
Writing this has made me hungry. Time to add to that trillion burger count.
Find more of Gale’s work at his Substack, Gale Winds.
