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01 / 05
There's Nothing Green About Socialism

Blog Post | Environment & Pollution

There's Nothing Green About Socialism

Historically speaking, environmental damage emanating from socialist production was vastly greater than environmental damage emanating from capitalist production.

Earlier this month, I wrote about the determined efforts of socialists on both sides of the Atlantic to conflate capitalism with racism. No doubt, some promoters of capitalism were racists. But that is hardly surprising, since racism, along with slavery and wanton cruelty, were universal and, until recently, eternal phenomena.

The truth is, no culture in documented history comes close to the high standards of civilised behaviour that we expect from one another in the contemporary, which is to say democratic and capitalist, West. What I objected to in my column was the implicit notion that socialism was, somehow, less racist. And, as I showed by looking at the history of socialism, the opposite comes closer to the truth.

Yet Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s noble savage – a mythological creature living in harmony with nature and fellow beings – maintains a stronghold on socialist imagination. Consider the recent articles in The New York Times titled, The Climate Crisis? It’s Capitalism, Stupid, and Lenin’s Eco-Warriors. In the first, Benjamin Y Fong recommends democratic socialism as a solution to global environmental problems, while in the second, Fred Strebeigh praises Lenin as “a longtime enthusiast for hiking and camping” who turned Russia into “a global pioneer in conservation”.

Before delving deeper into The Times’ peculiar take on the environmental legacy of socialism, a little bit of background is in order.

This year marks 100 years since the Bolshevik putsch in Russia – an event that unleashed upon the world the most destructive ideology ever conceived by the human mind. The Times, which is the main source of news for progressive intelligentsia in the United States, has chosen to commemorate the cataclysmic events of 1917 in a series of sympathetic (and much-ridiculed) articles with titles such as, When Communism Inspired AmericansThanks to Mom, the Marxist RevolutionaryMake It So: Star Trek and Its Debt to Revolutionary Socialism, and Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism.

Recall that The Times was complicit in whitewashing the crimes perpetrated by communist regimes for close to century, beginning with the discredited reportage of Walter Duranty – an Anglo-American correspondent who famously described concerns over man-made famine in Ukraine as “malignant propaganda”. Duranty’s crime against journalistic standards of truth-telling (from 1932 to 1934, the Holodomor claimed between 2.4 and 7.5 million lives), earned him a Pulitzer Prize – a high honour that The Times has repeatedly refused to relinquish.

But, let’s return to the newspaper’s recipes for saving the planet. According to the writers in The Times, capitalism is destroying the planet, while socialism (both in its original Leninist form and in its “democratic” form that is currently advocated by the US Senator Bernie Sanders) could save it. As Fong writes:

“The real culprit of the climate crisis is not any particular form of consumption, production or regulation but rather the very way in which we globally produce, which is for profit rather than for sustainability. So long as this order is in place, the crisis will continue and, given its progressive nature, worsen. This is a hard fact to confront. But averting our eyes from a seemingly intractable problem does not make it any less a problem. It should be stated plainly: It’s capitalism that is at fault…

“We have a much better chance of making it past the 22nd century if environmental regulations are designed by a team of people with no formal education in a democratic socialist society than we do if they are made by a team of the most esteemed scientific luminaries in a capitalist society. The intelligence of the brightest people around is no match for the rampant stupidity of capitalism….

“On the defensive for centuries, socialists have become quite adept at responding to objections from people for whom the basic functions of life seem difficult to reproduce without the motive power of capital. There are real issues here, issues that point to the opacity of sociability, as Bini Adamczak’s recent book, ‘Communism for Kids’, playfully explores. But the burden of justification should not fall on the shoulders of those putting forward an alternative. For anyone who has really thought about the climate crisis, it is capitalism, and not its transcendence, that is in need of justification.”

Bini Adamczak’s “playful” Communism for Kids aside, I think it is possible to answer most of Fong’s concerns by looking at the actual environmental records of socialist and capitalist economies.

To start with, all forms of production result in some environmental damage. Agricultural production clears forests, displaces wildlife and destroys the biosphere. Industrial production spews harmful gases into the atmosphere and releases pollutants into rivers. Even the service sector pollutes, given its reliance on electricity and the concomitant CO2 emissions. So the real question is not which economic system is the perfect steward of the environment, but which economic system is the better steward.

When answering that question, the following concepts should be kept in mind: economic efficiency, tragedy of the commons and the environmental Kuznets curve.

Socialist economies were very inefficient. (That’s still the case in the surviving ones in Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea.) To compensate for the inefficiency of central planning, which emanated from the lack of a market-based price mechanism, socialist economies generally ignored environmental damage and other negative externalities. To maximise production (in order to try to keep pace with the much more efficient capitalist economies), socialist countries had low, or non-existent, emission standards. Health and safety regulations were either ignored or lacking altogether. Socialist economies also banned independent trade unions and, often, resorted to slave labour.

The socialists’ disregard for the environment was further exacerbated by their contempt for property rights. In capitalist economies, farms and factories are owned by individual people or corporations. If they cause damage to the environment or the workforce, they can be held accountable in the court of law. In socialist economies, land and air (and, in the most extreme cases, people) were owned by the state and suffered from the “tragedy of the commons”.

A state-owned factory tasked by the central planners with producing a certain quantity of iron bars, for example, was not only allowed, but actively urged, to meet its production quota irrespective of the damage caused to the environment and to the populace. In capitalist economies, the state is entrusted with enforcing environmental standards and protection of workers. In socialist economies, the state is both the enforcer of production quotas, and the supposed protector of the environment and the workers. When it came to choosing between the two, the socialists almost invariably chose the former: they cut corners in order to compensate for the inefficiency of central planning.

That problem is clearly illustrated by the comparison of the amount of CO2 emissions per dollar of output in socialist and capitalist countries. Note that, over time, emissions declined in the United States from already low levels. A similar trend can be observed in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 (regrettably, I do not have data for the USSR prior to 1991).

Perhaps the best example of socialist disregard for the environment can be seen in data for China. Emissions during Mao Zedong’s Great leap Forward (1958-1962) were, compared to the United States, stratospheric. They declined afterwards, but remained very high until the late 1970s, when China abandoned socialism. Since China started liberalising its economy (by introducing the price mechanism and property rights), its emissions drastically declined.

Last but not least, socialist countries were, in large part as a result of central planning, much poorer than their capitalist counterparts. That is important, because of a phenomenon known as the environmental Kuznets curve. As a general rule, the richer the people are, the more likely they are to pay for “luxury goods”, such as clean air and rivers, as well as high health and safety standards in the workplace. It may sound strange to the modern ear, but clean environment and happy labour force are, in a very real sense, “luxuries” that were unavailable to our much poorer ancestors.

Really poor people, such as those in large parts of Africa and Asia, are primarily concerned with their survival. All other considerations are secondary. Don’t believe me? Following the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy, people started slaughtering the previously protected wildlife in order to feed their families. Following the collapse of the Venezuelan economy, animals from the zoo in the nation’s capital found themselves on the menu. During the Holodomor in Ukraine, people ate one another. My point here is not to denigrate environmental concerns, but to point to the real trade-offs that poor people in dysfunctional socialist economies have to face on daily basis.

Socialism, then, is not the answer. Historically speaking, environmental damage emanating from socialist production was vastly greater than environmental damage emanating from capitalist production. All and I repeat all academic studies done in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet empire found the quality of the environment in the formerly socialist countries to be inferior to those in capitalist countries.

The best way to protect the environment is to get rich. That way, there is enough money not only to meet the needs of ordinary people, but also to pay for cleaner power plants and better water-treatment facilities. Since capitalism is the best way to create wealth, humanity should stick with it.

This first appeared in CapX.

Blog Post | Economics

Capitalism, the Keystone of Modern Prosperity

Despite the rise of anti-capitalism across the political spectrum, Johan Norberg sheds important light on the benefits and major advances brought about by capitalism.

This article was originally published at Contrepoints on 11/1/2023.

Good news for fans of bipartisanship: even in today’s hypercharged political environment, an increasing number of people on both sides of the aisle agree on something! Unfortunately, it’s a notion that, if incorrect, could undermine the policies and institutions that form the very foundation of the modern world. The newfound area of agreement is the idea that capitalism, globalization, and free markets have failed.

Indeed many of the ideas expressed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their magnum opusThe Communist Manifesto, are gaining ground. Obsession with class warfare now transcends political tribes, dominating both the halls of deep blue academia and the lyrics of the chart-topping anthem of the “new right,” Rich Men North of Richmond. A swelling bipartisan chorus of voices dismiss laissez-faire economics as out-of-date. The complexities of the modern world, they claim, require robust government action to support domestic industries, repatriate risk-ridden globalized supply chains, and protect domestic markets from the vicissitudes of international competition.

Recent polling shows that only around 21 percent of Americans hold a very positive view of capitalism, dropping to just 11 percent among those under age 30. Mounting skepticism toward capitalism is not restricted to the United States; from Latin America to Europe, anticapitalism is all the rage. For example, a majority of French adults, 62 percent, express a negative view of capitalism.

In this age of growing derision toward the system of free enterprise, there is a man who stands athwart the anticapitalist zeitgeist declaring, “The global free market will save the world.” Who is this individual who dares to express such an unfashionable view? “No one is particularly keen on globalization now,” observed journalist Po Tidholm on Swedish Public Radio in 2020, “except possibly Johan Norberg.”

Norberg, a Swedish author and historian of ideas and a colleague of mine at the Cato Institute, wears the accusation with pride, quoting it at the start of his latest book, The Capitalist Manifesto. Given the current intellectual climate, the timing of the U.S. release of the book could not be better.

He was not the first to come up with the title; prior Capitalist Manifesto authors include Robert Kiyosaki, Andrew Bernstein, Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler. As Norberg notes, there is only one Communist Manifesto, but there are many capitalist manifestos—appropriately, as capitalism allows for a diversity of thought.

Norberg’s prior books include In Defense of Global Capitalism, which, as its title suggests, mounted a defense of free enterprise—against the system’s vocal leftist critics. But in the two decades since that book’s publication, expressing hatred of capitalism has become a bipartisan pastime in vogue among populists on both the left and right alike. In light of this trend, The Capitalist Manifesto presents an updated, sorely needed, and eloquent restatement of the principles of free market.

The book addresses the most frequent criticisms leveled against markets today and generally seeks to rehabilitate capitalism’s image in the mind of the skeptical modern reader. As business magnate Elon Musk put it in a recent post, “This book is an excellent explanation of why capitalism is not just successful, but morally right.”

How can Norberg, Musk, or indeed anyone remain enthusiastic about a system that so many people spanning the political spectrum now agree has been a failure? Examining the last couple of decades, the book acknowledges they have been filled with shocks, wars, and failures. Examining the problems of the last 20 years, including financial crises, violence in the Middle East, an industrial-scale war in Europe, various other disasters, and of course a global pandemic, Norberg never shies away from recognizing the bad. But, the last 20 years, he argues, despite so many devastating catastrophes, have nonetheless been the best years in all of human history.

How is that possible? Step back and examine the trendlines. A third of all wealth ever created was created over these last two decades alone. Over the last 20 years, during every minute of complaining about how global capitalism has wrecked the world, over 90 people climbed out of destitution. Child mortality has fallen so dramatically that the number of annual child deaths is down by millions compared to a decade ago even as the total population has grown.

The greatest progress occurred in the countries that most integrated into the global economy. Why is that? The miraculous problem-solving capacity of human beings that allows us to improve our conditions—if given the freedom to do so. Hence countries in the economically freest quartile enjoy more than twice the average per capita income of less free countries.

Capitalism’s haters fail to recognize modern prosperity’s origins. Norberg characterizes well-off anticapitalist thinkers such as Thomas Piketty this way: “taking pride in ignoring what’s going on down there, in garages, in shops and factories, and how that might relate to the fact he lives in history’s richest civilization.”

But, the anticapitalist might protest, modern abundance rests atop a proverbial house of cards. Surely the pandemic revealed the unacceptable fragility of globalized markets?

Yet pandemic shortages proved short-lived as entrepreneurs found ways to adjust the manufacturing process to changing conditions. In many cases, companies with more complex supply chains actually adjusted faster than those with less complex supply chains, because they had more options and found alternative suppliers or manufacturers who weren’t under lockdown. Concentrations of supply chains, Norberg warns, in fact pose a greater risk of disruption than diversified ones, due to their total reliance on a smaller number of suppliers–having all their eggs in one basket. Domestically produced goods were often more likely to see shortages than imported ones; recall that it was international trade that alleviated the United States’ baby formula shortage when policymakers lifted import restrictions in response to the crisis.

The book defends capitalism from charges that it simply represents theft and exploitation, pointing out that it in fact embodies the opposite of those things: enrichment and freedom of choice. Replacing markets with a system of more centralized government control concentrates decision-making power in the hands of a small elite.

Substituting the collective wisdom produced by billions of people with the preferences of a few bureaucrats whose own money isn’t on the line tends to spell disaster. Norberg cites numerous examples including Quaero, the stillborn dream of a government-backed search engine from 2005. Quaero was intended to outcompete Google. Despite the best efforts of numerous European politicians and bureaucrats, and despite the French and German governments wasting millions of taxpayer dollars on the project, Quaero collapsed within a year. Its implosion demonstrates what happens, again and again, when decision makers are divorced from the reality of market signals and financial consequences.

With abundant data and memorable examples, Norberg shows the historical ignorance of the new vogue for anticapitalism. He unmasks it as nothing new at all, but something wizened and old that has reared its ugly head again. Tariffs, industrial policy, repatriation, and price-setting have repeatedly failed. Will policymakers on the left and right alike heed Norberg’s warning, or will humanity relearn the lesson the hard way?

The Communist Manifesto ends with the words, “The Communists … openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!” Instead of a call for violent revolution, The Capitalist Manifesto ends with a plea for the peaceful preservation of the system of global capitalism endangered by unwise policies: “We pro-capitalists of the world have nothing to lose but our chains, tariff barriers, building regulations and confiscatory taxes. We have a world to win.”

Blog Post | Science & Technology

Joe Biden Kicked Off the Encryption Wars

The Crypto Wars, Part - 1

This article was originally published on Pessimists Archive.

In 1991 Joe Biden introduced two bills containing anti-encryption language to prevent private emails: the Comprehensive Counterterrorism Act & the Violent Crime Control Act. He had effectively declared war on math, but why?

Newsletter containing information about a government bill seeking access to encrypted information.

Encryption – once mainly used by government – had increasingly become appealing to consumers with the rise of personal computers and then the internet. The prospect of democratized access to encryption worried governments and law enforcement agencies, like the FBI, an agency the Electronic Frontier Foundation claimed had persuaded Biden to attack encryption.

ℹ︎ In the early 1990s encryption was still treated as a munition and subject to export controls, software companies had to sell different versions overseas.

Newsletter highlighting a bill introduced by Joseph Biden when he was a senator.

While Biden’s bills didn’t become law, his attempt to prohibit email encryption gave programmer Phil Zimmerman the motivation to finish and release his open source encryption project ‘Pretty Good Privacy’ (PGP.) PGP would spread rapidly throughout the early internet – including across boarders – making it much hard to prohibit.

In 1993 a Federal Grand Jury opened an investigation into exports of cryptography software with regards to PGP and Phil Zimmerman, who later admitted “I was quite guilty.” Zimmerman’s emails were – ironically – subpoenaed, and he faced possible jail-time for breaking export laws.

Phil Zimmerman, and newsletters about the grand jury investigation in  encryption software exports.

Meanwhile the Clinton Administration started pushing the NSA’s ‘Clipper Chip’ – a computer chip that would allow the government to break any and all encryption. The ultimate goal was to make the chip mandatory. While Biden didn’t comment on the Clipper Chipper at the time, he didn’t speak against it as some other Democrats did.

Newsletter about the "Clipper Chip"

Government snooping wasn’t the only concern raise about the Clipper Chip, if the encryption key was cracked or leaked, criminals would have free rein to cause havoc. This fear was proven out in 1994 when computer scientist Matt Blaze figured out how to break Clipper Chip encryption, and again in 1995 when a French student broke the weakened encryption Netscape were forced to ship its web browser with abroad.

Newsletter about a flaw found in computer clipper chip.

The Government investigation into PGP would hang over the head of Zimmerman for 3 years until 1996 – when the US government announced they didn’t plan to prosecute him. The same year the ‘Clipper Chip’ would be declared defunct and abandoned by the US Government.

In the following years encryption export controls remained, stunting the growth of US software companies in foreign markets. Technology industry figures like Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Google’s Eric Schmidt lobbied the government to relax rules, which eventually happened in 1999.

Newsletter titled "Software executives lobby in D.C. for end to ban on encryption"

When terrorists struck on September 11th, 2001 encryption opponents would pin part-blame on the uncontrolled proliferation of strong encryption they warned against.

While the passing of the Patriot Act in response (a bill Joe Biden boasted he inspired) proved to cryptography proponents how important it was for encryption to be open and available to protect citizens from government over-reach. The following years saw renewed attacks on encryption in the name of fighting the war on terror.

Different newsletter with notes about threats to encryption.

It is worth keeping all this history in mind as we see governments – including the Biden administration – move to propose, pass (and force through) laws to in the name of stopping people using AI for nefarious ends. Especially when those same governments continue to try and undermine encryption.

Blog Post | Health & Medical Care

Freeing American Families

In their new paper, Vanessa Brown Calder and Chelsea Follett propose reforms to make family life easier and more affordable.

Fertility is on the decline in the United States and around the world. Although some commentators celebrate population declines for environmental or other reasons, others fear that below‐​replacement fertility will result in negative economic and social consequences. As a result, many countries are pursuing various policies intended to boost fertility rates, such as baby bonuses, cash benefits for families with kids, paid family leave, and universal childcare. In the United States, members of Congress in both parties favor greater federal intervention to boost fertility rates or to support families more generally.

However, such policies are costly and have limited effects on fertility. International evidence indicates that expensive efforts to subsidize childbearing have failed to raise countries’ fertility to replacement levels and sustain fertility rates there. They typically fail even to meet policymakers’ more modest fertility objectives. Recent estimates suggest that fertility initiatives in the United States would be similarly misguided, with some $250 billion in annual subsidies needed to achieve a modest increase of 0.2 extra children per woman.

Although policymakers should avoid implementing similar initiatives, many other reforms would make family life easier and more affordable. This study proposes reforms to labor laws, child safety policies, tax and trade policy, and health policies that affect birth and conception, in addition to education, housing, and safety policy changes that would reduce the cost of raising children. Evidence suggests that some of these reforms could boost fertility, for instance, by reducing work‐​life tradeoffs or other intensive parenting requirements. However, these reforms are also worthwhile as standalone measures that improve family life.

Read the full paper here.

Blog Post | Health & Medical Care

Modernization and the Loss of Japan’s Samurai Culture Benefited the Japanese People

Economic, technological, industrial, and other progress radically improved the life of the ordinary Japanese citizen.

Imagine you’re a farmer in Japan in 1850. You pay homage to your feudal lord, wear clothes of plain cotton, eat rice and fish, and are mostly preoccupied with surviving the occasional famine and outbreaks of disease. You likely have no education. Fifty years later, life has changed beyond recognition. Farmers now have an education, have fertilizer to farm with, have access to vaccination, and can use the telegraph and the postal service. They have more money to spend, more leisure time, and access to mass media.

The 2003 movie The Last Samurai portrays Japan during this period of modernization. The film laments the loss of traditional samurai culture amid rising Westernization. The film is inspired by the Satsuma Rebellion, a revolt from disaffected samurai amid the loss of their privileged position in society.

Longing for a privileged past is not unique to Japan; many in Europe romanticize the medieval era as one of knightly chivalry. However, such portrayals usually look at history through rose-tinted glasses. The “good old days” is a common fallacy, with facts becoming more distorted the further one looks back in history.

What really happened in the era of The Last Samurai?

The period takes places after the Meiji Restoration, showcasing the Westernization of Japan. Before this period, Japan was ruled by Tokugawa shogunate, a military dictatorship that had dominated the island for over 260 years. It imposed the foreign policy of Sakoku—that is, one of extreme isolationism. Aiming to reduce the spread of Christianity and cement the power of the shogun, the islands of Japan became closed to foreigners. No one was allowed to enter or leave Japan, and foreign trade was virtually nonexistent. (There was some trade allowed from the Dutch through the island of Kyushu, notably in porcelain.) This period was one of peace, which many in Japan welcomed after the Sengoku Jidai (a period of civil war) of the 1500s.

Conservatives in Japan welcomed this closing of the country to foreign influence. At the time, Japan was dominated by the samurai class. Samurai, while traditionally warriors, had moved in peacetime to become aristocratic bureaucrats at the service of their daimyo, a feudal lord. Samurai had a monopoly on military force and controlled most of education. Merchants were seen as a lower class, even lower than farmers. Feudalism, a system where a lord would rent out land in return for labor from the peasantry, had ended in parts of Europe around 1500. Whereas competition among European powers had created the emergence of a middle class, Japan had remained socially, technologically, and militarily stagnant from 1639 onwards.

As described by Mitsutomo Yuasa in his study The Scientific Revolution in Nineteenth Century Japan:

The traditional society (feudalism) before the Meiji Restoration, namely the age of Edo of Tokugawa Shogunate, was based on pre-Newtonian science and technology, and on pre-Newtonian attitudes towards the physical world.

In 1853, Japanese isolationism came to an end. With the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry demonstrating a textbook example of gunboat diplomacy, the United States forced an end to Japanese isolationism and the opening of Japanese ports to American trade. In the years that followed, Japan established diplomatic relations with the Western Great Powers and underwent a collapse of the ruling Tokugawa shogunate.

Japan then went through a period of rapid modernization, importing Western technology, ideas, and culture. Ian Inkster describes the impact:

By 1855, Western machinery and factory organization had been introduced at Nagasaki for the maintenance of warships, and a spurt of building began in 1860 under Dutch leadership. It was Englishmen who in 1867 constructed the first steam powered spinning plant, the Kagoshima Spinning Factory. . . . By 1882, the Osaka Spinning Company operated 16 mules, 10,500 spindles and was practically powered by steam. . . . From 1870 to 1872, 245 railway engineers arrived in Japan from Europe. . . . Telegraphic communication was also established by the British from 1871.

The industries that were revolutionized by foreign influence included the iron industry, mining, railways, electricity, civil engineering, medicine, administration, shipbuilding, porcelain, earthenware, glass, brewing, sugar, chemicals, gunpowder, and cement manufacture. Japan developed its staple industry and export product, silk manufacturing and spinning, under guidance from a Swedish engineer using Italian methods. The silk industry also employed a large amount of female labor in Japan, with more women in the industrial labor force in Japan than in any other country in Asia.

The development of technological innovations improved Japanese industry. Ryoshin Minami showed the growth in total horsepower between 1891 and 1937 was in the order of 13 percent annually. The figure below shows the growth rate of development of primary industries during the period between 1887 and 1920, as well as overall economic growth. In many of the years during that period, growth in private non-primary fixed capital was in the double digits.

By the 1890s, Japanese textiles dominated the home markets and competed successfully with British products in China and India. Japanese shippers were competing with European traders to carry these goods across Asia and even to Europe.

The Satsuma Rebellion occurred in 1877, as Japanese government restricted the ability to carry a katana (long sword) in public. Regardless of one’s thoughts on the right to bear arms, the reduction in the power of the samurai class was a win for ordinary Japanese people. Having access to modern medical techniques, transportation, and goods benefited the whole society, rather than just feudal elites. Indeed, many of the samurai were able to adapt to their new roles in a modern Japan, working in business or government. In the 1880s, 23 percent of prominent Japanese businessmen were from the samurai class. By the 1920s, the number had grown to 35 percent.

By 1925, universal manhood suffrage had been implemented, a stark contrast from the Tokugawa shogunate. The social structure had loosened, allowing societal advancement far more easily than in the feudal era. By 1897, 95 percent of citizens were receiving some form of formal education, in contrast to 3 percent in 1853. With a more educated population, Japan’s industrial sector grew significantly. Of course, the new system still had its problems, such as labor strikes and industrial unrest. However, Westernization brought far more economic freedom to the Japanese people. Attitudes to commerce changed. Merchants rose from being the lowest class to becoming a vital part of the burgeoning middle class.

In Japan, progress was seen in economics, science, technology, education, consumer goods, industry, and social mobility. Society and the traditional order had been uprooted, in an example of Schumpeterian “creative destruction.” The inflow of new ideas, of new ways of doing things, allowed people to become freer, wealthier, healthier, and better educated. The opening of Japan was fundamentally an opening to progress. By isolating itself, Japan fell behind the rest of the world. As it opened itself to competition, it was able to catch up, and in some cases, surpass other countries. And the ordinary citizen of Japan was better for it.