WHY PEOPLE EMBRACE SOCIALISM, PART 568 – Out of ignorance of some important facts:
An overwhelming majority—95 percent—of Americans are confused about the state of global poverty. A survey from the late Hans Rosling’s web project Gapminder assessed the public’s knowledge on that subject. The survey asked twelve thousand people in fourteen countries if, over the last two decades, the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has a) almost doubled, b) stayed the same, or c) almost halved.The correct answer, as frequent visitors of HumanProgress.org know, is c. Extreme poverty has halved. But a staggering 19 in 20 Americans got the answer wrong. In fact, most people in all fourteen countries surveyed got it wrong. How is it possible that so many people are unaware of the extraordinary and unprecedented decline in world poverty that has been achieved in the last twenty years?
Poverty around the world has been declining and continues to decline – one of the good news stories of the past few decades – and it’s not because of socialism. But the overwhelming majority of people think it has actually gotten much worse or at best stayed the same. No wonder that socialism thrives amongst this sort of ignorance:
In the immortal words of Groucho Marx, “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.” None more so than Marxist politics.
