Is Capitalism really responsible for increasing life expectancy?

People like bleating sheep are always making the boring case for Capitalism. But where is this case?

In UK we've had pure Capitalism since the Georgian period of the 1700s.

Increasing life expectancy is often seen as a triumph of Capitalism. But actually where is the evidence?

In actual fact Capitalism lead to slums and mass outbreaks of disease and death. Mass graves from the period of pure Capitalism and Work Houses etc show people malnourished and diseased.

There is no evidence that Capitalism increased life expectancy. In fact if we could extend the graph backwards we would probably see that rural people with access to farm land and uncrowded living conditions would have been much more healthy and had longer life expectancy. I'm on the lookout for this data because I suspect it so flies in the face of Pro-Capitalist doctrine that it may be buried as absurd.

Anyway what the Pro-Capitalists forget is that the horrors of Dickensian Victorian Britain gave rise to a strong conscience in the minds of the wealthy and that is where Socialism was born.

The Socialist revolution in thinking in the 1800s is what is much more likely to have contributed to increasing life expectancy.

After the start of critical Social Theory with Marx in the early 1800s people began to think about forming a properly functioning society where poverty was a thing of the past and all people had a stake in society.

Obviously this is anathema to Capitalism that needs workers and owners, and there has been a Capitalist backlash in the latter part of the 1900s culminating in Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK. For the last 40 years the progress of the Socialists has been steadily dismantled.

I believe, while many Socialist institution still exist like a National Health service and a Social Security system to keep people off the streets and out of slums we are returning to Victorian Britain and it is worth watching the life expectancy as Capitalism resurges.

Now it is perhaps unexpected that the NHS and Vaccines programmes did not change the already existing rises in life expectancy. It seems if we were to point at the key factor it would be just the emptying the slums and increasing standards of living across society, and not just the wealthy as it had been before. Improvements in medicine like the invention of Salvarsan 606 in 1909 or the discovery of Penicillin in 1928 and its mass production by the 1950s did not change the already existing increases in life expectancy.

However the main date for medical contributions is Pasteur's Germ Theory developed during the 1860s. After this people understood that infections were caused by germs and this rapidly led to ways to reduce infection. Lister pioneered antiseptic surgery using Carbolic Acid that started to gain wide use by the 1870s. Now these dates correlate exactly with the graph. So we can add these medical contributions to probable causes for increasing life expectancy.

But none of these medical advances had anything to do with Capitalism. Consider the British Lister Institute:

"Initial funding came from a variety of sources including philanthropic donations from individuals and trusts, as well as the provision of a site on the Chelsea Embankment by the Duke of Westminster. A major donation was also made by the Earl of Iveagh, head of the Guinness family, which enabled the Institute to develop operations, and underlies our long-standing close association with the Guinness family.

So yes it was the wealthy elite who funded this science, but it was through donations not through rewarding investors which is the key Capitalist doctrine. When Nationalisation took over the job of donations, democratic government and the tax payer replaced the need for a wealthy elite to fund things. Ever since then the Capitalists have been trying to replace tax donations with investment so that wealthy private individuals can get rich off dividends and continue the system of elite the Democratic Socialists almost got rid of. So Capitalism was completely not involved in any of this expanding of life span.

Another possible interpretation of this is simply food. People are better fed. Scientific revolutions in food production have started to eliminate food poverty. But this is not Capitalism either. If you look at Capitalisms contribution to food it has caused obesity, heart disease and a number of other diseases. It would be interesting to see how many years the Capitalist food industry has removed from our lives in fact.  

A much lauded stat is the global life expectancy. But this is all due to progress made in China. People in China are now better fed. That is worth looking at more closely and worth another blog.