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17 Cato J. 117 (1997-1998)
Economic Freedom, Prosperity, and Equality: A Survey

handle is hein.journals/catoj17 and id is 121 raw text is: ECONOMic FREEDOM, PROSPERITY, AND EQUALITY: A SURVEY Steve H. Hanke and Stephen J. K Walters The best thing a society can do to increase its prosperity is to wise up. This means, in turn, that it is very important that economists, inside government and out, get things right. When we are wrong, we do a lot of harm. When we are right-and have the clarity needed to prevail against the special interests and the quacks-we make an extraordinary contribution to the amelioration of poverty and the progress of humanity. The sums lost because the poor countries obtain only a fraction of.. . their economic potentials are measured in the trillions of dollars. -Mancur Olson Economic growth is, quite literally, a matter of life and death. The relation between income growth and life expectancy is, of course, complex. Growth affects life expectancy through many channels: higher individual and national incomes produce favorable effects on nutrition, on standards of housing and sanitation, and on health and education expenditures. While it is true that reductions in mortality have sometimes been the result of technological factors, in the larger sense it is clear that sustained economic growth is a precondition for the kinds of investments and innovations that, over time, signifi- cantly reduce mortality. The evidence on this point is abundant and unequivocal (see, e.g., Schultz 1993). Cato Journal, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Fall 1997). Copyright @ Cato Institute. All rights reserved. Steve H. Hanke is Professor of Applied Economics at The Johns Hopkins University and a columnist for Forbes. Stephen J. K. Walters is Professor of Economics at Loyola College in Maryland. The authors thank the Institute for Humane Studies Social Change Research Program for its support for this research, and Ian Visquez for helpful comments. A longer version of this paper first appeared as a report to the Senate Joint Economic Committee (Hanke and Walters 1997). 117

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