 And I want to start with the case for capitalism and I want to lay out some of the good stuff. So for those of you who want to burn down the world, I'll get there, but not right now. So one of the gifts of the Enlightenment was to free people from obedience to the church and to the state and allow them to use their reason to discover useful knowledge that made their lives better, to innovate and to truck and barter freely to reap the benefits of new ideas. As many historians have documented, there was subsequently an astonishing explosion of well-being. Useful knowledge in the form of discoveries and applied science and engineering and in public health brought greater prosperity as well as more years of life in which to enjoy it. Improvements in sanitation reduced infant mortality and helped control infectious disease. The development of the germ theory of disease brought an understanding of the common causes of disease, an understanding that over time could be exported to the whole world. The industrial revolution spread from Britain and Northeast Europe, bringing rising prosperity with it. Much if not most of this progress came by leveling up, by extending good things from the few to the many, in other words by reducing inequalities. Capitalism was not responsible for all of this, but by allowing people to benefit and get rich from new ways of doing things, it played an important part in encouraging it. Now I can spend the rest of this lecture and, in fact, the rest of today documenting what happened, but I can summarize in just a few slides. So let me show you the first slide. So this shows life expectancy at birth in England and Wales from 1850 to the beginning of the current century. It rose from 40 in the middle of the 19th century, 40 years, to its current value of around 80. In the early days when life expectancy was 40, very few people actually died at age 40. People died as children or, if they escaped that fate, they had a good chance of surviving into an old age. Figure two shows the ages at which people died in Sweden and the Netherlands in 1751, 1920 and 2019. The horizontal axis shows age and the vertical axis the number of deaths per thousand at each age. The left-hand axis uses a proportional scale which exaggerates changes at low mortality rates and flattens them out at high mortality rates. What I want you to take away from this picture is its U shape. This is the U shape and that the U has deepened over time. It's moved downwards. The danger points to life at the beginning of life for babies and at the end of life for the elderly. If you survive the first year of life, you don't have much chance of dying until middle age or beyond. After the Second World War, the improvements in health first and then later in material prosperity began to spread to the poorer parts of the world in East and South Asia in Africa and Latin America. The health innovations based on the germ theory of disease, clean water and vaccinations were figured out in the richer countries and then passed on as gifts from the north to the south. They were not at least at first a consequence of the spread of freedom or free markets to poorer regions. The gap in life expectancy between rich and poor countries or between northern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa closed rapidly in the last 50 years and international inequality in life expectancy has declined rapidly. So now we get to the story of capitalism and the magic of markets. Better health in poor countries happened mostly by copying lessons from the north which is why life expectancy could increase in countries with little or no income growth. But it is inconceivable that the dramatic gains in income could have taken place without the help of markets, particularly global markets. The reduction in poverty despite the growth of world population over the same period is an almost incredible achievement, unlike anything else that has ever happened in human history. We're used to hearing about it so perhaps you're not as amazed by this graph as you ought to be. Certainly viewed from the 1970 when there was widespread pessimism about expanding population and the poverty that it would quotes inevitably bring with it, people would simply have refused to believe that this could happen. Yet it did. And it is impossible to imagine it having happened without markets and without globalization. When my libertarian friends want to sing the praises of classical liberalism, this together with the improvements in health are the numbers that they rightly trumpet. This is the case for global capitalism and it's a strong case indeed.