Airline worker falls asleep, OP ED.

[Hatshepsut]

The difference in life styles between rich and poor has been steadily closing....quality of life is rising and its rising fast.  Poor people today have it better than middle class people of the 1970s.  We have a situation where there is a capitalistic tide lifting all boats.

...rather than looking at gaps, it seems that trickle down is working quite well.
...work hard and work smart. THat's the recipe for success, and it isn't a secret.

The truth is debatable. It's difficult to compare past with present and assess relative size of gaps. In many ways quality of life – particularly life expectancy and availability of sophisticated but affordable consumer goods – is rising, though I won't go as far as to say the residents of a Salvation Army homeless shelter have it better than the middle classes of 1975. How much should we credit trickle-down for this happy state of affairs?

Not much, I'm afraid. The fact that we have a massive educational system capped by research universities underpins the rise of technology itself. That consumer goods are now so cheap in the United States has a lot to do with the offshoring of production plants to the cheap labor countries, with its government deciding to subsidize the energy needed to ship products around the globe.

If capitalism has a beneficial feature, it's not trickling of resources down from rich to poor. Instead, it is capitalism's ability to allocate investment efficiently with respect to consumer needs and wants. There's no question the state-owned behemoths we saw in the Soviet Union were flops.

Hard work little assures success because having or acquiring personal connections who can assist your rise is also needed. But it's true that laziness will kill your chances. Those powerful people won't help someone they perceive as undeserving. So we can also credit budding capitalism with ending the medieval system of birth entitlement, where you lived better than others just because you were the Duke of York. Initiative must be rewarded in some way if collective results are to follow.

We must admit that capitalism has a predatory aspect which needs regulation. Is post-Communist Russia really better off than the Soviet Union was? Life expectancy for males dropped from 72 to 59 within six years of Gorby's last goodbye. Russia continues amid corruption long after its recovery from "shock therapy." Capitalism allows accountability only to shareholders and, since executives can often conceal their intentions and moves behind opaque accounting screens, the shareholders can't curb the excesses of a Jeffrey Skilling when it arises.

Which is why a mixed economy is probably the best way to travel.