I met  José Miguel Ponce  two weeks ago at a talk in Seville, surrounded by high-impact social enterprises with wonderful projects, to give you some context.  I spoke, statistically speaking, about the state of the world, and José Miguel was interested in the approach. From here, I want to thank him, first of all, for the opportunity to write a few lines, and second,  what you will see below is not an exercise in optimism, but in realism, whether some like it or not.

If we had to deconstruct, in the style of Derrida, and explain how and why human beings have gotten to this point,  it could be summarized as follows: they studied the consequences of what was happening around them and chose one of the best options for living better out of all those they seemed to have.

Since I think everyone agrees on this, I’ll say that  an entrepreneur is basically someone who solves a problem first. The first great entrepreneur learned to control fire and offered it to the community; the latest wants to send spacecraft to Mars . None of them needed a foundation to know they were doing good, none needed to know what a B Corp was, and almost none measured their impact, yet they were all social entrepreneurs. Whether people like it or not—and I apologize for repeating myself—  a good entrepreneur is also a social entrepreneur insofar as they improve the lives of others and prevent suffering.  Adam Smith explained this 250 years ago, and no one has managed to refute it to this day, despite how many times they’ve tried.

And perhaps that’s why we set up  Techo (www.tutecho.es), because there was a moderately profitable solution for real estate investors that also had a huge impact:  helping people get off the streets and rebuild their lives. It’s sustainability and profitability that allow entrepreneurs to help 1,000 people instead of just 10.

Once we have humans solving problems en masse, from vaccines to hair ties that prevent hair loss when you take them on and off, we arrive at the second point.  What do we call this—solving problems and getting paid for it? We can call it many things. One is innovation, and everyone applauds it. Another is capitalism, and almost no one applauds it; “it wins, but it doesn’t convince,” as Unamuno would say.  No matter what we call it, this system, so intrinsic to human nature, has lifted 92% of the population out of poverty, and the best is yet to come.

Innovation/capitalism is so demonstrably good  that if you take a piece of land that nobody wants, that’s infertile, that has no fresh water, not even sand, just 700 square kilometers and 5,000 inhabitants, and you set it to trade, in 200 years it will have 6 million inhabitants, the best healthcare in the world, and one of the best education systems, and it will comfortably rank among the top ten countries with the highest per capita income. This isn’t theory; it’s Singapore. What did Singapore do that the rest didn’t in the last 50 years? It allowed the free movement of people, goods, and capital, or in other words,  it allowed human beings to be free, or in other words, responsible.

What are your achievements beyond Singapore?  I could spend 4 days writing about human achievements, but I’ll list 20.

1. Today only 8% of the world’s population lives in extreme poverty , compared to around 90% in 1800 or 90% in 1900.
2. 90% of the population has access to electricity.
3. 95% have access to drinking water.
4. Average salaries around the world have risen from around $20,000 in 1990 to nearly $40,000 right now.
5. Nearly 90% of the world’s population can read today  (in 1800 only 12.5% ​​could).
6. Today, 90% of the world’s children have access to primary education.
7. Today, equality between boys and girls when it comes to schooling is better than ever at a global level as well.
8. We are living longer than ever before (women living 74.2 years compared to an average of 69 years for men).
9. Of course,  fewer children die today than at any other time in our history.

• Two-thirds of the population now have access to public health services. 
• 11% of energy is renewable.
• Less than 10% of the world’s population goes hungry today. As Harari points out in Sapiens, more people die from obesity than from hunger.
• We can also see how homicides have dropped dramatically worldwide.
• Every day there are more democracies
• Almost 50% of the world’s population has access to the internet today.
• Renewable energy is cheaper than ever, especially solar.
• Today, fewer people are dying from natural disasters than ever before.
• NASA confirms that there is increasingly more ice in Antarctica (1,250 times larger than the Arctic).
• Childhood vaccination rates are at record highs.
• Even the statistics for deaths in war and terrorism are at a minimum.

There are a thousand challenges left, of course: climate change, the nuclear threat, wars between countries, homelessness, and so on.  However, we will only solve them by trusting each other—that is, by trading with our neighbors, by waking up every day  knowing that we must be better and that we can be, that we are capable of making a product that our neighbor can’t match, and even if they do, we will be there to improve it even further.  Let’s think of Djokovic, Nadal, and Federer and understand once and for all that competing is synonymous with cooperating, as a wise man who left us last year said. Thank you,  Antonio Escohotado , for everything.

I bid you farewell, congratulating everyone on their achievements, especially my parents’ generation, who accomplished what was previously unheard of. I leave you wishing you a brighter future, which, to date, has always been better than the present.

Alejandro de León,  co-founder of Techo and founder of Microwd.

To illustrate what Alejandro tells us ,  Mariana Costa, co-founder and CEO of Laboratoria ,  shares her story in this interview. Her technological development and social entrepreneurship led her to participate in discussions alongside  Obama and Mark Zuckerberg . She talks about her adolescence, how  Laboratoria  was born, and what you define it.

Antonio Escohotado

Sources:

• https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality-since-1990
• www.ourworldindata.org
• https://time.com/5754155/global-advances-2019/?linkId=80046780
• https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace
• https://ourworldindata.org/democracy
• https://ourworldindata.org/vaccination
• https://ourworldindata.org/natural-disasters
• https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of-antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses/
• In Defense of Enlightenment , Steven Pinker.
• The Great Escape , Angus Deaton.
• The Enemies of Commerce,  Antonio Escohotado.
• The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith