We shouldn’t even call it an economy, we should call it a slaughterhouse. What else could describe something that kills 35,000,000 people a year?

We could also phrase it as 3,000,000 a month. 100,000 people a day. 4,000 people an hour. 60 people a minute. 1 person every second. By the time it takes you to read this article, about 150 people will be killed by our economy. Did these people deserve to die? Do their families and friends deserve the suffering caused by their deaths?

A pile of skulls from the Pol Pot regime. What Pol Pot took four years to do with a totalitarian state, we do with our economy every month.

According to the journal ‘Aggression and Violent Behavior’: The death rate from poverty is around 20 million a year.[1] Also, according to the CDC: 780 million people don’t have access to clean water (equivalent to the population of Europe with 40 million to spare) and 2.5 billion people have don’t have consistent access to clean water. Often, this means diseases spread very quickly, some of which permanently leave people with severe health conditions, like a blindness or paralysis.

This is how most of the world lives.

According to the WHO: “An estimated 12.6 million people died as a result of living or working in an unhealthy environment in 2012 — nearly 1 in 4 of total global deaths, according to new estimates from WHO. Environmental risk factors, such as air, water and soil pollution, chemical exposures, climate change, and ultraviolet radiation, contribute to more than 100 diseases and injuries.”

Do you really want to leave this disgusting world to your children?

According to the ILO: “ Every day, people die as a result of occupational accidents or work-related diseases — more than 2.78 million deaths per year. Additionally, there are some 374 million non-fatal work-related injuries and illnesses each year”.

What is the point of this all? Is it really generating wealth and prosperity for all? Will this continue forever? Is this justice? Is this what it means to human? Is condemning tens of millions of people to death really the best we can do? It’s not a question of if this should be changed, it’s a question of when.

Author’s Note: I also tried to calculate the deaths from finance-related suicide, poverty-related murder, unsafe consumer products, colonialism and resource-related wars. However, there isn’t sufficient data in any of these areas to draw an accurate conclusion. If I can find information on them, I will update this.

[1] — Aggression and Violent Behavior. 2016. pp. 109–114 — via ScienceDirect.