Eric Posner has an op ed in yesterday's WSJ, saying that human rights don't do any good, and suggesting that the whole project be abandoned. While there is lots to argue with, I wanted to note one point here.
Posner suggests that the advancement of well-being has come only from other factors, with no contribution from human rights. Hayek hypothesized that human rights and property rights have a positive effect on welfare and growth. And of course, property rights are related to other human rights: if I can be tortured or falsely imprisoned, my property will be available to those who command the courts. Posner suggests that the role of human rights in betterment has been “minimal or nil.” Yet he has no data to back this up. Indeed a recent paper by Lorenz Blume and Stefan Voigt1 finds that basic human rights have a strong positive influence on the accumulation of physical capital, and that civil and emancipatory rights positively influence total factor productivity. Posner purports to know that human rights do not contribute to economic betterment, but it just ain’t so.
[1] Lorenz Blume and Stefan Voigt, The Economic Effects of Human Rights (2004), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=652701#PaperDownload.