In stark contrast, in the late 1940s, delegates charged with drafting an international bill of rights depicted social and economic rights as evidence of the social progress won by workers' movements. Rights to work, leisure, social security and a 'decent standard of living', as the Ecuadorian delegate put it, were the 'real triumph of the twentieth century'. China's P. C. Chang warned that neglecting 'freedom from want' would produce a document that would 'ill accord with the times'. Chile's Hernán Santa Cruz, a tireless advocate of social and economic rights, argued for adjusting production and distribution to secure general welfare, in order to transform 'the political democracy of the nineteenth century into an economic democracy'.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 149