From the piece featured below: “GDP per capita in Madagascar is about the same today as it was in 1950. As a consequence, the number of people in extreme poverty increased in line with the country’s population growth” (image source)
It’s easy to feel hope in the advances that the world has made in eraditcating extreme poverty over the last several decades. But as Max Roser writes, unless the poorest economies start growing, this period of progress against the worst form of poverty is over…
In the last decades, the world has made fantastic progress against extreme poverty. In 1990, 2.3 billion people lived in extreme poverty. Since then, the number of extremely poor people has declined by 1.5 billion people.
This means on any average day in the last 35 years, about 115,000 people left extreme poverty behind.1 Leaving the very worst poverty behind doesn’t mean a life free of want, but it does mean a big change. Additional income matters most for those who have the least. It means having the chance to leave hunger behind, to gain access to clean water, to access better healthcare, and to have at least some electricity — for light at night and perhaps even to cook and heat.
Can we expect this rapid progress to continue?
Unfortunately, we cannot. Based on current trends, progress against extreme poverty will come to a halt. As we’ll see, the number of people in extreme poverty is projected to decline, from 831 million people in 2025 to 793 million people in 2030. After 2030, the number of extremely poor people is expected to increase.
To understand why the rapid progress against deep poverty will not continue into the future, we need to know why the world made progress in the past.
Extreme poverty declined in the last three decades because, back in the 1990s, the majority of the poorest people on the planet lived in countries that subsequently achieved very fast economic growth. In Indonesia and China, more than two-thirds of the population lived in extreme poverty. But these economies then grew rapidly, so that by today, the share has declined to less than 10%. Other large Asian countries — including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Philippines — also achieved strong growth, and as a consequence, the share living in extreme poverty declined rapidly. Much of the progress happened in Asia, but conditions in other regions improved too: the share living in extreme poverty also declined in Ghana, Cape Verde, Cameroon, Panama, Bolivia, Mexico, Brazil, and many other countries.
This chart shows the economic change in these countries over the past decades. As incomes increased, the share of people in extreme poverty declined.
Share of population living in extreme poverty vs. GDP per capita, 1990 to 2024 (World Bank, Eurostat, OECD, IMF)
What is different today is that the majority of the world’s poorest people are stuck in economies that have been stagnating for a long time.Consider the case of Madagascar. In the long run, the country has not seen any growth at all: GDP per capita in Madagascar is about the same today as it was in 1950. As a consequence, the number of people in extreme poverty increased in line with the country’s population growth. In richer countries, it is possible to reduce poverty by reducing inequality through redistribution, but a country like Madagascar cannot reduce its share of people in extreme poverty through redistribution. This is because the mean income is lower than the poverty line; if everyone had the same income, everyone would be living in extreme poverty.
The situation is similar in other countries, as the chart below shows: in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Malawi, Burundi, and the Central African Republic, more than half of the population lives in extreme poverty. As their economies have stagnated, the deep poverty that most people live in has remained largely unchanged for decades.
This is why we have to expect the end of progress against extreme poverty based on current trends. If the poorest economies remain stagnant, hundreds of millions of people will continue to live in extreme poverty.
Share of population living in extreme poverty, 1992-2022 (World Bank)
I’m always skeptical when people say that we are at a juncture in history where the future looks much different than the past. But when it comes to the fight against extreme poverty, I fear it is true. Today, the majority of the world’s poorest people are living in economies that have not achieved economic growth in the recent past… Based on current trends, we have to expect the end of progress against extreme poverty…
… It’s no news that we should expect an end to progress against extreme poverty. This article is an update of an article I published in 2019, in which I wrote the same: the fact that the poorest economies are not growing means that the rapid progress against extreme poverty seen in the last decades will end.
Although this prospect has been known for years, it has hardly received the attention it deserves. Progress against extreme poverty was one of humanity’s most outstanding achievements of the past decades — the end of it would be one of the very worst realities of the coming ones.
Importantly, however, these projections are not predictions; their purpose is not to describe what the world in 2030 or 2040 will certainly look like. These projections describe what we have to expect based on current trends; they tell us about our present world rather than the reality of tomorrow. Current trends don’t have to become future facts: many countries left extreme poverty behind in the past, because they had a moment at which they broke out of stagnation.
What these projections tell us, however, is that if the poorest countries do not start to grow, a very bleak future is ahead of us: a future in which extreme poverty remains the reality for hundreds of millions for many years to come…
As we put our shoulders to the wheel, we might spare a thought for a man who contributed mightily to our capacity to feed humanity, Kenneth V. Thimann; he died on this date in 1997. A microbiologist, he was a pioneer in plant physiology (especially the hormones that control the development of plants). Building on the thinking of Frits Went, he identified the first plant hormone to be discovered– the first auxin, a class of growth hormones, and revealed its chemical structure– which proved very important to agriculture and its yields.
Max Roser argues that, if we keep each other safe – and protect ourselves from the risks that nature and we ourselves pose – we are only at the beginning of human history…
… The development of powerful technology gives us the chance to survive for much longer than a typical mammalian species.
Our planet might remain habitable for roughly a billion years. If we survive as long as the Earth stays habitable, and based on the scenario above, this would be a future in which 125 quadrillion children will be born. A quadrillion is a 1 followed by 15 zeros: 1,000,000,000,000,000.
A billion years is a thousand times longer than the million years depicted in this chart. Even very slow moving changes will entirely transform our planet over such a long stretch of time: a billion years is a timespan in which the world will go through several supercontinent cycles – the world’s continents will collide and drift apart repeatedly; new mountain ranges will form and then erode, the oceans we are familiar with will disappear and new ones open up…
… the future is big. If we keep each other safe the huge majority of humans who will ever live will live in the future.
And this requires us to be more careful and considerate than we currently are. Just as we look back to the heroes who achieved what we enjoy today, those who come after us will remember what we did for them. We will be the ancestors of a very large number of people. Let’s make sure we are good ancestors…
As we take the long view, we might recall that it was on this date in 1915 that Mary Mallon, “Typhoid Mary,” was put in quarantine on North Brother Island, in New York City, where she was isolated until she died in 1938. She was the first person in the United States identified as an asymptomatic carrier of the pathogen associated with typhoid fever… before which, she first inadvertently, then knowingly spread typhoid for years while working as a cook in the New York area.
Mallon had previously been identified as a carrier (in 1905) and quarantined for three years, after which she was set free on the condition she changed her occupation and embraced good hygiene habits. But after working a lower paying job as a laundress, Mary changed her last name to Brown and returned to cooking… and over the next five years the infectious cycle returned, until she was identified and put back into quarantine.
The majority of countries are democracies, but how many people enjoy what we think of as democratic rights? A nifty interactive map from Our World In Data charts the changes in political regimes across the globe, country by country, over the last 200 years. By way of explaining its categories:
• In closed autocracies, citizens do not have the right to choose either the chief executive of the government or the legislature through multi-party elections.
• In electoral autocracies, citizens have the right to choose the chief executive and the legislature through multi-party elections; but they lack some freedoms, such as the freedoms of association or expression, that make the elections meaningful, free, and fair.
• In electoral democracies, citizens have the right to participate in meaningful, free and fair, and multi-party elections.
• In liberal democracies, citizens have further individual and minority rights, are equal before the law, and the actions of the executive are constrained by the legislative and the courts.
Do civilians get a representative say in how the government is run where you live?
While it might seem like living with a basic level of democratic rights is the status quo, this is only true for 93 countries or territories today—the majority of the world does not enjoy these rights.
It also might surprise you that much of the progress towards democracy came as late as the mid-20th century…
As we ruminate on representation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1933, the day after an arsonist ignited the Reichstag building, home of the German parliament in Berlin (and four weeks after Nazi leader Adolf Hitler had been sworn in as Chancellor of German), that Adolf Hitler attributed the fire to a conspiracy of Communist agitators.
Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch “council communist”, was the apparent culprit; but Hitler insisted on a wider network of villains. He used it as a pretext to claim that Communists were plotting against the German government, and induced President Paul von Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree suspending civil liberties, and to pursue a “ruthless confrontation” with the Communists. A court later found that van der Lubbe had in fact acted alone. But Hitler’s orchestrated reaction to the Reichstag Fire began the effective rule of the Nazi Party and the establishment of Nazi Germany.
What makes a person healthy, wealthy, and wise? The UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) measures this by one’s life expectancy, average income, and years of education.
However, the value of each metric varies greatly depending on where you live. Today’s data visualization from Max Roser at Our World in Data summarizes five basic dimensions of development across countries—and how our average standards of living have evolved since 1800…
As we mind the gap, we might recall that it was on this date in 1968 that Science published Garrett Hardin‘s influential essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Hardin was building on an argument from an 1833 pamphlet by economist William Forster Lloyd which included a hypothetical example of over-use of a common resource– cattle herders sharing a common parcel of land on which they are each entitled to let their cows graze, as was the custom in English villages. Lloyd postulated that if a herder put more than his allotted number of cattle on the common, overgrazing could result. For each additional animal, a herder could receive additional benefits, while the whole group shared the resulting damage to the commons. If all herders made this individually rational economic decision, the common could be depleted or even destroyed, to the detriment of all. Hardin generalized this example to all natural resources in arguing that population should be controlled: that left to their own devices, humans would deplete all natural resources, leading to a Malthusian collapse.
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