Poverty is decreasing slowly but surely
World poverty is also decreasing, but a longer comparison is needed. “When we only think about what the world is like in our lives, it’s easy to think of the world as static. The richer parts of the world are right here on the map, and the poorer areas are right there. We could then erroneously conclude that it has always been this way and will always be this way,” Euronews quotes Max Roser, founder and editor of the publication Our World in Data.
According to him, looking at data that is thirty or even fifty years old is not enough to understand the development of poverty in the world, it is necessary to look at data that is up to 200 years old and capture the situation “before living conditions really change dramatically”, as Roser puts it.
In 1820, only a small part of the world’s elite enjoyed a high standard of living, while the rest lived in what is today considered extreme poverty as defined by the United Nations. Organizations today define “extreme poverty” as living on less than $1.90 per day.
For comparison: In 1950 two thirds of the world lived in extreme poverty, in 1998 it was 42% of the population. And in 2015, the last year for which scientific publications had data, the number of the world’s population living in extreme poverty fell below 10 percent.
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