The world's silver lining

Jan 24, 2008

The world's silver lining

The Economist: The world's silver lining

(Note: To my Emergent friends in particular, specifically those who are enamored with Brian McLaren's Everything Must Change and the popular video clip by the radical left Tides Foundation called The Story of Stuff. Here are the consequences of our modern economy (or as McLaren refers to it, "The Suicide Machine"). I plan to do a an extensive review of McLaren's neo-Malthusian treatise toward the end of February. This will have to do for now.)

In a week of financial uncertainty we look behind the headlines to a world that is unexpectedly prosperous and peaceful.

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In China 25 years ago, over 600m people—two-thirds of the population—were living in extreme poverty (on $1 a day or less). Now, the number on $1 a day is below 180m. In the world as a whole, a stunning 135m people escaped dire poverty between 1999 and 2004. This is more than the population of Japan or Russia—and more people, more quickly than at any other time in history.

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...in South Asia, for instance, the number of those without clean water has been nearly halved since 1990.

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In 2007 Unicef, the United Nations child-welfare body, said that for the first time in modern history fewer than 10m children were dying each year before the age of five. That is still an awful lot but it represents a fall of a quarter since 1990. Life expectancy has increased a bit in low- and middle-income countries. The long march to literacy is nearing an end: three-quarters of people aged 15-25 were literate in 1975; now the rate is nearly nine-tenths.

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Globalisation, it seems, leads to a shift in the direction of “replacement fertility”: the rate at which the size of a population eventually stabilises. This is a remarkable development. In closed agrarian societies, families need a lot of children as insurance against disaster. But in countries that have opened themselves up, families can rely on other sorts of protection, such as urban jobs or trade.

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Last year the global economy entered its fifth year of over 4% annual growth—the longest period of such strong expansion since the early 1970s. Despite financial turmoil and soaring oil and commodity prices, world growth barely dipped in 2007 and trade grew at 9%, even though trade talks fell apart. Unlike previous expansions, inflation remained more or less under control.

Moreover, growth was spread around fairly evenly....Growth in East Asia was 10%, in South Asia over 8%, in eastern Europe almost 7% and in Africa, thanks to the commodity boom, over 6%. This was unprecedented. In earlier booms, fast growth seemed to have been the preserve of a few miracle countries, such as the Asian tigers. No longer. Almost half of humanity, spread over more than 40 nations, lives in countries growing at 7% a year or more, a rate that doubles the size of an economy in a decade. This is twice the number of fast growers that existed in the years between 1980 and 2000.

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A more plausible culprit for rising inequality seems to be technological progress (see chart below). This is associated with inequality in poor countries because in emerging markets the people best able to take advantage of new technology are those who already have an education and who are usually among the richest in society. The more technological progress, therefore, the better the well-off do.

But to limit technology to reduce inequality would be a cure worse than the disease. Technology in its broadest sense—the flow of new ideas—is the only way of getting growth rates up to 5-10% a year, the rate which enables poor countries to catch up with the West. ...

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...since the mid-1990s, the incomes of the poorest fifth have risen everywhere except, marginally, in Latin America, where they have been affected by the after-shocks of debt crises. In Asia, the real incomes of the poorest fifth rose 4% a year; in Africa, by 2% a year, faster than the rise for other income groups.

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In 1990 those on $1 a day accounted for more than a quarter of the population of developing countries. By 2015, on current rates, the proportion of very poor people should have shrunk to 10%. Moreover, these monetary measures probably understate the real gains from things such as lower child mortality, safer water, literacy and other social achievements. A rich man appreciates his extra cash but this does not compare with what a poor family gains from seeing an infant survive childhood or learn to write.

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The number of conflicts (both international and civil) fell from over 50 at the start of the 1990s to just over 30 in 2005 (definitions are obviously fluid; these are the ones used by scholars at the universities of Uppsala and British Columbia for a project called the “Human Security Report”). On their definitions, the number of international wars peaked during the 1970s and has been falling slowly since. The number of civil wars continued to rise until about 1990 and then fell precipitately. In total, the death toll in battle fell from over 200,000 a year in the mid-1980s to below 20,000 in the mid-2000s.