Throughout human history, 90% of people have lived at a subsistence level - at or under what economists today call the extreme poverty line. Between 1820 and 1980, that percentage shrank by half to 44%. Between 1980 and 2005, it halved again to about 22%. During the next ten years, it has more than halved to less than 10%. Remember that while these percentages were shrinking, the global population grew from one billion to more than seven billion.
That is all good, but most people don't relate well to statistics. Is there some way to visually capture what this means in concrete terms?
Gapminder has an excellent graph that gives a sense of what it means to move from extreme poverty. The left column indicates how the extremely poor live relative to the features listed on the left. The second column is indicative of the life to which they emerged.
The graph is also instructive in dividing living standards into four levels. Many of us who went to school in the 1960s to 1990s have tended to see a binary world - developed and undeveloped, first world and third world, rich and poor, the West and the rest. That has ceased to be the case. It has been on a trajectory away from a binary world all during our lifetimes. At the bottom of the graph, you will see seven yellow human figures. Each stand for one billion people. Most of the world is now concentrated in the middle and moving upward or to the right in this chart. The percentage of people in level one is now well below one billion and shrinking rapidly.
Gapminder Dollar Street has visited 264 families worldwide and taken photos of their homes and belongings. The links to photos of the households are arranged in columns like the chart, allowing you to walk through the houses and get a sense of what it means to live at various living standards. It is an excellent resource.
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