SOME GOOD NEWS

Of course, for most economists and many businessmen, growth in poor countries is also important because of its implications for human welfare. The last few decades have been rather good for the world’s poor.

Nevertheless, perhaps fooled by the fact that they only see the rich getting richer, nineteen out of twenty Americans think world poverty has increased or stayed the same over this period.⁷⁰ In fact, absolute poverty rates (the fraction of those living under $1.90 a day at PPP) have been halved since 1990.⁷¹

This is undoubtedly in part due to economic growth. When people are extremely poor, it takes very little growth in their incomes to lift them up. Thus, even though they often got only the crumbs, those crumbs were enough to push them above $1.90 per person per day.

This might be because the particular definition of extreme poverty we have been using sets too low a bar. But the story of the last three decades is not just one of poverty going down; we also see large and important improvements in the quality of life of the poor. Since 1990, the infant mortality rate and the maternal mortality rate were cut in half;⁷² as a result, more than a hundred million child deaths have been averted since 1990.⁷³ Today, barring major social disruption, nearly everyone, boys and girls, has access to primary education.⁷⁴ Eighty-six percent of adults are literate.⁷⁵ Even deaths from HIV-AIDS have been declining since their peak in the early 2000s.⁷⁶ The gains in income for the poor have not just been paper gains.

The new “sustainable development goals” propose to end extreme poverty (those living under $1.25 a day) by 2030, and it is quite conceivable this target will be met, or at least we will get close if the world continues to grow anywhere near the way it has been growing.