4 ms·
Elephant Chart
- charlysl 9y agoFrom "The Retreat of Western Liberalism" (Edward Luce): It is intuitively simple and tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the era of high globalisation since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It shows the distribution of more than two decades of growth between different percentiles of the global economy. The global median – the emerging middle classes of China, Vietnam, India and so on – enjoyed income growth of more than 80 per cent in those years. Even the bottom deciles, in Africa and South Asia, saw growth of up to 50 per cent. The key part of the elephant for the Western middle classes is where its trunk slopes downwards – between the seventy-fifth and ninetieth percentiles of the world’s population. These account for the majority of the West’s people. At their mid-point, incomes grew by a grand total of 1 per cent over the last three decades.