6 ms·

It's changing rapidly, though. In 1997, 29% of the world lived in extreme poverty. Today, it's less than 9%. Stunning, but true. Or to put it another way... 50

• prestonbriggs 8y ago
  Reminds me of the Bronx, from a train window, in about 2005.
• andrepd 8y ago
  Hmm I'm always wary of those statements. The concept of "living in extreme poverty" is not a good way to measure progress in any sense. First because "poverty means earning less than x" implies that x needs to be updated and its not obvious how to do so; indeed it can be manipulated to push an agenda. Second because it reduces everything to money. You can make more money, but is your life actually improved? Sometimes yes, but surely not always. For example: millions of people have been relocated from the countryside to factories in China. They are now "lifted from poverty" according to that number. But now they live in smog-infested cities, stacked like sardines, working 12 hours per day, where before they had their homes and some sense of peaceful community. Have their lives improved? In the end, you're judging the success of a system (capitalism) with a metric internal to that system. What does that tell you? It's in fact so ridiculous a measure that a slave/indentured servant "earning" 5$ a day is considered a-ok in that metric. EDIT: I'll just rememind that downvote is not a "disagree" button.
  • beat 8y ago
    Europe went through the same things - from largely rural extreme poverty, to dirty industrial cities, to modern clean, wealthy Europe. Heck, these very photos show a step in that process, from 50 years ago, when Scotland was in the state you're so horrified about imagining China in today. And yes, working 12 hour days in a smog-infested city is better than extreme poverty. Life isn't a socialist realist painting. Literacy is better than illiteracy. Vaccination is better than no vaccination. Water from a tap is better than water in a bucket that you have to walk to get. Etc. People don't move to the cities because country life is getting worse; they move because city life is better. Is income a pretty measure? No. But it's a good proxy. It's more fine-grained and less messy than something like birth rate.
  • grey-area 8y ago
    I agree poverty is a blunt measure, but literacy, infant mortality, poverty, life expectancy are all improving globally. By almost any measure life has improved dramatically over the last hundred years. It is no longer nasty, brutish and short for the majority, and the rural life people leave for factories is not an idyll, but instead often grinding poverty and early death with no way out. That's why they leave.
  • michaelmcmillan 8y ago
    Read Enlightenment Now by Pinker!
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]