You joke, but there's no denying that the last millennium's trend of increasing government centralization, stability, control over the use of violence, and enfo

You joke, but there's no denying that the last millennium's trend of increasing government centralization, stability, control over the use of violence, and enforcement of property rights (in whatever systematic form they take) has been a factor in this reduction in poverty levels. Nothing is quite as good at causing desperate poverty cycles as most of your local infrastructure getting regularly forcibly undeveloped in a civil war, or the chaos of local resources getting stolen by whatever brigands show up.