I love our world in data but I will say this article is wordy. > Global poverty is one of the very largest problems in the world today. Is it possible to make

I love our world in data but I will say this article is wordy. > Global poverty is one of the very largest problems in the world today. Is it possible to make progress against this problem? To see where we are coming from, we must go far back in time. 30 or even 50 years are not enough. When you only consider what the world looked like during our lifetime, it is easy to think of the world as static — the richer parts of the world here and the poorer regions there — and to falsely conclude that it always was like that and will always be like that. > Take a longer perspective and it becomes clear that the world is not static at all. We can change the world. The countries that are rich today were very poor just a few generations ago. > To avoid portraying the world in a static way, we have to start 200 years ago, before the time when living conditions really changed dramatically. This could be written “to really see how much progress we’ve made we have to look back 200 years ago.”