The Visual History of World Poverty

Why is prosperity important? Because the standard of living increases with income, people's self-reported well-being is closely related to prosperity

This scatter plot is taken from evidence from Deathon (2008) - Income, health, and welfare around the world: Gallup World Poll. Economics Journal

The visualization below combines the extreme poverty share information shown in the previous table with the number of people living in the world. Prior to 1970, we used Bourguignon and Morrison (2002) to estimate the poverty of people living, but since 1981 we use the estimates of the World Bank did. In 1820, there were fewer than 1.1 billion people in the world, of which over 1 billion people lived in abusive poverty. In the next 150 years, the poverty reduction rate is not enough to offset the rapid increase of the world's population, so the number of non-poor and poor are increasing. However since 1970 we have lived in a world where the population of the non-poor is increasing, and the number of the poor is decreasing. According to the estimate below, 2.2 billion people are in extreme poverty in 1970 and 705 million people in extreme poverty in 2015.

This measure is bad. The World Bank defines extreme poverty as less than $ 1.90 per purchasing power parity in 2011. In 1981, 44% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty. It is easy to hide numbers, so let's pause. About 35 years ago, nearly half of them were in extreme poverty. As of 2012, this figure fell to 12.7% (896 million people). Other signs of hope can also be seen. In the United States, since the peak in the early 1990s, the proportion of violent crime has declined sharply. Life expectancy continues to increase. When you want to know whether this world eventually becomes a seed, it helps to consider the source of positive momentum to advance us. It is worth mentioning that global prosperity depends not only on solitary behavior of extremists but also on shocking actions that do not appear in words.

Since Wal-Mart became the world's largest retailer in 1990, the poverty rate in the world has declined by 2/3. This is the biggest human poverty reduction in history, over 1 billion people have been released from poverty during this time, Wal - Mart is the main force on this point. Finally, the audience was asked to vote electronically. More live audience is backed by Wal-Mart's debate than Wal-Mart's discussion. As I have been told repeatedly by Wal-Mart's advertisement - it is hard to say that someone has let 100 million consumers go to the store every week because it saves money.