…and is increasing more rapidly than ever.

We saw in my first post how rapidly poverty as a proportion of the population has decreased in the last 200 years. This in itself is an awesome success (see the graph at the bottom of this post), but when you factor in the rapidly increasing world population, it’s an even bigger success, and I love how the graph above illustrates this.

The sharp downturn of the number of people living in extreme poverty (black) curve, combined with the upturn in population shows just what we can achieve with modern technologies and societal structures. (And remember that the global population is expected to level off at around 10B, so we don’t need to be too concerned about the apparently exponential rise of total curve.)

Raising one person out of poverty is probably the greatest good we can do for individuals, and we’ve been doing that on an epic scale for the last 200 years.