The Biggest Story In Economic History Continues

You should be hearing about macroeconomic news like this. All. The. Time.

It’s a testament to the low key awfulness of the legacy media and politicians that you don’t.

Anyway, the UN reported that India lifted 271 million people out of poverty between 2006 and 2016.

That’s almost as large as the population of the whole U.S.

And, India wasn’t the only country doing this.

The report said that in the 101 countries studied — 31 low income, 68 middle income and 2 high income - 1.3 billion people are “multidimensionally poor”, which means that poverty is defined not simply by income, but by a number of indicators, including poor health, poor quality of work and the threat of violence.

The report identifies 10 countries, with a combined population of around 2 billion people, to illustrate the level of poverty reduction, and all of them have shown statistically significant progress towards achieving Sustainable Development Goal 1, namely ending poverty “in all its forms, everywhere”.

The 10 countries are Bangladesh, Cambodia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Haiti, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru and Vietnam.

Due to its size, India was the biggest improver, but the rates of improvement are startling:

India reduced deprivation in nutrition from 44.3% in 2005-06 to 21.2% in 2015-16, child mortality dropped from 4.5% to 2.2%, people deprived of cooking fuel reduced from 52.9% to 26.2%, deprivation in sanitation from 50.4% to 24.6%, those deprived of drinking water reduced from 16.6% to 6.2 %.

Further more people gained access to electricity as deprivation was reduced from 29.1% to 8.6%, housing from 44.9% to 23.6% and assets deprivation from 37.6% to 9.5%.

I also should not have to teach these sorts of factoids to college-level students, but given the priorities of others I have to:

• All humans used to be desperately poor.
• The only sustained period of improvement in that condition is the current one (ongoing for about 350 years, or 7% of human history).
• This enrichment is associated with regions that practice market tested betterment.
• The improvement in China and India over the last 40 years are unprecedented improvements in the condition of humanity
• Those changes are associated with a shift in political, social, and legal culture away from other systems and towards one market tested betterment.