The “Extreme Poverty Problem”: Hans Rosling Explodes Yet Another Myth

Answer this: In the last 20 years, the percentage of the world population living in extreme poverty has:

  1. Almost doubled?
  2. Remained about the same?
  3. Dropped by two-thirds?

The correct answer is C. The number of people living in extreme poverty is less than 9%. It was more than three times greater, 29%, in 1997.

If you answered A or B, you are not alone. In fact, an online poll conducted by Hans Rosling found that 90% of those polled got it wrong.

I wrote about Rosling before. LINK

His life work is correcting misconceptions. And one of the biggest misconceptions he’s discovered is that most people – and this includes most educated people – believe that poverty is getting worse.

Here are the facts:

In 1800, roughly 85% of the world population lived in extreme poverty, deprived of such basic human needs as food, safe drinking water, shelter, and access to medical care.

And this was not confined to Asia and Africa. It existed everywhere. Even in England, the US, Europe, and Scandinavia. The world economy back then was still agrarian. When crops failed, people starved.

The situation improved only slightly for the next 70 or 80 years. But by then the Industrial Revolution was in full swing. Wealth was being created at a rate that was faster, by multiples, than at any previous time in human history. And the beneficiaries were not only big industrialized countries but also their trading partners.  READ MORE

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Sequester (verb) – To sequester (sih-KWES-ter) is to segregate; set apart. As used by Paul Dini: “To overcome any form of adversity, to not give up, to not give up on yourself, your dreams, to not sequester yourself away from people – that’s the most important thing to do with your life.”

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The original name of Los Angeles was El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula (The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of the Porciúncula River).

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The Spy Who Fell to Earth (Netflix)

I’ve made it a point to stay relatively uneducated about global politics. (So much of what you read is bullshit or propaganda, and the rest will rile you up about problems you can’t solve.) I began watching The Spy Who Fell to Earth because I liked the title. It turns out to be a somewhat disappointing documentary about Ashraf Marwan, an Egyptian billionaire that was either a spy for Israel or a double-agent for Egypt. In 90 minutes, you don’t get an answer. But you do get an indirect summary education about the 5-Day and Yom Kippur wars.

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