U.S.
  • Full Archive
  • Covers

The End of Poverty

  • Print
  • Email
  • Share
  • Reprints
  • Related

(4 of 11)
The total number of people living in extreme poverty, the World Bank estimates, is 1.1 billion, down from 1.5 billion in 1981. While that is progress, much of the one-sixth of humanity in extreme poverty suffers the ravages of AIDS, drought, isolation and civil wars, and is thereby trapped in a vicious cycle of deprivation and death. Moreover, while the economic boom in East Asia has helped reduce the proportion of the extreme poor in that region from 58% in 1981 to 15% in 2001, and in South Asia from 52% to 31%, the situation is deeply entrenched in Africa, where almost half of the continent's population lives in extreme poverty--a proportion that has actually grown worse over the past two decades as the rest of the world has grown more prosperous.

A few centuries ago, vast divides in wealth and poverty around the world did not exist. Just about everybody was poor, with the exception of a very small minority of rulers and large landowners. Life was as difficult in much of Europe as it was in India or China. Your great-great-grandparents were, with very few exceptions, poor and living on a farm. The onset of the Industrial Revolution, supported by a rise in agricultural productivity, unleashed an explosive period of modern economic growth. Both population and per-capita income came unstuck, rising at rates never before imagined. The global population rose more than sixfold in just two centuries, while the world's average per-capita income rose even faster, increasing around ninefold between 1820 and 2000. In today's rich countries, the economic growth was even more astounding. The U.S. per-capita income increased almost 25-fold during this period. In beholding that success, many people embrace faulty social theories of those differences. When a society is economically dominant, it is easy for its members to assume that such dominance reflects a deeper superiority--whether religious, racial, genetic, ethnic, cultural or institutional--rather than an accident of timing or geography.


Connect to this TIME Story

Interact with
this story

  • Facebook







Get the Latest News from Time.com
Sign up to get the latest news and headlines delivered straight to your inbox.

Quotes of the Day »

Get & Share
EDUARDO MEDINA, the Attorney General of Mexico on executing Mexican President Felipe Calderon's nationwide crackdown on the drug trade




U.S.
  • Full Archive
  • Covers