The Much Reviled Age.

Has been a triumph.

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1. Martin Wolf:

The proportion of human beings living on the margin of subsistence is estimated to have fallen from close to 80 per cent in 1820 to just under 10 per cent in 2018. What makes this decline even more remarkable is that the global population rose from 1 billion in 1820 to 7.7 billion in 2018. Rising prosperity has also helped double global life expectancy to 71 years. In brief, we have moved from a world in which life was, for the great majority, indeed “nasty, brutish, and short” to something altogether better.

As recently as 1970, the rate of “extreme poverty” was still 50 per cent. This extraordinarily rapid recent reduction in the proportion of people living in extreme poverty is due to the huge progress in the much reviled age of economic globalization. I will never regret this achievement. It shows that the combination of global economic opportunity with external assistance worked.(Sources: penguinrandomhouse.com, ft.com)

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