Progress on Poverty

http://humanprogress.org/blog/year-of-the-1-percent?utm_content=buffer4397b&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

The Economist's graph reminded me of another graph, which also shows two lines that eventually cross but tells a very different story. Despite population growth, there are fewer people living in extreme poverty today than ever before:

How can both graphs be accurate? Poverty can decline even as inequality rises, as long as the total amount of wealth in the world is growing. To ignore this is to fall prey to the "fixed pie fallacy." Throughout most of human history, global wealth hardly changed. But thanks to trade and industrialization, wealth has skyrocketed since the 1900s and continues to climb. At the same time, technological advances have also increased human wellbeing in ways not captured by looking at GDP alone......