Turn – econ growth decreases poverty numbers.

University of Oxford economist Max Roser has pointed out that the number of people in extreme poverty has fallen by roughly 137,000 individuals every single day for the past 25 years. That’s over a billion people—more people than there were on Earth just a couple centuries ago.

This miraculous occurrence has been called “the most important fact about wellbeing in the world since World War II” by the Nobel Prize winning Princeton University economist Angus Deaton in his book The Great Escape. And as CNN host and Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria has observed, these data indicate that more people have escaped extreme poverty in the last fifty years than had done so in the preceding five hundred.

Harvard University cognitive scientist Steven Pinker notes in his 2018 book Enlightenment Now that if this trend were to continue, the extreme poverty rate would reach zero by the year 2026. The COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns set the global economy back a few years, but the virtual end of extreme poverty remains broadly within reach, which is an unprecedented circumstance to be in as a species.

As Deaton and Pinker delineate in their aforementioned books, and as Harvard University Department of Economics chairman Benjamin M. Friedman explains in his book The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, improving the material fortunes of the poor causes their physical health, educational opportunities, life expectancies, safety from violence, trust in their neighbors, and countless other standards of living to improve. As Pinker writes, “Though it’s easy to sneer at national income as a shallow and materialistic measure, it correlates with every indicator of human flourishing.”

Notably, those brought out of extreme poverty, which have mostly been in places like China and India, were largely not helped by massive social programs but by a growing global market for their labor. If redistribution of pre-existing wealth were the cause of this phenomenon, then the reduction in extreme poverty would have been accompanied by a reduction in extreme wealth in some other subset of the population.

To the contrary, there is no significant demographic with massive losses to match those massive gains. Rather, as Americans and other denizens of wealthy countries have become wealthier on average, their increased demand for overseas labor has brought people from farms to factories, from factories to office parks, and so on. That has been made possible by gross world product roughly doubling since 1990.

This widespread growth has been unfolding ever since it began around the time of the industrial revolution, which is why over 90 percent of the human population lived in extreme poverty throughout all of human history before 1800, and why less than 10 percent live in extreme poverty today. It was economic growth, not redistribution programs, that has brought the masses out of extreme poverty like never before in human history.