Inequality is decreasing at unprecedented rates by every metric.

In 2016 the economist and columnist Noah Smith reviewed the evidence on poverty around the world, and his conclusion was notably exuberant: "This is incredible—nothing short of a miracle. Nothing like this has ever happened before in recorded history." A graph created by Max Roser clearly reveals the "miracle" Smith was talking about, and how right he was that the improvement is without precedent. The graph doesn't show the percentage of people living in poverty, but instead something even more important: the total number of extremely poor people on earth.

The World's War on Poverty

The total number of poor people in the world peaked right at the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, then started to slowly decrease. But the real miracle came when this happy decline accelerated during the twenty- first century. In 1999, 1.76 billion people were living in extreme poverty. Just sixteen years later, this number had declined by 60 percent, to 705 million. Hundreds of millions fewer people are living in poverty now than in 1820, when the world's total population was seven times smaller than it is today.

Much of this decline is reflective of what occurred in China, which, as we saw in the previous chapter, threw off economic socialism beginning in 1978 and let capitalism work its poverty-reducing miracles. But the story of global poverty reduction isn't a purely Chinese one. As the graph below shows, every region around the world has seen large poverty reductions in recent years. The speed of the recent decline indicates that it's no longer ridiculous to talk about completely eliminating extreme poverty from the planet. The World Bank thinks this might be possible by 2030.

It's not just incomes that have improved. As I consult Our World in Data and other comprehensive sources of evidence, I struggle to find even a single important measure of human material well-being that's not getting better in most regions around the world.

Here are recent trends in a few key areas.

Daily Bread

As recently as 1980, the global average number of available daily calories wasn't enough to permit an active adult male to maintain his body weight. Less than thirty-five years later, however, every region in the world met this standard of twenty-five hundred daily calories.

Clean Living

More than 90 percent of the world's people now have access to improved water;VII in 1990 only a bit more than 75 percent did. The situation is similar for sanitation: in 1990 only a bit more than half of the world's people had it; now, more than two-thirds do.

Young Minds

The trend in secondary education enrollment around the world is similar to the one for sanitation, but even sharper: in 1986 fewer than half of the world's teenagers were in school; at present, more than 75 percent are.

One Thing We Say to Death: Not Today

By now the pattern should be familiar: life expectancy at birth has gone up around the world in recent decades:

As we saw in chapter 1, global life expectancy was about 28.5 years in 1800. Over the next 150 years, that number increased by 20 years. Then, in the years between 1950 and 2015, it increased by 25 more. These gains are now universal; Southern Africa has regained the 10 years of expected life lost during its terrifying AIDS crisis.

One of the reasons life expectancy has gone up so quickly is the collapse in both child and maternal mortality around the world:

I find these mortality declines especially fast, large, and broad. Today, we still have desperately poor regions, failed states, and the decimations of war. But in no region today is the child mortality rate higher than the world's average rate was in 1998.

Convergent

Trends in maternal and child mortality highlight a critical fact that's often overlooked: around the world, inequality in most important measures of human material well-being is decreasing. Poor countries are catching up to rich ones, and gaps that were once large are shrinking. Inequalities in income and wealth dominate the news, and in many places these gaps are large and growing. They re also important, so well look at economic inequality in the next two chapters.

But it's true, too, that there are other kinds of inequality that we should care about as we examine the human condition: inequalities in health, education, diet, sanitation, and other things that matter deeply for the quality of a person's life. Here the news is profoundly good; these inequalities are collapsing. As the four horsemen have galloped around the world in recent decades, they've made life better not only for those people and countries that were already rich but for just about everyone else. Everywhere, fewer mothers and babies are dying, more kids are getting an education, more people have adequate nutrition and sanitation.

It's essential to acknowledge these global victories because they show us that what we're doing is working. Tech progress, capitalism, public awareness, and responsive government are spreading around the world and improving it. It's often said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. The corollary might be that ignorance is not examining the results of what's being done. Over and over, when we look at the evidence, we see that the four horsemen are improving our world.