Describe the world after 200 years.
Answers
Answer
Answer
Studies in the biodemography of human longevity indicate a late-life mortality deceleration law: that death rates level off at advanced ages to a late-life mortality plateau. That is, there is no fixed upper limit to human longevity, or fixed maximal human lifespan.
Explanation:
We are working on Our World in Data to provide ‘Research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems’.
Our mission only makes sense if it is in fact possible to make progress against the large problems the world faces. Very few think the world is making progress. A recent survey asked “All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither getting better nor worse?”. In Sweden 10% thought things are getting better, in the US they were only 6%, and in Germany only 4%.
What is the evidence that we need to consider when answering this question?
The question is how the world has changed and so we must take a historical perspective. And the question is about the world as a whole and the answer must therefore consider everybody. The answer must consider the history of global living conditions – a history of everyone.Global poverty is one of the very largest problems in the world today. Is it possible to make progress against this problem? To see where we are coming from we must go far back in time. 30 or even 50 years are not enough. When you only consider what the world looked during our life time it is easy to think of the world as static – the richer parts of the world here and the poorer regions there – and to falsely conclude that it always was like that and that it always will be like that.
Take a longer perspective and it becomes very clear that the world is not static at all. We can change the world. The countries that are rich today were very poor just a few generations ago.
To avoid portraying the world in a static way – the North always much richer than the South – we have to start 200 years ago before the time when living conditions really changed dramatically.
The United Nations measure ‘extreme poverty’ as living on less than 1.90$ per day. This is an extremely low poverty line that draws attention to the very poorest people in the world.
These poverty figures take into account non-monetary forms of income – for poor families today and in the past this is important, particularly because many of them are subsistence farmers who live largely from their own food production. The extreme poverty measure is also corrected for different price levels in different countries and it is adjusted for price changes over time (inflation) – poverty is measured in so-called ‘international dollar’. As a consequence of these adjustments one international dollar has the same purchasing power as one US-dollar in 2011.
The first chart shows the estimates for the share of the world population living in extreme poverty. In 1820 only a tiny elite enjoyed higher standards of living, while the vast majority of people lived in conditions that we would call extreme poverty today. Since then the share of extremely poor people fell continuously. More and more world regions industrialized and thereby increased productivity which made it possible to lift more people out of poverty: In 1950 two-thirds of the world were living in extreme poverty; in 1981 it was still 42%. In 2015 – the last year for which we currently have data – the share of the world population in extreme poverty has fallen below 10%.
The $1.90 poverty line is very low and focuses on the very poorest in the world. The world is also making progress against poverty relative to higher poverty lines. In fact, no matter what poverty line you choose, the share of people below that poverty line has declined globally (see here).
That is a huge achievement, for me as a researcher who focuses on growth and inequality maybe the biggest achievement of all in the last two centuries. It is particularly remarkable if we consider that the world population has increased 7-fold over the last two centuries – switch off the ‘Relative’ toggle in this visualization to see the number of people in and out of poverty. In a world without economic growth, a 7-fold increase of the population would have resulted in less and less income for everyone, it would have been enough to drive everyone into extreme poverty. Yet, the exact opposite happened. In a time of unprecedented population growth our world managed to give more prosperity to more people and to continuously lift more people out of the worst poverty.
Increasing productivity was important because it made vital goods and services less scarce: more food, better clothing, and less cramped housing. Productivity is the ratio between the output of our work and the input that we put in our work; as productivity increased we benefitted from more output, but also from less input – weekly working hours fell very substantially.
Economic growth was also important because it changed the relationship between people. In the long time in which the world lived in a non-growth world the only way to become better off was for someone else to get worse off. It was a zero-sum economy. Your own good luck was your neighbors bad luck.