Hey readers,
It's Bryan here. Thanksgiving is traditionally a good time to start counting your blessings. And for years, hundreds of millions of people have had this to be thankful for: they live in a time that has made historic progress against the scourge of extreme poverty.
Between 1990 and today, the number of people living in extreme poverty â meaning on the equivalent of $3 or less per day in US purchasing power â fell from 2.3 billion to around 800 million, even as the global population nearly doubled.
To put it another way, each day over the past 35 years, an average of 115,000 people escaped from extreme poverty. Through financial recessions and technological revolutions, through wars and climate change, even through pandemics, this fundamental progress continued. It was the ultimate good news story. And now it may be ending.
Thatâs the dire conclusion of a recent post by Max Roser, founder of the website Our World in Data. While Roser projects that the number of people in extreme poverty will decline by about 40 million over the next five years, he writes that âafter 2030, the number of extremely poor people is expected to increase.â
If that projection holds, it would mark the end of one of humanityâs greatest accomplishments. And it wouldnât be because the tools that worked for decades mysteriously stopped working. It would, in a way, be precisely because of the success of those tools. |
Where growth fails
The last few decades of astonishing global progress were propelled above all by growth.
In the 1990s and 2000s, hundreds of millions of people in China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and other rapidly developing countries rose above the extreme poverty line because their economies were growing at extraordinary speed. And because most of the planetâs poorest people lived in these countries at that time, they were able to experience explosive gains in income, infrastructure, education, and health.
Today, however, the majority of people living in extreme poverty are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and in fragile and conflict-affected states â places where economic growth has been weak, volatile, or nonexistent for decades. This means the remaining pockets of extreme poverty are concentrated in places where our usual engines of progress barely turn over at all.
Madagascar â where my Vox colleague Benji Jones just returned from â is Roserâs example of a country stuck in this trap: GDP per capita today is roughly what it was in the 1950s, even as its population has grown by 700 percent.
When an economy doesnât grow but its population does, the math is brutal. More children are born into extreme poverty, and the total number of people living in deprivation stays flat or rises. And the problem will become more challenging in the future, as much of the worldâs population growth is projected to be in countries mired in extreme poverty.
Layer on conflict and the situation becomes even more intractable. By 2030, the World Bank estimates that nearly 60 percent of the worldâs extreme poor will live in conflict-affected economies. A civil war can wipe out a decade of economic progress. Climate shocks can do the same. When drought, flooding, or crop failure hits a region where people already live one bad break away from destitution, millions can fall back below the poverty line overnight.
Saving the future
Roser acknowledges that his projections are not prophecy. Change the growth pattern â through better governance, fewer conflicts, more investment, cheap clean energy, or even dramatically expanded migration opportunities â and the projections change with them. The future of extreme poverty depends on whether the countries where the poorest people live can finally begin to grow. Keeping this progress going will be harder, but we shouldnât mistake âharderâ for âhopeless.â The gains of the last 35 years might feel like a miracle, but they were the result of specific choices, investments, and reforms that helped billions of people build better lives.
The challenge now is to extend that success to the places that were left behind. If we can do that, the age of progress against extreme poverty doesnât have to end. If we canât, then this Thanksgiving might be one of the last moments when we can look at the global numbers and confidently call them a blessing. |
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Bryan Walsh Senior editorial director
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| Bryan Walsh
Senior editorial director |
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The Vox Membership program is getting even better with access to Voxâs Patreon, where members can unlock exclusive videos, livestreams, and chats with our newsroom.
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The long, fun list of things we could do with unlimited clean energy |
Imagine we had cheap and abundant energy. Some radical ideas are actually within our reach. |
What would we do if clean energy became so cheap and accessible that it became truly abundant? In his latest feature, Vox climate correspondent Umair Irfan invites us into that future, not in a hokey sci-fi way, but as a practical thought experiment for a future thatâs actually surprisingly within reach. Because if the world really is on track to pour trillions into clean power this year, maybe the most interesting question isnât how we decarbonize, itâs what weâll do once weâve done it.
What sort of things become possible? Farms that produce fresh berries in January without gulping down fossil fuels? Desalination plants turning seawater into drinking water without political drama? Burgers grown from cells instead of cows? What about carbon-gobbling machines that clean up the atmosphere like cosmic Roombas? Energy abundance could assure our food and our water and repair our planet. It could also open up whole categories of invention weâve barely begun to imagine.
But Umair also reminds us that abundance wonât magically solve inequality or the messy human parts of transitions this big. Weâll still need good policy, global cooperation, and â especially considering that there are still 685 million people in the world who donât have access to electricity at all â a plan for who benefits.
Still, itâs energizing, quite literally, to imagine a future where our biggest challenge isnât scarcity, but deciding what remarkable things to build next. âPaige Vega, senior climate and Future Perfect editor |
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CAN'T STOP THINKING ABOUT... |
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| Title: Senior reporter
What I cover: Animal welfare and factory farming
What Iâm eating this Thanksgiving: Field Roast's celebration roast, stuffing and mashed potatoes with generous servings of gravy, and zero cranberry sauce |
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Last month, the European Parliament voted to ban plant-based meat companies from using words like âburgerâ and âchickenâ on their packaging. Itâs not policy yet â the European Commission, along with the 27 countries that make up the European Union, need to vote on it, too, and itâs unclear where theyâll land. But what is clear, according to a new story in Politico Europe, is that few European parliament members ever wanted it, though âalmost no one is expending political capital to bury it.â
Thatâs likely because, over the last few years, European farmers have successfully created a literal stink â by dumping manure on highways and in city centers â in protests over agricultural pollution measures and proposed EU support for plant-based meat. That helped to quash some of the continentâs plant-based momentum and created a political environment in which national governments have âclosed ranks around traditional agriculture,â according to Politico Europe. CĂ©line Imart, the European parliamentary member who pushed the labeling ban, appealed to this âtraditional vs. nontraditional framingâ when she said that terms like âsteakâ are ones that âbelong to farmers.â
But this is a weak argument â plant-based meat alternatives have been around for centuries, and more importantly, theyâre made using ingredients, like soybeans, peas, and potato starch, that are grown by, well, traditional farmers. |
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â ONE WAY TO GOOD THIS WEEK |
You can take part in an American tradition this Thanksgiving. And no, Iâm not talking about the meal.
Sign up for a turkey trot â a race on Thanksgiving Day â that raises money for charity. The Long Grove Turkey Trot that I walk, not run, raises money for the Northern Illinois Food Bank. Find a race near you here.
And if you decide to sleep in â I wonât judge â rest easy knowing that your registration fee will go to a good cause. Seriously, register even if you donât intend to go in order to raise money for charity.
Last year, 1.1 million people ran turkey trots at over 936 races across the country. Turkey trot registrations managed by RunSignup raised more than $3.6 million for a variety of causes. All states host turkey trot events, with 5K distances being the most common. And if youâre not much of a runner like me, youâll be in good company if you decide to walk.
Expect to see people fully embracing the Thanksgiving spirit by dressing as turkeys. Itâs a nice workout before a feast. âShayna Korol, Future Perfect fellow |
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Todayâs edition was edited and produced by Izzie Ramirez. Weâll see you next week. Feel free to reply with what you're having for Thanksgiving. :) |
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