Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the statistics (from Johan Norberg’s book, ‘Progress’) documenting the rise of ‘Life Expectancy’, as they did for ‘Food’ and ‘Fuel’, all point to not only a general improvement in human welfare, but a distinct quickening of this improvement over the last two to three of the some eight thousand generations of human existence. We also saw, once again, how the agents of this improvement also correlate with Teilhard’s insights into the human capacities that drive the continuation of human evolution.

This week we will take a last look at Norberg’s metrics of human evolution, ‘Poverty’.

The History of Poverty

The unfortunate lot of human societies which are rife with poverty, in which the great majority of persons find it difficult to feed and house themselves and their families, is a familiar topic of nearly all historical records. Few of us have lived our lives without at least some personal contact with this condition, from the beggars on street corners to nearby poverty-stricken neighborhoods.

The news media frequently reports on ‘the poor’, and their vulnerability to crime, hunger and disease, especially in third-world and ‘developing’ countries.

Generally, we have become numb to this phenomena, with some claiming that the poor themselves are responsible for their condition, some that it is appropriate to their ‘caste’ and others claiming that poverty is a ‘fact of life’, like aging or weather, and must simply be accepted. Even Western Christianity suggests that it is inevitable, as found in the gospel of Matthew, “The poor you will always have with you.”

Considering that conventional wisdom supports all these beliefs, the results of a recent American poll should not be surprising. As the Economist reports, when asked whether global poverty had fallen by half, doubled or remained the same in the past twenty years, only 5% of Americans answered correctly that it had fallen by half. This is not simple ignorance, as the article points out: “By guessing randomly, a chimpanzee would pick the right answer far more often.”

So, what data might there be that would support the Economist’s ‘right’ answer of “fallen by half over the past twenty years”?

The Data of Poverty

As Jane Jacobs (The Economy of Cities) asserts, “Poverty has no causes.   Only prosperity has causes.” By this reckoning, as they evolve, all humans start out impoverished, with the majority of our ancestors spending most of their lives like the animals they evolved from: looking for food and struggling to survive. The phenomenon of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ did not occur until thousands of years later, with the slow evolution of society.

Jacobs is suggesting that the metric we seek if we are to quantify poverty is that of prosperity. She proposes less a focus on ‘where does poverty come from?’ than ‘how does prosperity reduce poverty?’ Once we establish this, we can go on to ask, ‘where does prosperity come from?’ Does human evolution show an increase in prosperity, much less one that erodes the prevalence of poverty?

Norberg asserts an overwhelming ‘yes’. He notes that the effective increase in the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that can be estimated during the period of 1 CE to the early 1800s was approximately 50%. This meant that, on average, people did not experience an increase in wealth during their lifetimes.

In 1820, the personal GDP of Great Britain was between $1500 and $2000 (in 1990 US dollars), or as Norberg notes, “Less than modern Mozambique and Pakistan”, but nonetheless on a par with global GDP. He puts this into perspective:

“Even if all incomes had been perfectly equally distributed (which they certainly weren’t) it would have meant a life of extreme deprivation for everybody. The average world citizen lived in abject misery, as poor as the average person in Haiti, Liberia and Zimbabwe today.”

   So, in 1820, the average percent in poverty in Europe, consistent with the rest of the world, was about 50%. If earlier trends had continued, it would have taken the average person two thousand years to double their income, but in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the average Briton did this in thirty years. By 1950, continuing this trend, extreme poverty was virtually eradicated in nearly all of Western Europe, which had seen a fifteen-fold increase in per capita income. (This increase did not emerge as a result of working harder, as the Western work week was reduced by an average of twenty-four hours during this same time period.)

Consistent with the trend that Norberg documents in the other evolutionary metrics that we have addressed, this trend, while starting in the West, increased even more quickly when introduced to the East: As The United Nations Development Program describes, and Norberg comments:

“Starting in East Asia, countries such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore integrated into the global economy and proved to the world that progress was possible for ‘developing countries’”.

   The numbers are astonishing, and totally unprecedented, with China at 2000%, Japan at 1100% and India at 500%.

The reduction in global extreme poverty, as this data clearly shows, is equally astonishing. The data shows a significant ‘knee in the curve’ on global extreme poverty. (source: World Bank): Poverty initially can be seen to decrease by 10% over the forty years from 1820 to 1920, by another 10% by 1950, another 20% by 1981, then another 40% by 2015.

The reductions over the entire two hundred year span show an overall decrease from 94% to to 12% today.

Considering that the world population increased by two billion during this time, this data reflects an exponential decrease in the number of people living in extreme poverty by 1.2 billion people in 200 years. The first half of this decrease took about 150 years to materialize, but the other half required only 50 years, a very obvious ‘knee in the curve’..

Putting This Into Perspective

At the risk of redundancy, I’ll revisit how all this fits into the characteristics of human evolution as recognized by Teilhard:

• Innovation and invention are natural gifts of human persons, and will occur whenever and wherever the human person’s autonomy is valued and enabled in the legal codes of society. Historically, this has mostly happened in the West.
• Innovations and inventions have been shown to rapidly increase human welfare elsewhere than their point of origin when personal freedom is permitted and globalization is fostered. Although the stimuli for the rapid progress that Norberg documents began in the West, it was adopted in the East and applied not only effectively but very rapidly. Note however, in countries such as North Korea, where the government strangles personal freedom, such increases have not happened.
• These innovations and inventions arise as they are needed: the ‘compression of the noosphere’ has, as Teilhard notes, “The effect of concentrating human effort to increase human welfare”

The Next Post

This week we took a look at another of Norberg’s measures of ‘Progress’, with the topic of ‘Poverty’, and saw how it, too, confirms Teilhard’s optimistic forecast for the future of human evolution.

This week’s post concludes a review of Norberg’s detailed look at human progress, offering in-depth statistics that quantify not only how evolution continues through the human species, how this evolution is contributing to human welfare and how quickly the rate of ‘complexification is increasing. Even the most cursory scan of his other topics (Sanitation, Violence, Environment, Literacy, Freedom and Equality) reveal the same trends as outlined above.

Next week we will overview Norberg’s data and how it correlates with Teilhard’s audacious forecast for the continuation of human evolution.