Global Poverty and History

While we celebrated the 248^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence last week, Noah Smith looks back at a much more lengthy history—the history of poverty. Smith notes that most of human history has been characterized by poverty and the struggle for survival, and that what Smith calls industrial modernity is the only force that separates us from an animal existence. As Smith points out, we can see the change in humanity’s fortunes over the past few hundred years:

Smith argues for the continued extension of industrial modernity to alleviate poverty in the areas where it still persists. He suggests that an enormous source of progress would be India repeating China’s emergence from poverty over the past 50 years. Indeed, as Smith observes, India has already made significant progress to that goal:

Matthew Yglesias provides more detail in his look back at ancient history. While it’s a lengthy essay covering numerous topics, it shares Smith’s theme that the history of rapid human progress is a tiny subset of the history of mankind, and that the progress of recent centuries should not be taken for granted.

Yglesias notes that poverty reduction only took off in earnest about 70 years ago, over a century after the Industrial Revolution. He also cautions against taking the past 150 years as a template for the future. Most of human history has been a struggle for survival, and technological progress has not always been a panacea—Yglesias cites evidence suggesting that the shift from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural societies that began about 12,000 years ago initially lowered living standards for the average person, a decline from which it took thousands of years to recover. Yglesias advocates humility and attentiveness to downside risks (from AI, for example); even if the future is likely to echo the past, should we be looking at the extraordinary achievements of the past few hundred years, or the prior millenia of subsistence living?

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