By Steven W. Mosher
December 8, 2018 | 9:55am
Pope Francis
AP
Pope Francis last year created the “World Day of the Poor” to call attention to the less fortunate among us. So far so good.
All popes back to Peter have encouraged us to be generous to the poor, a message that dovetails nicely with the Christmas season.
But I was taken aback when he used the occasion of the second “World Day of the Poor” to claim that “the rich few … grow ever fewer and more rich,” while “the cry of the poor daily becomes stronger but heard less.”
Is it true, as the Argentinian pontiff seems to believe, that not only is global poverty increasing but also that income inequality is growing as well?
Certainly many self-described progressives subscribe to the notion that the rich are always getting richer and the poor are always getting poorer. That includes socialist torchbearer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has tweeted exactly that.
It is, after all, an essential element of their political creed, used to justify the distribution of wealth between the haves and the have-nots that they intend to carry out using the coercive power of government.
The numbers, however, tell a different tale.
Let’s first consider living standards. According to demographers Joyce Burnette and Joel Mokyr, the average standard of living has improved enormously over the past few centuries. In their article, “The Standard of Living Through the Ages,” they document this in almost every possible way.
They have graphs showing rising per-capita income, average life expectancy, average height, caloric consumption, sugar consumption, cotton consumption, even beer consumption! Every one of these graphs shows steady improvements over time.
Their graphs demonstrate one simple truth: that over the past 250 years or so, living standards have improved so dramatically that the average person on the planet now lives longer, eats better and enjoys better housing than European nobility in the Middle Ages. What would King Henry VIII of England have given for a refrigerator, much less for a smartphone or penicillin?
When you look globally, the future is a lot rosier than Pope Francis’ sermon suggests.
The progressives — and the present pope apparently — may have convinced themselves that poverty is growing worse, but the truth is precisely the opposite. The incomes of the world’s poorest citizens continue to rise, and poverty is now falling faster than ever before in human history.
The numbers are nothing short of astonishing. The share of those living in extreme poverty, according to the World Bank, has shrunk from 44 percent to under 10 percent over the last four decades. Nearly 1.1 billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty just since 1990.
Meanwhile, according to the US Census Bureau, poverty in the US has declined to its lowest level in 15 years and is closing in on its lowest level ever.
Of course, even if living standards are rising globally, and average per capita income continues to rise, it is still possible that income inequality could be growing, not shrinking. So what can we say about the pope’s claim that the rich are still getting relatively richer and the poor are getting relatively poorer?
Here the pope and the progressives would be right — if we were still living in 1975.
Today, in 2018, however, the situation is dramatically different. Here’s why.
Before the industrial revolution, virtually everyone was living in conditions that we would today describe as extreme poverty. At the beginning of the 19th century, more than 80 percent of the population lived on less than $2 a day. That is to say, these countries had a per-capita income equivalent to that found in only the very poorest countries today.
But as countries the West began to achieve sustained economic growth, income distribution became very unequal. While Europe and North America saw their populations rapidly lifted out of poverty, the rest of the world’s population remained largely destitute, lagging further and further behind.
Since 1975, people in developing nations have had seen greater wealth and access to technology.Reuters
By 1975, as Max Roser writes, “The world income distribution was bimodal, with the two-humped shape of a camel. One hump below the international poverty line and a second hump at considerably higher incomes — the world had divided into a poor, developing world and a developed world that was more than 10 times richer.”
Fortunately, in the decades following, the world income distribution underwent a dramatic shift in the other direction. Many countries, especially those in East and Southeast Asia, caught up with the West. Incomes throughout the world have become more equal — Roser’s two-humped camel has morphed into a dromedary with a single hump — but at a much, much higher standard of living.
While income inequality remains higher in the US than in most developed countries, what we might call income mobility is high as well. Unlike in Latin America, a lot of Americans who start off poor will wind up in the middle class.
America is still the land of opportunity, which is precisely why so many of the Argentinian pope’s fellow Latinos are beating down the door to come into our country.
The pope is not an economist, so he should of course be forgiven for believing that everything he learned at the Jesuit seminary he attended a half-century ago is still true. And it should be noted that he comes from a continent — South America — which remains the world’s worst in terms of income inequality. In Argentina, perhaps, the rich may indeed still be getting richer and the poor poorer.
But when you look globally, the future is a lot rosier than Pope Francis’ sermon suggests.
Steven W. Mosher is the president of the Population Research Institute and the author of “Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order.”
By 1975, as Max Roser writes, “The world income distribution was bimodal, with the two-humped shape of a camel. One hump below the international poverty line and a second hump at considerably higher incomes — the world had divided into a poor, developing world and a developed world that was more than 10 times richer.”
Fortunately, in the decades following, the world income distribution underwent a dramatic shift in the other direction. Many countries, especially those in East and Southeast Asia, caught up with the West. Incomes throughout the world have become more equal — Roser’s two-humped camel has morphed into a dromedary with a single hump — but at a much, much higher standard of living.
While income inequality remains higher in the US than in most developed countries, what we might call income mobility is high as well. Unlike in Latin America, a lot of Americans who start off poor will wind up in the middle class.
America is still the land of opportunity, which is precisely why so many of the Argentinian pope’s fellow Latinos are beating down the door to come into our country.
The pope is not an economist, so he should of course be forgiven for believing that everything he learned at the Jesuit seminary he attended a half-century ago is still true. And it should be noted that he comes from a continent — South America — which remains the world’s worst in terms of income inequality. In Argentina, perhaps, the rich may indeed still be getting richer and the poor poorer.
But when you look globally, the future is a lot rosier than Pope Francis’ sermon suggests.
Steven W. Mosher is the president of the Population Research Institute and the author of “Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order.”
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