A friend, seeing Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined on my bookshelf, asked, “Is that true?” Our daily news diet certainly suggests the opposite.
And now here’s another report, as incredible and counter-intuitive as the one about decreasing violence: Poverty in the developing world is shrinking rapidly. Two studies (one from Oxford University, the other the UN) find what the UN calls
an epochal ‘global rebalancing’ with higher growth in at least 40 poorer countries helping lift hundreds of millions out of poverty and into a new ‘global middle class’. Never in history have the living conditions and prospects of so many people changed so dramatically and so fast.”
The Oxford study says acute poverty is on track to disappear in countries such as Rwanda, Nepal, Bangladesh, Ghana, Tanzania, Cambodia and Bolivia, in some cases in as little as 20 years. Trade, international and national aid and development projects (schools, health, housing, infrastructure, access to water), are identified as the factors behind the improved conditions. Factors used to determine poverty in the studies included “nutrition, child mortality, years of schooling and attendance, cooking fuel, water, sanitation, electricity and a covered floor.”
The last quote comes from the Guardian Weekly article that reported the studies. This is not the usual image of the developing world formed by my news diet.
So I shouldn’t have been surprised that such momentous news was buried at the bottom of page 10.
--Julian
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