Recent Economic Growth
Angus Maddison has shown that human economies grew very little, if at all, for most of human history. Between 1000 and 1820 or so, annual economic growth was around 0.05% a year — which meant that people living in 1800 were only mildly better off than people living in 1000. Between 1820 and today, world per capita real income grew 20 times as fast as it did in the previous 8 centuries.
The diffusion of technology, medicine, and agricultural techniques has meant that developing countries have enjoyed dramatic improvements in “human development indicators,” even if most of their citizens remain poor.
Technology can diminishing the demands made by affluence and population growth. For example, productivity gains have dramatically reduced the environmental burden of farming (at least on the land — there have not been similar advances in the efficient use of water) over the past 40 years and shrunk the amount of land needed to feed the world. More recently, technological improvements in the scrubbing of power-plant smokestacks have brought about a sharp reduction in the amount of sulfur dioxide in the air.
Developed countries generally have cleaner air, cleaner water, more forest cover, and less cropland devoted to food production than developing countries do, even though the latter are much poorer. The obvious, and important, exception is carbon dioxide emissions and climate change.
The USA is arguably less polluted today than at any time in the last 100 years, and the last 4 decades have seen a dramatic improvement in the quality of air and water.
The percentage of the world’s population that is poor has fallen over the past two decades (although 2.7 billion people still live on less than $2 a day). And inequality — at least among individuals globally — has declined some as well.
The number of countries that have dramatically improved their standards of living in the era of globalization is surprisingly small — and most of them are in Asia.
The economies of sub-Saharan Africa and the former Soviet Union have in many cases actually shrunk over the past 2 decades, while most of Latin America has seen little growth, and even Asia’s “little tigers” (Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand) have spent much of the past 7 years recovering from the 1990s Asian financial crisis. (Most of these countries have nonetheless seen their human development indicators improve, thanks to the diffusion of technology and health care.)
China and India, together, are responsible for almost all of the reduction in poverty in the world in the past 2 decades.
“Better and Better,” James Surowiecki’s review of Indur Goklany’s The Improving State of the World