Repeatedly we read in the news, in books, and hear from pulpits about how the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Is it true?
A couple of months ago, my friend Derrick put me onto a website called www.gapminder.org. Gapminder provides several helpful animated presentations about various economic and demographic variables presented in an easy-to-understand and engaging way. (Please excuse my drooling.) It is like an animated PowerPoint presentation. Gapminder has a great presentation about the status of the world since 1970 on several variables. Here are three slides I captured that show trends in world poverty. Gapminder uses the UN's Millennium Project definition of earning less than $1 a day as a poverty threshold.
1970
2000
Projected 2015
The presentation warns that this last chart is anything but certain. It is a reasonable projection of trends. However, what is evident here is that we are witnessing an enormous shift from a bottom-heavy bell curve to one more in the center. Far from the poor getting poorer, the world is experiencing unprecedented growth in widespread prosperity even though we have doubled the planet's population from 3.7 billion to 7.2 billion!
The presentation gives some interesting breakdowns of what is happening with poverty by region of the world. You can go straight to the presentation here: Human Development Trends 2005. For more on Gapminder, click the link at the beginning of the post.
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