A shocking new warning about global poverty should unsettle everyone

Thanksgiving is traditionally a good time to start counting your blessings. And for years, hundreds of millions of people have had this to be thankful for: they live in a time that has made historic progress against the scourge of extreme poverty.

Between 1990 and today, the number of people living in extreme poverty — meaning on the equivalent of $3 or less per day in US purchasing power — fell from 2.3 billion to around 800 million, even as the global population nearly doubled. To put it another way, each day over the past 35 years, an average of 115,000 people escaped from extreme poverty. Through financial recessions and technological revolutions, through wars and climate change, even through pandemics, this fundamental progress continued. It was the ultimate good news story.

And now it may be ending.

That’s the dire conclusion of a recent post by Max Roser, founder of the website Our World in Data. While Roser projects that the number of people in extreme poverty will decline by about 40 million over the next five years, he writes that “after 2030, the number of extremely poor people is expected to increase.”

If that projection holds, it would mark the end of one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments. And it wouldn’t be because the tools that worked for decades mysteriously stopped working. It would, in a way, be precisely because of the success of those tools.

The last few decades of astonishing global progress were propelled above all by growth.

In the 1990s and 2000s, hundreds of millions of people in China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and other rapidly developing countries rose above the extreme poverty line because their economies were growing at extraordinary speed. And because most of the planet’s poorest people lived in these countries at that time, they were able to experience explosive gains in income, infrastructure, education, and health.

Today, however, the majority of people living in extreme poverty are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and in fragile and conflict-affected states — places where economic growth has been weak, volatile, or nonexistent for decades. This means the remaining pockets of extreme poverty are concentrated in places where our usual engines of progress barely turn over at all.

Madagascar — where my Vox colleague Benji Jones just returned from — is Roser’s example of a country stuck in this trap: GDP per capita today is roughly what it was in the 1950s, even as its population has grown by 700 percent.

When an economy doesn’t grow but its population does, the math is brutal. More children are born into extreme poverty, and the total number of people living in deprivation stays flat or rises. And the problem will become more challenging in the future, as much of the world’s population growth is projected to be in countries mired in extreme poverty.

Layer on conflict and the situation becomes even more intractable. By 2030, the World Bank estimates that nearly 60 percent of the world’s extreme poor will live in conflict-affected economies. A civil war can wipe out a decade of economic progress. Climate shocks can do the same. When drought, flooding, or crop failure hits a region where people already live one bad break away from destitution, millions can fall back below the poverty line overnight.

Roser acknowledges that his projections are not prophecy. Change the growth pattern — through better governance, fewer conflicts, more investment, cheap clean energy, or even dramatically expanded migration opportunities — and the projections change with them. The future of extreme poverty depends on whether the countries where the poorest people live can finally begin to grow.

Keeping this progress going will be harder, but we shouldn’t mistake “harder” for “hopeless.” The gains of the last 35 years might feel like a miracle, but they were the result of specific choices, investments, and reforms that helped billions of people build better lives.

The challenge now is to extend that success to the places that were left behind. If we can do that, the age of progress against extreme poverty doesn’t have to end. If we can’t, then this past Thanksgiving might be one of the last moments when we can look at the global numbers and confidently call them a blessing.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!