Prompted by all the commencements making the news.

  • fireweed@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    4 days ago

    I know that a lot of improvements were made to worldwide extreme poverty in the 1980-2010ish range but I’m not an expert on that so I wanted to include a disclaimer that my perspective is skewed by what I’m exposed to.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      4 days ago

      Well, there’s more than one dimension here. There’s distribution of wealth and distribution of income, as well as absolute wealth and income. Poverty itself has gone way down, globally. Poor countries are able to start exporting stuff and get way richer. Ones that really have it rough benefit from the existence of aid programs, as well.

      In China specifically, things began to get super unequal starting around 2000, but the economy’s growth has been so fast it probably more than offsets it as seen by the average person. At least on the eastern side of the country.

      I should point out that historically, wealth pretty reliably self-accumulates until a war breaks out. It’s not like an exclusively modern trend, either.