World Poverty

Max Roser

In the past only a small elite enjoyed living conditions that we would not describe as a life in extreme poverty today. With the onset of industrialization and rising productive the share of people living in poverty started to decrease and kept on falling ever since. As a consequence of falling poverty, the health of the population improved dramatically over the last two centuries, and the population started to grow. The growth of the population caused the absolute number of poor people in the world to increase; only over the last decades has the absolute number of people living in poverty started to fall as well.