Someone asked me to back up my claim that since 1976 China has lifted more humans out of poverty than all of nations combined in the entirety of human history. Since it would be hard to go back to Greek and Persian times I made an executive choice (capricious no doubt) to begin with the year 1500.
Global population was estimated tobe between 450-500 million world wide and fully 90% lived in dire, subsistence poverty. You can google those numbers, they are everywhere. So, 50 million humans were not poor at this time. Way to go humanity!
By the year 1900 the worldwide population had grown to between 1.6 to 2 billion. Of those, fully 75% lived in dire subsistence or industrial poverty. Yes, the incipient industrial revolultion had lifted about a quarter out of poverty, some into a middle class, but most fabulously wealthy. At this time between 400-500 million people were not poor. Better but still shitty.
Now, lets talk about China between 1976 and 2018: their standard of living multiplied 26 times. While the United States lifted 28 million people out of poverty between 1945 and 1975, China lifted 800 million people out of poverty between 1976 and 2018.
Now, go back and do the math between 1500-1975 and compare world growth versus Chinese growth between 1976-2018. My claim may not be 100% accurate but it is damn close.
Daniil Adamov
It seemed plausible enough to me at a glance, given China’s extremely large population and the abyssal state it was in during the immediate pre-communist decades. Mind you, I suspect those circumstances mean that anyone who restored order in China, be it Communists, KMT or a new foreign or domestic-made dynasty as happened on all previous occasions, would’ve been able to point to dramatic improvements in the lives of a huge amount of people within just a few years. Simple pacification has historically had a huge impact on people’s lives. The Communists did do more than just that, for good and ill. So did all founders of new dynasties.
Sean Paul Kelley
Simple pacification is 26 orders of magnitude simpler than a standard of living that improves by a multiple of 26. I seriously doubt that have ever happened in all of human history.
Egoculexegonos
Thanks so much for elaborating on that, Sean Paul, I truly appreciate it. As I said before, the fact is both impressive and important enough. This and other examples (Lula-Rousseff’s Brazil, AMLO-Sheinbaum’s México, Vietnam, Xiomara Castro’s Honduras, etc) make it clear that limiting the power of the ‘masters’ results in benefits and redistribution for the rest but the masters have been efficient, mind-manipulating, Cordyceps-like parasites for 7 millennia. They are adaptable experts who make deparasitization look like an unattainable goal. Actually, they manage to even make the notion of deparasitization a non-existing topic.