Journalists are a bit like vultures, feasting on war, scandal and disaster. Turn on the news and you see Syrian refugees, Volkswagen corruption and dysfunctional government.
Yet that reflects a selection bias in how they report the news: They cover planes that crash, not planes that take off. Indeed, maybe the most important thing happening in the world today is something that they almost never cover: A stunning decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease.
Everyone knows about the spread of armed conflict, the rise of AIDS and other diseases, the hopeless intractability of poverty and the natural disasters brought about by climate change.
One survey found that two-thirds of Americans believed that the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has almost doubled over the past 20 years. Another 29 percent believed that the proportion had remained about the same.
That is 95 percent of Americans — who are utterly wrong.
In fact, the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has not doubled or remained the same. It has fallen by more than half, from 35 percent in 1993 to 14 percent in 2011 (the most recent year for which figures are available from the World Bank).
When 95 percent of Americans are completely unaware of a transformation of this magnitude, that reflects a flaw in the way journalists cover world events.
Consider the following facts:
— The number of extremely poor people (defined as those earning less than US$1 or US$1.25 a day, depending on who is counting) rose inexorably until the middle of the 20th century, then roughly stabilized for a few decades. Since the 1990s, the number of poor has plummeted.
— In 1990, more than 12 million children died before the age of five; this toll has since dropped by more than half.
— More children than ever are becoming educated, especially girls. In the 1980s, only half of girls in developing nations completed elementary school; now, 80 percent do.
Granted, about 16,000 children still die unnecessarily each day. It is maddening to watch children dying simply because they were born in the wrong place at the wrong time.
However, one reason for the current complacency is a feeling that poverty is inevitable — and that is unwarranted.
The world’s best-kept secret is that people live at a historic inflection point when extreme poverty is retreating. UN members have just adopted 17 new Global Goals, of which the centerpiece is the elimination of extreme poverty by 2030.
Their goals are historic. There will still be poor people, of course, but very few who are too poor to eat or to send children to school. Young journalists or aid workers starting out today will in their careers see very little of the leprosy, illiteracy, elephantiasis and river blindness that their older colleagues have seen routinely.
“We live at a time of the greatest development progress among the global poor in the history of the world,” Georgetown University professor and development economist Steven Radelet wrote in a book set to published next month, The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World.
“The next two decades can be even better and can become the greatest era of progress for the world’s poor in human history,” Radelet wrote.
Some write often about inequality, a huge challenge in the US, but globally, inequality is diminishing, because of the rise of poor countries.
What does all this mean in human terms? The question becomes more striking when teenage Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai’s experience is taken into account. Malala’s mother grew up illiterate, like the women before her, and was raised to be invisible to outsiders. Malala is a complete contrast: educated, brash, outspoken and perhaps the most visible teenage girl in the world.
Even in countries like Pakistan, the epoch of illiterate and invisible women like Malala’s mother is fading; the epoch of Malala is dawning. The challenge now is to ensure that rich donor nations are generous in supporting the Global Goals — but also that developing countries do their part, rather than succumbing to corruption and inefficiency.
That leaves one last false argument to disprove.
Cynics say that saving lives is pointless, because the result is overpopulation that leads more to starve. Not true. Part of this wave of progress is a stunning drop in birthrates.
Haitian women now have an average 3.1 children; in 1985, they had six. In Bangladesh, women now have average 2.2 children. Indonesians, 2.3. When the poor know that their children will survive, when they educate their daughters, when they access family planning, they have fewer children.
So people should get down to work and defeat extreme poverty worldwide. The challenges are surmountable — because people have already turned the tide of history.
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