Never had such a thing happened....

Life to the full: the dangers of 

material wealth and spiritual poverty

by Jordan J. Ballor 

In helping developing countries, we must remember that human welfare cannot be reduced to a rising GDP.

Last November, James R. Rogers published a short essay titled “What’s Behind the Stunning Decrease in Global Poverty?”. Rogers examined studies from a variety of sources, all of which “confirmed the overall conclusion that the rate of extreme poverty in the world has undergone a stunning decline.” These studies primarily examine figures such as the number of people living on one US dollar per day, a typical measure of “extreme poverty.” But this “mountainous rise in well-being,” in which hundreds of millions of people moved out of extreme poverty over the past thirty years, is attested to by other measures as well.

One of the more popular is what has been called “the most important economic chart in Western civilization,” which measures gross domestic product (GDP) gains per capita over hundreds of years of human history. A version of this graph appears below in what is a kind of economic analogue to the famous “hockey stick”:

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