A Little Money Perspective – A Wealth of Common Sense

The world has never been better, but it feels like things are getting worse.

We see far more bad things than previous generations because of our access to an unlimited amount of information.

Don’t get me wrong – we have a lot of problems and we always will. But things are much better than the headlines would lead you to believe.

For example, look at the share of the global population living in extreme poverty:

It’s on a massive discount (in a good way).

Most of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty until relatively recently. This is the kind of slow and steady progress you’ll never see on the news.

As we improve as a species, the goals of success can and will shift.

Max Roser, founder of Our World in Data, which published the poverty chart, recently wrote an op-ed in The New York Times calling for a new measure of poverty.

Roser began by outlining how far we’ve come:

Until recently, most of humanity lived in what we would now consider extreme poverty. Just two centuries ago, about three-quarters of the world was extremely poor. In the words of development researcher Michail Moatsos, who painstakingly made this historic estimate, most people “could not afford a small living space, non-malnutrition-inducing food, and minimal heating capacity.” Starvation was widespread and throughout the world, for much of human history, about half of all children died before reaching adulthood. Today, that picture has changed dramatically. Entire nations have largely left deep poverty behind.

That’s great news, but here’s the following:

But poverty is not history. People around the world still struggle to afford housing, heating, transportation and healthy food for themselves and their families. To get us moving in the right direction, we need to make global poverty more visible by finding a better way to measure it.

The extreme poverty line is people living on less than $2.15 a day. I did a good job of lifting most people over that line. But look at these other thresholds:

Only 17% of the global population lives on more than $30 a day.¹

These numbers give insight into how well we have it in this country. Yes, there are major problems here, but we are by far the richest country in the world.

It may not seem like it at times, but this wealth has also translated into higher levels of happiness.

People living in richer countries tend to be happier, all else being equal:

There are a lot of people in America who think that average wages in this country are too low. It’s probably based on inequality, but look at some of the median incomes on the left side of the chart.

I did a double take when I saw the number of countries with middle incomes below $10,000 per year.

Wealth and income figures are always viewed through the lens of peers, co-workers or people who are doing better than you. In many ways, this is one of the reasons we have experienced so much progress over time. No one is ever satisfied.

Knowing that there are people worse than you won’t solve all your problems. Our brains don’t work that way.

Money isn’t everything, of course, but consider yourself lucky if you live in a country with a high standard of living.

Life can always be better, but it can also be worse.

Further reading:
50 ways to make the world a better place

¹In America, 84% of people live on more than $30 a day. In 1964, it was half the population.