Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Amid stories of terrorism, government incompetence and corruption, mass migration and economic stagnation, there’s actually some good news: Global poverty has fallen below 10% for the first time ever.

That’s right: A new study by the World Bank estimates that less than 10% of the world’s population is living in what it calls poverty — an income of less than $1.90 per day. Twenty-five years ago, over a third of the global population was living on less. The biggest changes have come in East Asia and around the Pacific, but even sub-Saharan Africa, the worst place in the world for incomes, has improved significantly, with poverty dropping from 56% to an estimated 35.2% since 1990.

For most of human history, of course, extreme poverty was the norm. People worked hard to get — if they were lucky — three meals a day and clothes on their backs. Money was scarce, possessions were few, leisure existed only when all the work was done, which was seldom, and capital for investment was scarce — as were things to invest in.

Deaths from sickness and violence were common: As Steven Pinker has noted, human beings back in the era before nation states developed had a 15% chance of dying by violence; numbers today are vastly lower. This is true, he notes, despite the number of deaths from wars and civil wars.

Charles Kenny even wrote in The Atlantic that 2015 was the best year ever in the history of humanity. Wars have become less common and less deadly (though better publicized), while vaccines and medicines have reduced sickness and death. Kenny writes: “The UN reported this year that global child mortality from all causes has more than halved since 1990. That means 6.7 million fewer kids under the age of five are dying each year compared to 1990. Nearly 7 million families avoided the pain of burying their child in 2015 who would have gone through it if the world hadn’t seen two and a half decades of historically unprecedented progress against childhood illness.”

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So that’s all good news. But it leads to a couple of points. First, this progress is contingent: Screwups or bad luck could turn things around. As science fiction writer Robert Heinlein once wrote:

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as ‘bad luck.’”

Globally, we’ve changed that “normal condition” by the spread of free markets and free inquiry, which have led to a global growth in knowledge and skills that has made almost everyone rich by human historical standards. But we could revert to the “bad luck” norm if things went wrong, and they still might. Eternal vigilance, and all that.

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The second point is that people haven’t caught up. Our brains are still wired, in large part, for caveman times: A time when the stock of wealth was largely fixed (hunter-gatherers couldn’t create more antelopes, or more berries), so that if one person had more, that inevitably meant that another had less, and when strangers — meaning, basically, the people over the next hill — had every reason to try to take it away from you. These two caveman attitudes produce the zeal for redistribution that is now marketed as socialism and the tribalism that is still a major part of politics.

We don’t live in the caveman era now. Wealth isn’t fixed, but the product of human ingenuity — cavemen couldn’t make more antelopes, but we can invent gadgets and services that never existed before. And in free markets, we entrust our lives to strangers not of our tribe every time we fly in an airplane, drive on the highway or check in to a hotel.

We’ve come as far as we have by overcoming those caveman attitudes. To go farther, we’ll need to overcome them more completely. Will 2016 be better than 2015? That will depend on how well we do at that.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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