A global tipping point: Half the world is now middle class or wealthier

Eli,

Every night I ask the Mrs. if she would like to watch the latest edition of, "Trump is Awful and He's Ruining the World," aka, The PBS NewsHour. I suppose it should be uplifting to get re-educated every night, with teachable moments on how people feel, but I must admit it does bring me down to hear about the descent into chaos, facism and authoritarianism we have brought on ourselves. So it's always nice to see some counter-programming.

I was surprised to see this from Brookings, which I regard as a center-left publication, "A global tipping point: Half the world is now middle class or wealthier."

For the first time since agriculture-based civilization began 10,000 years ago, the majority of humankind is no longer poor or vulnerable to falling into poverty. By our calculations, as of this month, just over 50 percent of the world’s population, or some 3.8 billion people, live in households with enough discretionary expenditure to be considered “middle class” or “rich.”

The authors predict it will get even better in the next 10 years. In 2020 half the world was either "poor" or "vulnerable," while in 2030 that falls to 32% of the total world population. Even more impressive, in 2020 the authors estimate 3.8 billion people are poor or vulnerable. By 2030 they estimate 2.7 billion are in those categories. That is an astounding result.

 

At times I read (and hear) from the younger generation criticism of "the mess" we are leaving them. I beg to differ. We are leaving them an extraordinary world, drowning in riches.

I couldn't get data on these classifications for the US, which is unfortunate. Because I'd like to know how many of the 200 million "rich" reside in the US. I can't imagine less than half of the 200 million rich in the world are in the US, or 100 million. Since there are 300 million people in the US, that's about 1/3. Another (made-up) data point suggesting the 1% rhetoric is pure bullshit.

Bill